Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

cromulent

I can report that the science is pretty solid.

35° at 70% (your peak today) is wet-bulb 29.8°.

45° at 20% (desert) is wet-bulb 24.3°.

32° at 100% is wet-bulb 31.8°.

At 100% sweating is useless. You can't lose heat through evaporation.

https://www.mit.edu/~eltahirgroup/calTW.html

View on HN

Thank you for that. I guess where I have a problem is the notion that 2.2 degrees higher on the wet bulb than where we were earlier this week is going to lead to millions of deaths. Like, this is the tropics, it's always hot. It's been a lot hotter than it was this week, and yet there was no extinction event. It's very hard for me to parse this idea from an Internet forum filled with white dudes in air conditioned NA/EU offices saying that millions of us are going to die because the weather will be basically the same as it's always been here. There has got to be some breakdown in the logic between the observations about the wet bulb and the conclusion that humanity will go extinct because it can't sweat or whatever. There are like a billion people sweating in temperatures around what this study says will kill them.

Bezos said if your data and anecdotes disagree, it's usually your data that is wrong

Reply on news.ycombinator.com