October 19, 2021 • 52 mins
Heat waves are one of the easiest natural disasters to overlook yet they kill more people in the US than any other natural disaster (and maybe all others combined). And if climate predictions prove correct, they’re going to get longer and hotter.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's chucking. It's just us, but that's okay because
we today are doing stuff you should know. The heat
wave addition, that's the heat brows of the fact. Have
(00:25):
you been singing that song all day? I've been trying
so hard not to and it's not working. How about you?
Oh man, it's Martha Invent and the Vandellas. How can
you not? Yeah? The problem is is all I just
it's just this constant loop of heat wave like heat wave,
I know, heat wave. Just that's it over and that's
(00:46):
the only part I know. And it's terrible. I think
I know that. One of the first lines is uh
whenever we oh near me. Oh, that's the same song.
I think, so right, because I'm I thinking of something. No,
I think it is. But every movie that ever uses
it just uses that first line and then starts to
fade out before they get to the heat wave card.
So I never put two and two together. A great song,
(01:10):
great song, for sure, But you don't want just heat
wave on a loop in your head. I can tell you.
Uh no, No, I just looked at the lyrics and
I'm wrong anyway, But whenever I'm with him, Okay, but
it's that's what you're talking about. It's not like a
totally different song or something. Whenever I'm with him, something
inside starts to burning and I'm filled with desire. Heat wave?
(01:30):
Could it be a devil in me? Heat wave? The
way love is supposed to be? He'd wave, Yes, All right,
let's done. Let's never speak of that again. Sexy song.
I didn't realize it was that sexy. Well, sure, she
talking about getting all hot for a dude, you know,
I mean, that's your over. That's not what There's nothing
(01:52):
sexy about the heat wave that we're talking about. No,
deadly maybe the antithesis of sexy. Yeah, they think about
it heat wave sex. And there's such a thing as
cold waves, which will touch on briefly. They are very
much related to heat waves are kind of its polar opposite,
if you'll excuse the pun, but the you could make
(02:14):
a case that that would be far sexier than a
heat wave. Yeah. At least you're you know, warming yourself up, right,
That's exactly right. Uh, And boy, we we used a
lot of great weather website references for this one, right, Yeah, yeah, great, great,
great segue there, chuck. So, um, we got some info
(02:34):
from from Noah j No. Actually, the thing is, I
can't even be taken seriously when I'm trying to be
serious and genuine like that was genuine. I'm still learning.
So that was so Noah gave us a bunch of information,
your nephew. Um. There's also the Center for Climate Change
(02:56):
and Energy Solutions. Is this my cue? Yep uh, World
Weather Attribution, the New York Times, the failing New York Times, NASA,
ACU Weather, Yeah, and a bunch more, but those are
the ones that we got the meat of this stuff from. Yeah,
and we're talking about heat waves, which is the I
was about to call it a phenomenon. I don't know
(03:17):
if it is categorized at that, but it's a weather event.
It's a natural disaster. Well yeah, and as we'll see,
one of one of the worst. It is when there
are consecutive days where the temperature is higher than usually
is that is to say, higher than the historical average.
But there's no like it depends on where you are.
What is uh, what a heat wave is like, It's
(03:39):
not necessarily like three days and it's eight degrees hotter
than usual for those three days. Now, because it varies
region to region, like in New Hampshire, a heat wave
of two days, two days or two consecutive days where
it's ninety degrees fare hight or more is a heat wave.
And that's just like yawn to those of us down
in the southeast. That's like a fairly nice day. Yeah,
(04:02):
it's regional, like spices that go in hot dogs, right.
But the thing is is like that depends the reason
that they do that. The reason there's no single definition
for heat waves because people are acclimated to different kinds
of weather, and if you're not acclimated to warm weather,
it's going to affect you and your body a lot worse.
So it makes a lot of sense. But the two
(04:23):
days in a row as low as ninety degrees fair
at height, that's the minimum that I've seen in the
United States that constitutes a legit heat wave. I'm sorry,
I'm sorry, a legit heat wave. Oh boy, we're gonna
do that the whole time. I think I'm going to okay. Um,
this one speaks to my heart because, as everyone who's
(04:44):
ever listening to the show much knows and as you
my friends certainly know, I am a I'm a polar bear.
So the sun and humidity is not good for Chuck.
I hate it. I hate it. I grew up in
the South, and it's it's worse now. It feels like
it's not like I've gotten acclimated, Like you know, it's
easy to say you get acclimated. But even as as
(05:07):
much as I sweat, which is a I can't imagine
how hot I would be if I didn't sweat like
I sweat. Well, yeah, you'd be like one of those
people who can't sweat and can die from it. But
when I lived in l a uh, it can get
very hot out there, but generally if you can park
it under a tree, you might get a breeze and
(05:27):
you can sweat and you're cooling down pretty good. But
it's it's there's no relief when you live in the
South because of humidity. We're going to talk about all that,
but I just want to kind of set set up
my personal involvement with heat waves, which is boo thumbs down.
You're personally involved through sweatiness, is what you're saying. Yeah,
and when those heat waves, especially the late heat waves
(05:49):
in the summer when it should be cooling down come through.
It's just it makes me mad. Yeah, those are not
fun because your your bodies in your mind has been
like okay, great, it's fall, and then you're just dog
days summer again. It's terrible. I'm with you on that.
But how did these things come about to begin with?
Why is it hot for a week straight way hotter
than it normally is, and why doesn't is just cool
(06:11):
down every night? Well, first we should say, because I
don't want to lose anybody this early on if they're like, uh,
two days in a row of ninety degree weather? Why
are you guys even talking about this? The reason we
are talking about this because, like we said, Chuck, Noah
classifies heat waves as a disaster, and a lot of
really terrible stuff can happen during a heat wave, even
(06:31):
of just a few days. Like it's it's a an invisible, silent,
deadly natural disaster that we're only beginning to awaken. Too,
silent but deadly. So as you're saying how do heat
waves work, you're kind of set me up for that one, right, Well, yeah,
but I thought you were going to hit him with
the big stat which is heat waves kill more people
(06:53):
than all other natural disasters combined. Um or I think
you saw somewhere else all but hurricane. But point being,
they kill a lot of people, like way more than
you think. Yeah, and even if they don't necessarily kill
more than uh, kill more people at least in the
United States. That it was just the statistic I saw.
(07:13):
Um then all other natural disasters combined, that at the
very least, it kills more people per year than all
other natural disasters. It's the deadliest kind of natural disaster.
The thing is is it doesn't happen all at once,
like say a flood that takes a bunch of people's
lives in a very a very acute area, right concentrated area. Um.
(07:39):
It happened slowly over the course of days in a
very large region, and people just kind of die. And
it's not immediately apparent like like, oh, I found you
in floodwater, you drowned in a flood. It's I found
you dead on your sofa, you know, in your apartment.
And I'm not maybe you had a heart attack or
something like that. It's it's not That's what I was saying.
We're just beginning to awaken to it because it's not
(08:00):
an obvious natural disaster, but it is most decidedly a
natural disaster. Yeah, that's a good point. Like it's not
quite as grabby in the news. I mean, they certainly
report on it, but it's not and you know, the
news is is well, I don't want to talk about
the news. Um, let's talk about heat waves. Heat waves,
that's right. So the whole thing about a heat wave
(08:23):
is it's a basically a warm mass of hot air
that's a just a lope or no, a high pressure system.
So let me just restate that less confusingly. It's a
high pressure system that's made up of very stagnant, still
warm air that kind of finds its way over a
region and doesn't move for a little while and things
(08:45):
get really oppressive during that period. Yeah, And these high
pressure systems are just part of the normal weather patterns
and they generally kind of circulate clockwise and kind of
move on through. Uh. The jet stream takes care of that, thankfully.
That that west to east air current that moves pushes
(09:06):
all the weather around, always shoving the weather around in
the northern hemisphere at least. Yeah, well, come on, is
there any other hemisphere, sorry, America's centric or anything. No,
not at all, but are in the northern hemisphere. The
jet stream hits us about at the belt between Canada's
shirt and America's jeans. And like I said, it usually
(09:30):
pushes stuff around and it'll get hot and then it'll
push that hot stuff out. But during the summertime, the
jet stream slows down. Uh. They have found that overall,
and we're gonna talk, you know, quite a bit about
climate change. Overall, it's slowing down period some, but in
the summertime it's it definitely slows down from its you know,
(09:51):
two and fifty mile per hour or so peak. And
that's gonna obviously keep that hot weather there a little longer. Yeah,
even under normal conditions, let alone climate change conditions. So
when all of the all those factors are are kind
of falling into place where the jet stream is feeling
a little logy and not moving too quickly, and there's
(10:13):
a big mass of hot air that kind of moves
up as a high pressure front and just settles in
over a region, you've got everything you need for that
massive hot air to just stay put and continue heating up,
which is the big problem because a high pressure um
weather system forces air downward and it's hot air too. Normally,
(10:37):
you have hot air at the surface, or air that
warms up at the surface and it moves upward, it
floats upward, and it's replaced by cool air that comes in,
and you've got breezes. Well, one of the things that's
the hallmark of a high pressure system is there there
ain't no breezes because it's just sitting there pushing the
air downward towards the surface of the Earth, which prevents
(10:58):
that air from rye eazing, so there's no cool air
to come in, so there's no breeze. But also because
that air is just sitting there at the surface, it's
just getting warmer and warmer and warm warmer. And the
surface air temperature is what we're concerned with, because it's
the temperature of the air about two meters above the
Earth's surface above the ground, so it's about six and
a half feet, which is where a lot of us
(11:20):
are trying to take a breath in this really hot air. Well,
a lot of you taller people, sure, but even still,
if you stood on your tippy toes, it would affect
you a lot too. Well, the other thing that happens
to because that air isn't rising, that means it's not
gonna rain. Uh, and rain obviously can be away to
cool things down. So it just it's sort of acts
(11:42):
as this uh, it's sort of like a feedback loop
basically where the hotter it gets, the hotter it's gonna get. Yeah.
And even the other thing about a high pressure front
is it pushes like air away from it, outward from
the edges of it, so there's no fronts coming in
to like kind of relieve it. It's so the stronger
(12:04):
they get, the more all of these factors contribute, and then,
like you said, creates this positive feedback cycle and basically
you're just totally at the mercy of the jet stream
to move this thing away eventually, and it can take
some time. And so that's what a heat wave is.
It's when one of these like all these factors kind
of come together and this massive hot air settles in
over a region and just keeps getting hotter and hotter.
(12:27):
And in the daytime, that's that's the like the money
time as far as people are concerned with heat waves,
because the sun's out, it's really really hot. The temperatures
are really high, and it's pretty bad. No one's going
to argue that the daytime during a heat wave stinks,
But it's the night time that's the more insidious part.
That's the real problem with the with the heat wave, right, yeah,
(12:50):
I mean, even if it gets really hot, but it's
not a heat wave. The earth helps itself out by
cooling down at night. Your body, like everything cools down
at night. It's a it's a great chance to just
kind of, you know, kick off your shoes and like
relax and recharge. Yeah, like humans, the human body needs it. Uh,
Animals bodies need it. The earth itself needs it. The
(13:14):
buildings and the concrete and the asphalt and the steel
and the glass. It all depends on cooling down some
at night. So it can be like, well, I'm gonna
get hot again tomorrow, but at least I cooled down
tonight and you know, kind of relaxed and like you said,
repaired my energy. But when a heat wave comes, it's
not cooling down at night. So I mean, just imagine yourself.
(13:35):
If you never get a chance to cool down at
night and you stay hot, then that sun comes up
the next day, it's gonna be twice as bad, Yeah,
because you're starting from a higher set point at the beginning,
you know. And that's one of the hallmarks of a
heat wave is it's hot even before the sun comes up.
That's which is not pleasant, and it's certainly not good
sleeping weather. Those are the worst, man like, especially here
(13:58):
in the South, when you go out, like you go
to let your dog out at eleven o'clock at night,
and it's like eighty seven degrees or something, you just
start sweating immediately before that. It's just brutal. It's pretty bad.
All right. Well, let's take a break. I need to
go I don't know, soaking a bathtub or something. I'm
getting a little hot down here. Uh, And we'll talk
(14:20):
about the dreaded humidity right after this. Learn it's stuff
with Joshua John Okay, Chuck lay it on him that
(15:06):
very famous phrase that actually holds true. Um, youth has
wasted on the young, sure that one, but also early
bird gets the worm and UM never say candy man
into a mirror. Well, it's certainly not three times in
(15:26):
a row. It's not the heat, it's the humidity. There's
the one I was looking for, right that's the one,
and that's true. I mean we were talking about humidity earlier.
That is what you know the humans have as this
great mechanism built in a kind of a self contained
air conditioning system which is called sweat. And if it's
if the air is fairly dry outside, and like I
(15:48):
mentioned getting under that shade tree in Los Angeles, you
can sweat and that water is gonna evaporate off of
you and a cool breeze will come through and it
actually feels good. And that is how you regulate and
cool down. When the humidity happens, it's hard to near
impossible for that sweat to really cool you down. You'll
still be sweating, but it won't have that same effect, right, Um, yeah,
(16:12):
it's it's just there's no place for that sweat to go.
It doesn't just move into the air because there's already
so much water vapor into the air. So the higher
the humidity is, the worst off it is for you.
And then if you take high temperatures as well, that
combination of high humidity and high temperature can be really bad.
(16:32):
And back in the seventies there was a guy, actually
in nineteen seventy nine, somebody named R. G. Steadman. They
came up in nineteen seventy nine with assessment of sultry nous,
which we call today the heat index. It was the
paper that put the heat index out there, and the
heat index is basically, yeah, it really is. You know,
it sounds it sounds like a Tennessee Williams play or
(16:55):
something like that. So the heat index makes a lot
of sense because when it's really humid out and it's
high in temperature, that humidity makes it feel even hotter
because we have trouble sweating. So so R. G. Steadman
came up with the heat index that kind of gives
you a much better understanding of what the actual temperature
(17:16):
as far as your human body is concerned. That's why
they also call it the apparent temperature or the fuels
like temperature. Yeah, and that's the only one I care about.
I don't even know why they less regular temperature. It
should just be heat indecks and wind chill in the winter,
because that's the only thing that matters. And I guess
you know, it's it's like showing your math or something.
So they have to go through it all, but as
(17:38):
far as your human body is concerned, those are really
the only two measures that matter, or at least for me. Yeah.
So you know how sometimes you can end up down
a rabbit hole and like not find a way out
and you have to just crawl backwards out of it,
and you're you're kind of worse off for the wear
because you went a little mad in there. Sure that
happened to me. With humidity, heat index, evaporation, condensation, I'm
(18:00):
like researching it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, And I'm like
there's a lot of there's some some connections here between
all these things that my brain is not making. I'm
just sensing that it's all very much connected, and I'm
even reading stuff that's saying it's connected. I just can't
figure out how it's all connected because it's not as
simple as like humidity or you know, the heat index
(18:23):
is humidity times temperature divided by two or something like that.
That's not how it works. It's way more sophisticated than that,
and it takes into account a lot of different stuff
so that if you if you actually put a lower
temperature in with higher humidity, it will bring the temperature down.
And then there's some temperatures like say seventy degrees where
(18:45):
it doesn't really matter what you do with the humidity,
it's still just gonna feel like seventy degrees. So there's
like a lot of different weirdness in there. But the
thing is the upshot of all this. I was just
kind of confessing and getting off my chest that I'm
a little obsessed with this and if any any meteorologists
or climatologists can explain all this to me, I would
love to hear it. But as far as heat waves
(19:05):
are concerned, if you have high temperatures and high humidity,
some really astounding stuff happens when you put those together.
As far as the heat index is concerned. Yeah, And
just not to harp on my personal um sweating issues.
We've talked about it a lot over the years, but
it's the embarrassing thing for me is not that I've
(19:26):
sweat a lot, because a It's that's why I never
had like acne growing up, because I'm just constantly sweating
everything through. We've got like the cleanest pores in the world,
um and it you know, it helps cool me down,
But it's when it's like seventy six degrees and super humid,
and other people are like or even in the sixties
(19:46):
or fifties, and they're like, it's really cool. Why are
you sweating, like because it's humid. I don't care if
it's forty degrees. If it's super humid, I might break
a sweat. Yeah, it gets through. If you're sweating at
forty degrees, that's that's some sweaty us for sure. Maybe
not forty fifty. We could do some tests, all right,
let's do oh yeah, let's do some science. I'm gone up. Yeah,
(20:09):
like a humidity lab or something. Okay, but I still
get to get a lab coat, right Sure of the
color of my choosing. Um, I'll let you select from
three colors of my choosing. What are they? Cinnamon, powder, blue,
and orange? Okay? Great, okay, any one of those, then
that's mine. It's mine. Banana yellow was going to be
(20:29):
in there, but you missed. You missed the boat. At
least you didn't make me dress up in a banana costume. Uh, yeah,
I was. It's funny. I was shopping for Halloween for
this year and I kind of didn't want to go
is a devo, and so I was looking up for
those yellow jumpsuits and I was waylaid because you kind
(20:50):
of end up having to be whatever your kid says
you have to be. So I think we're all gonna
be spooky things this year, but I had to put
the devo thing on the back burner. You could be
like zombie Divo. Not a bad idea, No, it's not.
It's a great idea. Yeah, you can be zombie anything.
That's kind of the beauty of the zombie Zombie b York,
Zombie Mark Mother's Ball, Zombie b York. I like that,
(21:15):
Just wear that Swan dress and walk around saying I
was trying to think of how Buyork would say brains
but not of my head. Couldn't put it together. That
was perfect thing. Uh. So you mentioned insidious effects and
we're going to talk about those because, uh, very wide reaching.
(21:37):
It's not just people get hot and people die. Uh.
It affects kind of everything on the planet. And it's
easy to kind of think of heat stroke and dehydration
and something like that during the day, like you said,
because that's when you count on it, and that's when
you might take precautions, which, by the way, to go
listen to our Desert Survival episode for that kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, good tips there, but not like you said,
(22:01):
it's that's when it's really bad because the human body
really depends on that rest and that reset and that
cool down. And if you stay hot, your body and
is you know, especially if you have like high bread
high blood pressure or like heart issues, it's working overtime
at night when it should be cooling down because you
I think you're like lowest body temperature of the twenty
(22:23):
four hour cycle is during sleep. So if you're not
hitting that cool down cycle, then everything is just doing
a lot of extra work. Yeah, in particular your heart is.
And when your heart is working hard and then it
has to work hard again the next day, it's like
that that set point doesn't ever or the set point
starts higher the next day. So after a few days
(22:44):
of this, especially if you have a bum ticker to
begin with, UM, it can be quite dangerous for you.
And so people like the elderly, UM children, like very
young children, they're usually the first casualties of UM of
a heat wave. But there are a lot of other
people who are susceptible to UM, especially people who don't
(23:04):
have easy access to air conditioning UH, people who are
of low income, who very sadly might even have air conditioning,
but don't have power right then, or don't have the
money to to to run their air conditioner. The homeless,
um people who work outside and sorry, I gotta I
gotta work no matter what to keep food on the table,
(23:25):
whether it's a heat wave or not. They can be
in big trouble as well. But then so can any
of us, especially when that heat index starts to jump.
Like when you have like a hundred degree temperatures with
um like fifty five percent humidity. You put those together,
it's suddenly a hundred and twenty four out. That's not
good for anybody, you know. No, And you know I
(23:48):
mentioned earlier that it's like people and animals and buildings
and everything. The infrastructure takes, you know, it takes a hit.
Um like railway railroad tracks can literally up and buckle. Yeah,
they won't run trains during a heat wave a lot
of times for that reason because they could derail. Yeah, concrete,
an asphalt, any kind of metal and glass on a
(24:10):
building you've uh, I mean, buildings can like their shape
can briefly change and expand and contract or I guess
expand and not contract for a little while, all due
to this heat wave. And you know, we talked a
little bit about the urban heat island effect at some point, um,
but this is you know, this is why you got
(24:32):
to New York City and a heat wave and it's
it's one of the hottest places on the planet. It
feels like, yeah, because it actually is way hotter than
other places because of all those building materials number one,
that are excellent absorbers of heat, all that blacktop and
asphalt and um, all that steel, but also chuck like
the distinct lack of vegetation like trees and stuff that
(24:55):
actually helped cool the air. Like it's not just shade
that they do, Like they actually release water vapor into
the air and actually cool the nearby air. So the
more trees you have, the lower the urban heat island effect.
But that's just not like a huge, huge um trait
of the average city. Like somebody actually wrote a book
called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That's how significant the
(25:18):
idea of a tree in Brooklyn was. You know what
I'm saying. That's funny. Uh. Energy takes a big wall
up to um for the obvious reason and more um
obvious when being that you know, everyone's cranking those air
conditioners everyone's refrigerators and freezers are working over time. Um.
Industrial refrigeration is working over time. And you combine that
(25:41):
with the fact that transmission capacity is reduced during these
high temperatures, it's gonna strain the electrical grid even more. Uh.
It's just nothing is running with any kind of efficiency.
And if you want to really have some people die quickly,
you have an energy power outage during a heat wave
(26:02):
because of these overstressed systems. And that's when all of
a sudden, like nobody has refrigeration or air conditioning, and uh,
it can get brutal pretty quickly. Yeah, because I mean,
if you, if you think about it, you've got incredible
demand on the system. And then the system itself can't
really um, it can't get rid of its you know,
(26:23):
waste heat like it needs to, just like a human
body does. So Yeah, if the system blacks out or
even browns out, it's that's not the time to do it,
but that's when it's most likely to happen. And then
on the same on the opposite side of the same coin, chuck,
are those cold waves I was talking about? Um, And
that was what happened in Texas. Uh this past winter
(26:43):
it was a high pressure front, but instead of a
mass of like super hot air, it was a massive
super cold air and it just settled in and stayed
there and froze Texas and Texas infrastructure suffered. I think
we talked about in the electrical grid episode. Um. And
it was the same thing. They just couldn't keep up
with the demand, and the weather itself was taxing the
system too. And uh, it's the same thing in a
(27:07):
heat wave. It's just for the opposite reasons, but the
same outcome, right. Uh. And if you're thinking, hey, you know,
look at the bright side, warmer winters mean we're not
going to be using as much energy in the wintertime
to heat our homes, so it all balances out. Uh,
that's not true. They've done a lot of studies and
they're pretty much coming to the conclusion that the heat
(27:30):
is out is tipping that scale too far in the
other direction. And even if we are saving a little
bit of energy and or even a great deal of
energy in the wintertime due to warmer temperatures, it's not
going to balance it out. Um. Water is another big
one to chuck, which makes a lot of sense, Like
people drink more water they need more water. Uh, they
might take cool baths to cool down, but not just humans.
(27:54):
Livestock need more water during this time. Um power plants
need more water to stay a cool, crops need more water.
Everything needs more water. But the problem is is during
heat wave when you need water the most, that's when
it's like the least available because it becomes pretty scarce.
Because drought and heat waves are they work really well together.
(28:16):
They kind of go hand in hand. Actually in a
lot of cases. Yeah, I mean that kind of creates
a similar feedback feedback loop, and that when there is
moisture in the ground thanks to rain and stuff like that,
even when it gets hot, the earth is going to
soak up a lot of that sun and use some
of that energy to get rid of that water and
(28:38):
turn it into water vapor. If that ground is already
super dry because of a drought, then it's just it's
basically just baking like an oven, and that energy has
no other use. It doesn't have the use of turning
it into water vapor, so it's just baking, yeah, just
heating that ground up instead, so it just gets hotter
and hotter, which is terrible stuff. So UM plus also
(29:01):
with drought stricken landscapes. Those are more susceptible to wildfire.
So as there's more and more heat waves, we can
expect worse and more widespread wildfires. Basically too, we talked
about animals, it's not animals. I think a lot of
people forget about animals and situations like this. Uh. I
(29:23):
think people think more about animals when it gets super
super cold and like really bad cold. Friends come in.
But they're susceptible to the heat too. And it's not
just you know, our little you know, domesticated pets that
we love and and unfortunately some of the street animals
like really suffer. But livestock, you know, if you're on
a farm, those cows and chickens don't like that kind
(29:45):
of heat either. Uh. Sometimes it can affect their mortality rates. Uh,
it can affect things way downstream because uh they might
be rep you know if they don't want to have
that heat wave sex either, so that they might be
reproducing less, which is gonna have a down on stream effect. Uh.
And then you know all the crops are going to
be affected too, Yeah, especially the ones that cops when
(30:06):
it comes snatch that what cops want to come and
snatch my crops. I don't what is that? You do
remember that as a Cypress Hill lyric, a very famous one.
I don't. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, I remember. Now, boy,
we mentioned cypers Hill a lot on the show. They're
kind of like, uh, they're like a mascot now, like
Frank the Chair. I knew that sounded familiar. Cops come
(30:29):
and try to snatch my crops. Here it is, and
then that has to be followed, of course by heat Wave. Boy,
somebody should sample that on a on a hip hop tune.
That'd be great. What heat Wave? Yeah, I bet it
has been sure. I could see Puff Daddy sampling that.
That'd be up his alley. Oh yeah, did ever tell
(30:50):
you I went to his house one time. It sounds
vaguely familiar, but I'd like to hear it again. It's
not the biggest story, but I ran an errand as
p a over to his house one time and had
to drop something. Now, so I had to go go
knock on his door and walk inside the front and
drop something off. Something was something in air quotes. No,
(31:11):
it was some for the job. It wouldn't a big deal,
but it was like clothes or something. But it was.
It was just very shiny and white. Everything was shiny
and white. I can imagine, which is you know, it's
a way to go, I guess, but I don't know.
It's a look it's too much. It's too much. I
don't know. I mean, there's a long time ago. He
may not be into that now. But white couches and
(31:31):
big white marble floors, I mean, I like white couches
and and I do like white stuff, but it's also like,
gotta have lots of color. Like the white stuff is
just a it's just a backdrop for your color. That's
in my that's my opinion. We are too messy. We
can't have white things. I understand, you know. Yeah, told
well you need to have if you have a white couch,
it's got to be a uh slip cover because you're
(31:55):
gonna have to wash it, yes, if you drink red wine.
But but there is one that we haven't covered you.
I think we should before we take a break, and
it is air pollution, which uh might be overlooked by
some people, but it really makes a lot of sense
because number one, we're like demanding way more from power
(32:16):
plants than usual during a heatwave with all that a c.
So those power plants are putting out more emissions than usual.
But then the actual like conditions of the heat wave
itself make the air pollution worse, does it not? Yeah?
I mean that that same cap that uh kind of
forces all that air down and keeps everything stagnant, that
(32:37):
same cap is in place for uh, these emissions that
are going up into the air. So it's just it's
just like bottling it all up. It's gonna make things
a lot worse. Yeah, and so, and also ozone is
more easily produced. You've got ozone and like particulate matter
from from emissions, all combining to make your breathing much
more difficult. Danger. Right, So let's take a break, man,
(32:58):
and then we'll talk about some couple of famous heat
waves and what the future holds. How about that, let's
do it. Learn it's stuff with Joshua John stuff all right.
(33:47):
So if you were alive on the earth this summer, um,
you might remember and said, all you almost started with it,
and you didn't. You've really come a long way John
with what you almost said, unless you're living under a rock.
Oh no, no, no, no, no, it really wasn't all right, Um,
so between June and June, Uh, something was brewing down
(34:11):
in Mexico that was very hot, and this big, massive
warm air moved up and kind of settled over the
middle of the United States and and didn't move for
a while. And uh, it was just sort of your
classic heat wave. But even in places like where that
they're used to the heat in the summertime, it got
(34:32):
exceedingly hot. Like if you were in Arizona and Phoenix,
you're used to hot weather for sure, but it it
cracked a hundred and fifteen degrees for six consecutive days,
which is a record for even Phoenix. That is not
okay for anybody, no, but so so it's bad enough
for Phoenix. But still, I'm sure the people of things
(34:54):
were like, yeah, it's kind of hot, but come on,
we could we could handle worse. Um, it was play
this is where it's not normally hot at all. That
really took the brunt of that heat wave. And as
a matter of fact, the heat wave is generally called
referred to as the Pacific Northwest heatwave because that's where
it really stunk the worst. Yeah, I can't believe Portland,
(35:15):
Oregon got up to a hundred and twelve degrees. That
is bananas. Yeah, And we should say when you're talking
about air temperatures and you are seeing the temperature on
the news or whatever, that measurement was taken in the shade.
That's not the sunlight sunshine temperature. That's what that the
temperature is in the shade. Okay, So wrap your head
(35:35):
around that one. Yeah. So a hundred and twelve in
Portland's hundred and four in Seattle, which broke a record.
Um it was. It was bananas and and that kind
of like a lot of people in that part of
the country. I don't really know percentages, but there are
there are people who don't have h VAC units. They
(35:57):
count on opening their windows and stuff like that. There
are places in the United States, believe it or not,
that don't have HVAC and that that use ceiling fans
and stuff and they just don't eat. Yeah, for sure. Um.
There was another town too that we have to mention,
chuck Lytton, British Columbia, which is north a couple hundred
miles north of Seattle. They hit a hundred and sixteen
(36:19):
and set a new record not just for themselves but
for Canada as a whole and then the town burned
down from a wildfire right afterward. Very sad, so like
it was a really big deal. And one of the
things that that I think this the Pacific Northwest heat
wave in June, and I think there were multiple ones
around that region over the well not just in the
(36:41):
Pacific Northwest, but in like the Midwest States in particular
U this year. But what I think these the heat
waves in the U s s you're kind of woke
people up to, is like these things are like really deadly.
They looked at excess deaths, which they kind of take
the background number of deaths, the deaths you'd expect, and
then see how many more occurred on a particular day
(37:04):
or over a particular period or during a heat wave.
And they've concluded thus far that in Washington State alone,
six people died from that heat wave over the course
of a few days. Yeah, like thousands of people total
um all over that region. And you know this is
that's a little bit of a squishy number because it's
(37:25):
and we'll talk a little bit about this, like people
who study is kind of stuff, they're doing the best
they can. They can't necessarily say like every single one
of those deaths was because of the heat wave. But
it is a really good measure. Um, And if you're
if you're just looking at sort of round numbers, uh,
it's it's not the kind of thing that you can dismiss.
And Plus, if history is any kind of guide that
those numbers will probably be revised upward in the next
(37:48):
year or so, I would guess. Yeah. And it's not
just the United States. There was a heat wave in
Europe in two thousand three that was it was the
warmest summer on record since the fifteen forties. And I
was like, how do they know that? I don't know.
So I looked, there's a bunch of different ways they
can kind of miss us out. Yeah, parchment is the answer. Um,
(38:10):
there's there's They take bore holes is basically one of
the best ways I saw, where when when it's hot
on on this Earth's surface, that temperature radiates downward through
the Earth. And if you take a core sample, a
borehole sample sample, you can actually kind of deduce from
whatever temperature a specific moment in time is, like say
(38:35):
like in the fifteen forties, this would have been at
the surface, that it actually that you can actually get
the temperature roughly from that era. I think we talked
about that before. This was really familiar. Okay, well it
sounded new to me. I had no idea, But I
think that's pretty interesting because there was nobody in fifteen
forties saying, oh, it was eighty degrees celsius it was
(38:57):
super hot, which I think that's like really really hot,
if I'm not mistaken. But um, nobody was recording temperature
like that. Some people did record the weather, but it
was just like a smattering of observations and nothing scientific.
Because this is pretty scientific. Um, so they have to
use even more scientific stuff today to kind of deduce
what it was before. Right. You might see, like it
(39:20):
was very hot the day we burned this person at
the stake, right, and we made even hot glancing reference.
But yeah, I mean Milan, Paris, London, all these places
broke record temperatures, uh, temperatures, temperatures. I can say that
like a lazy Southerner temperature temperature because of hookworm, you
say it like temperature. Yeah, but in the you know,
(39:44):
in a couple of years after they calculated that, about
thirty thousand people died all over Europe, and then later
on they said that could have been as high as
seventy tho people when they studied it. Years after that,
seventy thousand people died from a two week Hey wave
in Europe in two thousand three, and this may be
(40:04):
what we're looking at going forward. Yeah, so we talked
about you were you were saying, like, um, that there's
there's people who like are trying to figure out how
much this is increasing, how much of it has to
do with climate change. There's a it's a new branch
of science called attribution studies, and it's pretty much in
league with climatology. I get the impression that it's made
(40:24):
up of climatologists and it's a brand new type of
science and it's really hard to do. Um. But they're
they're starting from an article I read the data set
post climate change. Basically this this one point to degrees
celsius that has risen since we started keeping records in
(40:45):
eighteen eighty. I believe it's like the benchmark here that
it's starting to happen, like weird stuff is starting to
happen in more and more frequency, that this data set
is growing. And then they have since the eighteen eighties
to compare it against and so using a lot more
sophisticated statistical analysis that I can quite wrap my head around. Um,
they're figuring out how to say this weird weather event
(41:09):
like the one in the Pacific Northwest had ex chance
of happening had climate change never happened, had we never
started releasing greenhouse gas emissions during the industrial age. And
they've actually done that. There was a study that that
actually kind of came to some pretty interesting conclusions about that. Yeah.
(41:30):
They you know, they you hear about like a hundred
year storm or something like that. Uh, they did a
calculation and they said, you know, this was that that
heat wave in this year in the United States was
in a one thousand year event. And that's factoring in
like the current climate that we are already in. Yeah,
like if we frozeur if our climate did not get
(41:51):
any hotter or change in any way than it did
now for from now on, that it would have been
a thousand year event like now basically right, And then
they can further extrapolate and say with this was pre
um pre end of the nineteenth century, I guess, Yeah,
eighteen eighty that's that benchmark date when everyone around the
(42:13):
world started to keep like pretty accurate weather records from
that point on. They said that that would have been
about a hundred and fifty thousand year event back then,
and in the future it might become like a five
or ten year event. Yeah, by the twenty fifties maybe, Yeah,
because I think that it's like thirty or forty years
from now, the overall global temperature there it is again,
(42:39):
is gonna rise in another two degrees celsius. No, two
degrees celsius total since eighteen eighty Okay, yeah, I guess
that would be catastrophic. Yeah, I don't know what would happen.
I think we should do an episode explaining temperature rise
in like what effects it's going to have and all
that sure sot into our doomsday series. So even even
taking aside like climate chain UM and an increase from
(43:02):
climate change, UM, there's there's a lot of data that
just says, yeah, we're actually seeing a lot more heat
waves than we used to just in the past, like
fifty sixty years UM, and just taking data starting in
nineteen sixty I think UM the weather the National Weather
Service to a study that basically said, UM, looking at
(43:26):
fifty cities in the United States, forty six of them
have seen a signific statistically significant increase in heat waves
since the nineteen sixties, so much so that like during
the nineteen sixties they could expect about two heat waves
per year these fifty cities in the United States. Now
they're averaging about six per year. And the season for
heat waves in these cities is on average forty seven
(43:48):
days longer than it was in nineteen sixty. So there's
definitely a big upward trend in heat waves. It's becoming
this new normal for us. Yeah, and it's it's really
all about data. Um in more data you have, because
they you know, there are still freak weather events that um,
they don't want to just throw everything in there and
say it's all caused by the rising climates all over
(44:10):
the world. Uh. But the more time goes on, like
the more of this data set is enriched and the
the wheat is separated from the chaff just sort of naturally,
the more data you get, and those statistical anomalies will
they will be revealed, yes as such. Yeah, well, which
I think it behoo's us to say, like any good
(44:32):
attribution um climatologists is going to tell you like that
that heatwave in the Pacific Northwest could have just been
statistical bad luck. It may have had nothing to do
with climate change. It could have just been like that
was the one we drew. Because a thousand year event
means you have a one in a thousand chance on
any given year of that you could happen next year. Again,
(44:54):
statistically is unlikely, but it's possible just from statistics that
it was just bad luck that it happened. But um, yeah,
what you were saying is actually totally accurate that the
more unfortunately weird freak weather events go on, the bigger
the data set they're going to have to compare to
pre you know, climate change times and see what is
(45:17):
actually trending upward. And it looks like they're probably right
about heat waves. Yeah, and they you know, people should
feel good knowing that they're really trying to get good
accurate data. It's it's not they don't want to just
be doomsday uh people and say, you know, they want
to really get good accurate numbers in there. So if
(45:39):
you're a person who thinks climate change is bogus or
it's not human caused or whatever, or they're just trying
to scare you, and you know they're going to throw
everything in there that happens and say it's because of this.
They're not doing that. They're really really working super super
hard to get a super accurate record and picture of
what things are like now and and what they're like
(46:00):
moving forward. You're not being good winked. I think people
who are still saying that are basically like standing in
a burning house being like, the house isn't on fire,
It's fine. Yeah, Um, so what can we do to
stop this stuff? Well, you can't stop it. What can
we do to help ourselves out in the meantime. No,
eventually we probably will be able to control the weather,
which sounds like Bond villain esque, but we'll probably be
(46:22):
able to control it to our benefit and the benefit
of the planet I'm guessing in the next like hundred
years possibly. But until then, we can do absolutely nothing
about this except kind of try to mitigate the effects
of it. One of the things that's starting to happen
our local governments are starting to get a little more
hip to the idea that they need, you know, plans
in place so when a heat wave comes along, because
(46:44):
they're actually pretty easy to forecast by many days out,
so you can give people a lot of warning and
then if the government has this plan in place, they
can open up cooling center. So you've got a convention
center is not being used well that now is a
cooling center where you're running lots of ace for residents
who don't have a c to come cool off. You
can start um reroofing buildings in your city with you know,
(47:08):
green roofs or even like like um cool roofs, which
is basically a roof that's not black and that's all
it takes to to cool that roof by fifty degrees
sometimes on a sunny day. Um. There's just a lot
of stuff where if you just stop and look at
the infrastructure and even the color of the infrastructure use
in cities, just changing it to lighter colors would have
(47:30):
an enormous effect on the urban heat island effect. Oh yeah,
plant more trees. I love those green roofs are good
looking anyway, Sure they look like Hobbit houses, a Hobbit skyscraper.
No less uh, making the electrical grid more efficient because again,
if you've got a heat wave and that thing breaks down,
it's just exacerbating the problem. So those are all things
(47:51):
we can do to help out a little bit. Yeah,
we'll probably figure it out more as it goes on,
but does it's a pretty good start. And the other
thing that you can do is you can actually if
you watch your local news and the weather person says
there's a heat advisory today, like that means that it
could be dangerous to be outside. Like they're not just
whistling Dixie there, hope. I had a borderline heat stroke,
(48:11):
uh this summer, first time in my life. What I
was playing golf, I got I was able to play
the historic East Lake Golf Club near where I live,
and I it was brutally hot. It is a walking
only course, so it's not like you're riding around a
golf cart. And you know, golf courses aren't their trees
(48:32):
on the edges, but you're out on that sun if
you're hitting them straight, you know what I mean. And
I started feeling funny. I got a little dizzy a
couple of times. And I'm at the age now where
I'm smart enough for where I was like, I gotta
do something here, dudes, Like this isn't right. I don't
feel right. I've been hot all my life and I
don't feel right, So I they called sort of embarrassing,
(48:55):
but they called a golf cart out and I went
back to the clubhouse for like three holes in cool down,
oh yeah, and then went back out. I missed those
three holes, but I rejoined my buddies and uh and
finished out the back nine. But you had the lowest
score of all then, exactly it was. But I'm glad
that I was smart en if I was like, well,
this is a little embarrassing, but I just I've got
(49:16):
to take care of myself, Like not dying of pete
stroke is much better than you know, playing on to
not be embarrassed. I mean, that's come on, because you
know what's really embarrassing is dropping dead. Of course it is.
And then it would think about how it would affect me, chuck,
I would have to explain it to all of our listeners. Man. Uh.
(49:38):
It took me a long time to cool down. Like
I went in the icy, coldest clubhouse I've ever been
in and it was just pounding water and it took
me fifteen minutes to feel normal. And then I took
a cold shower upstairs in the clubhouse. In the clubhouse
and the bought a new shirt in the clubhouse nice
(50:00):
and um, and then came back out and I was like,
I felt normal again. But it took a half hour.
There there's your answer. That's why it's an all walking course,
because they want to move those replacement shirts unsuspectingly eive. Wow. Well,
I'm glad you made it, buddy, and you did the
right thing. And I hope everybody learns a lesson from you.
(50:21):
It doesn't matter if it's embarrassing. We're talking about your
life and your health here. You just go cool off,
or you stopped playing, or you just don't gotta do
it like you gotta look out for yourself everybody. Yeah,
and it's just dumb golf. Yeah, who cares? Okay, Uh,
you got anything more on heat heat waves? Nope? Well,
if you want to know some more stuff about saving
(50:43):
your took us from heat stroke and stuff again, go
listen to our Desert Survival episode. And since I said that,
it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this Merchant's
house museum. This from the Embalming episode. Hey, guys, been
listening since you started when I was in high school.
(51:04):
You've been a real comfort more than ten years and
You've kept me company, distracted me, and made me laugh.
I'm emailing you because Josh mentioned the Merchant's House Museum
in the Embalming episode. I work at the Merchant's House
and it was so cool to hear you guys mentioned
the museum. I'm impressed Josh even remembered Seabury Treadwell's name.
It's a great small museum in the Greenwich Village East
(51:26):
Village area that most New Yorkers and tourists don't even
know about. I wanted to see if you could plug
the MHM a bit because for the last ten years
has been fighting a real estate developer who wants to
do construction on the site next to the house, and
now it would endanger the hundred and eighty nine year
old building. Enforced UH force it to close temporarily, if
(51:47):
not permanently. Our small staff are always looking for more visitors, volunteers,
and donors interested in saving the landmark. Thank you for
mentioning the Merchant's House Museum. And this is from Lizzie
in Deck UH. She her and Lizzie and everyone else
out there doing the work at the Merchant's House Museum.
Thank you, And if you go to New York City.
(52:07):
Go visit the Merchant's House Museum. If you can't go,
maybe go in line and make a donation. Yeah, nicely done, Chuck,
Thanks again for writing in Lizzie. That was good stuff.
I'm glad you did. Um and who could ever forget
Sea Barry Treadwell's name, Come on, great name Well. If
you want to get in touch with us like Lizzie
did and help you fight off a real estate developer
(52:28):
who wants to ruin your museum or historical location, we
want to hear from you. You can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(52:49):
favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's chucking. It's just us, but that's okay because
we today are doing stuff you should know. The heat
wave addition, that's the heat brows of the fact. Have
(00:25):
you been singing that song all day? I've been trying
so hard not to and it's not working. How about you?
Oh man, it's Martha Invent and the Vandellas. How can
you not? Yeah? The problem is is all I just
it's just this constant loop of heat wave like heat wave,
I know, heat wave. Just that's it over and that's
(00:46):
the only part I know. And it's terrible. I think
I know that. One of the first lines is uh
whenever we oh near me. Oh, that's the same song.
I think, so right, because I'm I thinking of something. No,
I think it is. But every movie that ever uses
it just uses that first line and then starts to
fade out before they get to the heat wave card.
So I never put two and two together. A great song,
(01:10):
great song, for sure, But you don't want just heat
wave on a loop in your head. I can tell you.
Uh no, No, I just looked at the lyrics and
I'm wrong anyway, But whenever I'm with him, Okay, but
it's that's what you're talking about. It's not like a
totally different song or something. Whenever I'm with him, something
inside starts to burning and I'm filled with desire. Heat wave?
(01:30):
Could it be a devil in me? Heat wave? The
way love is supposed to be? He'd wave, Yes, All right,
let's done. Let's never speak of that again. Sexy song.
I didn't realize it was that sexy. Well, sure, she
talking about getting all hot for a dude, you know,
I mean, that's your over. That's not what There's nothing
(01:52):
sexy about the heat wave that we're talking about. No,
deadly maybe the antithesis of sexy. Yeah, they think about
it heat wave sex. And there's such a thing as
cold waves, which will touch on briefly. They are very
much related to heat waves are kind of its polar opposite,
if you'll excuse the pun, but the you could make
(02:14):
a case that that would be far sexier than a
heat wave. Yeah. At least you're you know, warming yourself up, right,
That's exactly right. Uh, And boy, we we used a
lot of great weather website references for this one, right, Yeah, yeah, great, great,
great segue there, chuck. So, um, we got some info
(02:34):
from from Noah j No. Actually, the thing is, I
can't even be taken seriously when I'm trying to be
serious and genuine like that was genuine. I'm still learning.
So that was so Noah gave us a bunch of information,
your nephew. Um. There's also the Center for Climate Change
(02:56):
and Energy Solutions. Is this my cue? Yep uh, World
Weather Attribution, the New York Times, the failing New York Times, NASA,
ACU Weather, Yeah, and a bunch more, but those are
the ones that we got the meat of this stuff from. Yeah,
and we're talking about heat waves, which is the I
was about to call it a phenomenon. I don't know
(03:17):
if it is categorized at that, but it's a weather event.
It's a natural disaster. Well yeah, and as we'll see,
one of one of the worst. It is when there
are consecutive days where the temperature is higher than usually
is that is to say, higher than the historical average.
But there's no like it depends on where you are.
What is uh, what a heat wave is like, It's
(03:39):
not necessarily like three days and it's eight degrees hotter
than usual for those three days. Now, because it varies
region to region, like in New Hampshire, a heat wave
of two days, two days or two consecutive days where
it's ninety degrees fare hight or more is a heat wave.
And that's just like yawn to those of us down
in the southeast. That's like a fairly nice day. Yeah,
(04:02):
it's regional, like spices that go in hot dogs, right.
But the thing is is like that depends the reason
that they do that. The reason there's no single definition
for heat waves because people are acclimated to different kinds
of weather, and if you're not acclimated to warm weather,
it's going to affect you and your body a lot worse.
So it makes a lot of sense. But the two
(04:23):
days in a row as low as ninety degrees fair
at height, that's the minimum that I've seen in the
United States that constitutes a legit heat wave. I'm sorry,
I'm sorry, a legit heat wave. Oh boy, we're gonna
do that the whole time. I think I'm going to okay. Um,
this one speaks to my heart because, as everyone who's
(04:44):
ever listening to the show much knows and as you
my friends certainly know, I am a I'm a polar bear.
So the sun and humidity is not good for Chuck.
I hate it. I hate it. I grew up in
the South, and it's it's worse now. It feels like
it's not like I've gotten acclimated, Like you know, it's
easy to say you get acclimated. But even as as
(05:07):
much as I sweat, which is a I can't imagine
how hot I would be if I didn't sweat like
I sweat. Well, yeah, you'd be like one of those
people who can't sweat and can die from it. But
when I lived in l a uh, it can get
very hot out there, but generally if you can park
it under a tree, you might get a breeze and
(05:27):
you can sweat and you're cooling down pretty good. But
it's it's there's no relief when you live in the
South because of humidity. We're going to talk about all that,
but I just want to kind of set set up
my personal involvement with heat waves, which is boo thumbs down.
You're personally involved through sweatiness, is what you're saying. Yeah,
and when those heat waves, especially the late heat waves
(05:49):
in the summer when it should be cooling down come through.
It's just it makes me mad. Yeah, those are not
fun because your your bodies in your mind has been
like okay, great, it's fall, and then you're just dog
days summer again. It's terrible. I'm with you on that.
But how did these things come about to begin with?
Why is it hot for a week straight way hotter
than it normally is, and why doesn't is just cool
(06:11):
down every night? Well, first we should say, because I
don't want to lose anybody this early on if they're like, uh,
two days in a row of ninety degree weather? Why
are you guys even talking about this? The reason we
are talking about this because, like we said, Chuck, Noah
classifies heat waves as a disaster, and a lot of
really terrible stuff can happen during a heat wave, even
(06:31):
of just a few days. Like it's it's a an invisible, silent,
deadly natural disaster that we're only beginning to awaken. Too,
silent but deadly. So as you're saying how do heat
waves work, you're kind of set me up for that one, right, Well, yeah,
but I thought you were going to hit him with
the big stat which is heat waves kill more people
(06:53):
than all other natural disasters combined. Um or I think
you saw somewhere else all but hurricane. But point being,
they kill a lot of people, like way more than
you think. Yeah, and even if they don't necessarily kill
more than uh, kill more people at least in the
United States. That it was just the statistic I saw.
(07:13):
Um then all other natural disasters combined, that at the
very least, it kills more people per year than all
other natural disasters. It's the deadliest kind of natural disaster.
The thing is is it doesn't happen all at once,
like say a flood that takes a bunch of people's
lives in a very a very acute area, right concentrated area. Um.
(07:39):
It happened slowly over the course of days in a
very large region, and people just kind of die. And
it's not immediately apparent like like, oh, I found you
in floodwater, you drowned in a flood. It's I found
you dead on your sofa, you know, in your apartment.
And I'm not maybe you had a heart attack or
something like that. It's it's not That's what I was saying.
We're just beginning to awaken to it because it's not
(08:00):
an obvious natural disaster, but it is most decidedly a
natural disaster. Yeah, that's a good point. Like it's not
quite as grabby in the news. I mean, they certainly
report on it, but it's not and you know, the
news is is well, I don't want to talk about
the news. Um, let's talk about heat waves. Heat waves,
that's right. So the whole thing about a heat wave
(08:23):
is it's a basically a warm mass of hot air
that's a just a lope or no, a high pressure system.
So let me just restate that less confusingly. It's a
high pressure system that's made up of very stagnant, still
warm air that kind of finds its way over a
region and doesn't move for a little while and things
(08:45):
get really oppressive during that period. Yeah, And these high
pressure systems are just part of the normal weather patterns
and they generally kind of circulate clockwise and kind of
move on through. Uh. The jet stream takes care of that, thankfully.
That that west to east air current that moves pushes
(09:06):
all the weather around, always shoving the weather around in
the northern hemisphere at least. Yeah, well, come on, is
there any other hemisphere, sorry, America's centric or anything. No,
not at all, but are in the northern hemisphere. The
jet stream hits us about at the belt between Canada's
shirt and America's jeans. And like I said, it usually
(09:30):
pushes stuff around and it'll get hot and then it'll
push that hot stuff out. But during the summertime, the
jet stream slows down. Uh. They have found that overall,
and we're gonna talk, you know, quite a bit about
climate change. Overall, it's slowing down period some, but in
the summertime it's it definitely slows down from its you know,
(09:51):
two and fifty mile per hour or so peak. And
that's gonna obviously keep that hot weather there a little longer. Yeah,
even under normal conditions, let alone climate change conditions. So
when all of the all those factors are are kind
of falling into place where the jet stream is feeling
a little logy and not moving too quickly, and there's
(10:13):
a big mass of hot air that kind of moves
up as a high pressure front and just settles in
over a region, you've got everything you need for that
massive hot air to just stay put and continue heating up,
which is the big problem because a high pressure um
weather system forces air downward and it's hot air too. Normally,
(10:37):
you have hot air at the surface, or air that
warms up at the surface and it moves upward, it
floats upward, and it's replaced by cool air that comes in,
and you've got breezes. Well, one of the things that's
the hallmark of a high pressure system is there there
ain't no breezes because it's just sitting there pushing the
air downward towards the surface of the Earth, which prevents
(10:58):
that air from rye eazing, so there's no cool air
to come in, so there's no breeze. But also because
that air is just sitting there at the surface, it's
just getting warmer and warmer and warm warmer. And the
surface air temperature is what we're concerned with, because it's
the temperature of the air about two meters above the
Earth's surface above the ground, so it's about six and
a half feet, which is where a lot of us
(11:20):
are trying to take a breath in this really hot air. Well,
a lot of you taller people, sure, but even still,
if you stood on your tippy toes, it would affect
you a lot too. Well, the other thing that happens
to because that air isn't rising, that means it's not
gonna rain. Uh, and rain obviously can be away to
cool things down. So it just it's sort of acts
(11:42):
as this uh, it's sort of like a feedback loop
basically where the hotter it gets, the hotter it's gonna get. Yeah.
And even the other thing about a high pressure front
is it pushes like air away from it, outward from
the edges of it, so there's no fronts coming in
to like kind of relieve it. It's so the stronger
(12:04):
they get, the more all of these factors contribute, and then,
like you said, creates this positive feedback cycle and basically
you're just totally at the mercy of the jet stream
to move this thing away eventually, and it can take
some time. And so that's what a heat wave is.
It's when one of these like all these factors kind
of come together and this massive hot air settles in
over a region and just keeps getting hotter and hotter.
(12:27):
And in the daytime, that's that's the like the money
time as far as people are concerned with heat waves,
because the sun's out, it's really really hot. The temperatures
are really high, and it's pretty bad. No one's going
to argue that the daytime during a heat wave stinks,
But it's the night time that's the more insidious part.
That's the real problem with the with the heat wave, right, yeah,
(12:50):
I mean, even if it gets really hot, but it's
not a heat wave. The earth helps itself out by
cooling down at night. Your body, like everything cools down
at night. It's a it's a great chance to just
kind of, you know, kick off your shoes and like
relax and recharge. Yeah, like humans, the human body needs it. Uh,
Animals bodies need it. The earth itself needs it. The
(13:14):
buildings and the concrete and the asphalt and the steel
and the glass. It all depends on cooling down some
at night. So it can be like, well, I'm gonna
get hot again tomorrow, but at least I cooled down
tonight and you know, kind of relaxed and like you said,
repaired my energy. But when a heat wave comes, it's
not cooling down at night. So I mean, just imagine yourself.
(13:35):
If you never get a chance to cool down at
night and you stay hot, then that sun comes up
the next day, it's gonna be twice as bad, Yeah,
because you're starting from a higher set point at the beginning,
you know. And that's one of the hallmarks of a
heat wave is it's hot even before the sun comes up.
That's which is not pleasant, and it's certainly not good
sleeping weather. Those are the worst, man like, especially here
(13:58):
in the South, when you go out, like you go
to let your dog out at eleven o'clock at night,
and it's like eighty seven degrees or something, you just
start sweating immediately before that. It's just brutal. It's pretty bad.
All right. Well, let's take a break. I need to
go I don't know, soaking a bathtub or something. I'm
getting a little hot down here. Uh, And we'll talk
(14:20):
about the dreaded humidity right after this. Learn it's stuff
with Joshua John Okay, Chuck lay it on him that
(15:06):
very famous phrase that actually holds true. Um, youth has
wasted on the young, sure that one, but also early
bird gets the worm and UM never say candy man
into a mirror. Well, it's certainly not three times in
(15:26):
a row. It's not the heat, it's the humidity. There's
the one I was looking for, right that's the one,
and that's true. I mean we were talking about humidity earlier.
That is what you know the humans have as this
great mechanism built in a kind of a self contained
air conditioning system which is called sweat. And if it's
if the air is fairly dry outside, and like I
(15:48):
mentioned getting under that shade tree in Los Angeles, you
can sweat and that water is gonna evaporate off of
you and a cool breeze will come through and it
actually feels good. And that is how you regulate and
cool down. When the humidity happens, it's hard to near
impossible for that sweat to really cool you down. You'll
still be sweating, but it won't have that same effect, right, Um, yeah,
(16:12):
it's it's just there's no place for that sweat to go.
It doesn't just move into the air because there's already
so much water vapor into the air. So the higher
the humidity is, the worst off it is for you.
And then if you take high temperatures as well, that
combination of high humidity and high temperature can be really bad.
(16:32):
And back in the seventies there was a guy, actually
in nineteen seventy nine, somebody named R. G. Steadman. They
came up in nineteen seventy nine with assessment of sultry nous,
which we call today the heat index. It was the
paper that put the heat index out there, and the
heat index is basically, yeah, it really is. You know,
it sounds it sounds like a Tennessee Williams play or
(16:55):
something like that. So the heat index makes a lot
of sense because when it's really humid out and it's
high in temperature, that humidity makes it feel even hotter
because we have trouble sweating. So so R. G. Steadman
came up with the heat index that kind of gives
you a much better understanding of what the actual temperature
(17:16):
as far as your human body is concerned. That's why
they also call it the apparent temperature or the fuels
like temperature. Yeah, and that's the only one I care about.
I don't even know why they less regular temperature. It
should just be heat indecks and wind chill in the winter,
because that's the only thing that matters. And I guess
you know, it's it's like showing your math or something.
So they have to go through it all, but as
(17:38):
far as your human body is concerned, those are really
the only two measures that matter, or at least for me. Yeah.
So you know how sometimes you can end up down
a rabbit hole and like not find a way out
and you have to just crawl backwards out of it,
and you're you're kind of worse off for the wear
because you went a little mad in there. Sure that
happened to me. With humidity, heat index, evaporation, condensation, I'm
(18:00):
like researching it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, And I'm like
there's a lot of there's some some connections here between
all these things that my brain is not making. I'm
just sensing that it's all very much connected, and I'm
even reading stuff that's saying it's connected. I just can't
figure out how it's all connected because it's not as
simple as like humidity or you know, the heat index
(18:23):
is humidity times temperature divided by two or something like that.
That's not how it works. It's way more sophisticated than that,
and it takes into account a lot of different stuff
so that if you if you actually put a lower
temperature in with higher humidity, it will bring the temperature down.
And then there's some temperatures like say seventy degrees where
(18:45):
it doesn't really matter what you do with the humidity,
it's still just gonna feel like seventy degrees. So there's
like a lot of different weirdness in there. But the
thing is the upshot of all this. I was just
kind of confessing and getting off my chest that I'm
a little obsessed with this and if any any meteorologists
or climatologists can explain all this to me, I would
love to hear it. But as far as heat waves
(19:05):
are concerned, if you have high temperatures and high humidity,
some really astounding stuff happens when you put those together.
As far as the heat index is concerned. Yeah, And
just not to harp on my personal um sweating issues.
We've talked about it a lot over the years, but
it's the embarrassing thing for me is not that I've
(19:26):
sweat a lot, because a It's that's why I never
had like acne growing up, because I'm just constantly sweating
everything through. We've got like the cleanest pores in the world,
um and it you know, it helps cool me down,
But it's when it's like seventy six degrees and super humid,
and other people are like or even in the sixties
(19:46):
or fifties, and they're like, it's really cool. Why are
you sweating, like because it's humid. I don't care if
it's forty degrees. If it's super humid, I might break
a sweat. Yeah, it gets through. If you're sweating at
forty degrees, that's that's some sweaty us for sure. Maybe
not forty fifty. We could do some tests, all right,
let's do oh yeah, let's do some science. I'm gone up. Yeah,
(20:09):
like a humidity lab or something. Okay, but I still
get to get a lab coat, right Sure of the
color of my choosing. Um, I'll let you select from
three colors of my choosing. What are they? Cinnamon, powder, blue,
and orange? Okay? Great, okay, any one of those, then
that's mine. It's mine. Banana yellow was going to be
(20:29):
in there, but you missed. You missed the boat. At
least you didn't make me dress up in a banana costume. Uh, yeah,
I was. It's funny. I was shopping for Halloween for
this year and I kind of didn't want to go
is a devo, and so I was looking up for
those yellow jumpsuits and I was waylaid because you kind
(20:50):
of end up having to be whatever your kid says
you have to be. So I think we're all gonna
be spooky things this year, but I had to put
the devo thing on the back burner. You could be
like zombie Divo. Not a bad idea, No, it's not.
It's a great idea. Yeah, you can be zombie anything.
That's kind of the beauty of the zombie Zombie b York,
Zombie Mark Mother's Ball, Zombie b York. I like that,
(21:15):
Just wear that Swan dress and walk around saying I
was trying to think of how Buyork would say brains
but not of my head. Couldn't put it together. That
was perfect thing. Uh. So you mentioned insidious effects and
we're going to talk about those because, uh, very wide reaching.
(21:37):
It's not just people get hot and people die. Uh.
It affects kind of everything on the planet. And it's
easy to kind of think of heat stroke and dehydration
and something like that during the day, like you said,
because that's when you count on it, and that's when
you might take precautions, which, by the way, to go
listen to our Desert Survival episode for that kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, good tips there, but not like you said,
(22:01):
it's that's when it's really bad because the human body
really depends on that rest and that reset and that
cool down. And if you stay hot, your body and
is you know, especially if you have like high bread
high blood pressure or like heart issues, it's working overtime
at night when it should be cooling down because you
I think you're like lowest body temperature of the twenty
(22:23):
four hour cycle is during sleep. So if you're not
hitting that cool down cycle, then everything is just doing
a lot of extra work. Yeah, in particular your heart is.
And when your heart is working hard and then it
has to work hard again the next day, it's like
that that set point doesn't ever or the set point
starts higher the next day. So after a few days
(22:44):
of this, especially if you have a bum ticker to
begin with, UM, it can be quite dangerous for you.
And so people like the elderly, UM children, like very
young children, they're usually the first casualties of UM of
a heat wave. But there are a lot of other
people who are susceptible to UM, especially people who don't
(23:04):
have easy access to air conditioning UH, people who are
of low income, who very sadly might even have air conditioning,
but don't have power right then, or don't have the
money to to to run their air conditioner. The homeless,
um people who work outside and sorry, I gotta I
gotta work no matter what to keep food on the table,
(23:25):
whether it's a heat wave or not. They can be
in big trouble as well. But then so can any
of us, especially when that heat index starts to jump.
Like when you have like a hundred degree temperatures with
um like fifty five percent humidity. You put those together,
it's suddenly a hundred and twenty four out. That's not
good for anybody, you know. No, And you know I
(23:48):
mentioned earlier that it's like people and animals and buildings
and everything. The infrastructure takes, you know, it takes a hit.
Um like railway railroad tracks can literally up and buckle. Yeah,
they won't run trains during a heat wave a lot
of times for that reason because they could derail. Yeah, concrete,
an asphalt, any kind of metal and glass on a
(24:10):
building you've uh, I mean, buildings can like their shape
can briefly change and expand and contract or I guess
expand and not contract for a little while, all due
to this heat wave. And you know, we talked a
little bit about the urban heat island effect at some point, um,
but this is you know, this is why you got
(24:32):
to New York City and a heat wave and it's
it's one of the hottest places on the planet. It
feels like, yeah, because it actually is way hotter than
other places because of all those building materials number one,
that are excellent absorbers of heat, all that blacktop and
asphalt and um, all that steel, but also chuck like
the distinct lack of vegetation like trees and stuff that
(24:55):
actually helped cool the air. Like it's not just shade
that they do, Like they actually release water vapor into
the air and actually cool the nearby air. So the
more trees you have, the lower the urban heat island effect.
But that's just not like a huge, huge um trait
of the average city. Like somebody actually wrote a book
called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That's how significant the
(25:18):
idea of a tree in Brooklyn was. You know what
I'm saying. That's funny. Uh. Energy takes a big wall
up to um for the obvious reason and more um
obvious when being that you know, everyone's cranking those air
conditioners everyone's refrigerators and freezers are working over time. Um.
Industrial refrigeration is working over time. And you combine that
(25:41):
with the fact that transmission capacity is reduced during these
high temperatures, it's gonna strain the electrical grid even more. Uh.
It's just nothing is running with any kind of efficiency.
And if you want to really have some people die quickly,
you have an energy power outage during a heat wave
(26:02):
because of these overstressed systems. And that's when all of
a sudden, like nobody has refrigeration or air conditioning, and uh,
it can get brutal pretty quickly. Yeah, because I mean,
if you, if you think about it, you've got incredible
demand on the system. And then the system itself can't
really um, it can't get rid of its you know,
(26:23):
waste heat like it needs to, just like a human
body does. So Yeah, if the system blacks out or
even browns out, it's that's not the time to do it,
but that's when it's most likely to happen. And then
on the same on the opposite side of the same coin, chuck,
are those cold waves I was talking about? Um, And
that was what happened in Texas. Uh this past winter
(26:43):
it was a high pressure front, but instead of a
mass of like super hot air, it was a massive
super cold air and it just settled in and stayed
there and froze Texas and Texas infrastructure suffered. I think
we talked about in the electrical grid episode. Um. And
it was the same thing. They just couldn't keep up
with the demand, and the weather itself was taxing the
system too. And uh, it's the same thing in a
(27:07):
heat wave. It's just for the opposite reasons, but the
same outcome, right. Uh. And if you're thinking, hey, you know,
look at the bright side, warmer winters mean we're not
going to be using as much energy in the wintertime
to heat our homes, so it all balances out. Uh,
that's not true. They've done a lot of studies and
they're pretty much coming to the conclusion that the heat
(27:30):
is out is tipping that scale too far in the
other direction. And even if we are saving a little
bit of energy and or even a great deal of
energy in the wintertime due to warmer temperatures, it's not
going to balance it out. Um. Water is another big
one to chuck, which makes a lot of sense, Like
people drink more water they need more water. Uh, they
might take cool baths to cool down, but not just humans.
(27:54):
Livestock need more water during this time. Um power plants
need more water to stay a cool, crops need more water.
Everything needs more water. But the problem is is during
heat wave when you need water the most, that's when
it's like the least available because it becomes pretty scarce.
Because drought and heat waves are they work really well together.
(28:16):
They kind of go hand in hand. Actually in a
lot of cases. Yeah, I mean that kind of creates
a similar feedback feedback loop, and that when there is
moisture in the ground thanks to rain and stuff like that,
even when it gets hot, the earth is going to
soak up a lot of that sun and use some
of that energy to get rid of that water and
(28:38):
turn it into water vapor. If that ground is already
super dry because of a drought, then it's just it's
basically just baking like an oven, and that energy has
no other use. It doesn't have the use of turning
it into water vapor, so it's just baking, yeah, just
heating that ground up instead, so it just gets hotter
and hotter, which is terrible stuff. So UM plus also
(29:01):
with drought stricken landscapes. Those are more susceptible to wildfire.
So as there's more and more heat waves, we can
expect worse and more widespread wildfires. Basically too, we talked
about animals, it's not animals. I think a lot of
people forget about animals and situations like this. Uh. I
(29:23):
think people think more about animals when it gets super
super cold and like really bad cold. Friends come in.
But they're susceptible to the heat too. And it's not
just you know, our little you know, domesticated pets that
we love and and unfortunately some of the street animals
like really suffer. But livestock, you know, if you're on
a farm, those cows and chickens don't like that kind
(29:45):
of heat either. Uh. Sometimes it can affect their mortality rates. Uh,
it can affect things way downstream because uh they might
be rep you know if they don't want to have
that heat wave sex either, so that they might be
reproducing less, which is gonna have a down on stream effect. Uh.
And then you know all the crops are going to
be affected too, Yeah, especially the ones that cops when
(30:06):
it comes snatch that what cops want to come and
snatch my crops. I don't what is that? You do
remember that as a Cypress Hill lyric, a very famous one.
I don't. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, I remember. Now, boy,
we mentioned cypers Hill a lot on the show. They're
kind of like, uh, they're like a mascot now, like
Frank the Chair. I knew that sounded familiar. Cops come
(30:29):
and try to snatch my crops. Here it is, and
then that has to be followed, of course by heat Wave. Boy,
somebody should sample that on a on a hip hop tune.
That'd be great. What heat Wave? Yeah, I bet it
has been sure. I could see Puff Daddy sampling that.
That'd be up his alley. Oh yeah, did ever tell
(30:50):
you I went to his house one time. It sounds
vaguely familiar, but I'd like to hear it again. It's
not the biggest story, but I ran an errand as
p a over to his house one time and had
to drop something. Now, so I had to go go
knock on his door and walk inside the front and
drop something off. Something was something in air quotes. No,
(31:11):
it was some for the job. It wouldn't a big deal,
but it was like clothes or something. But it was.
It was just very shiny and white. Everything was shiny
and white. I can imagine, which is you know, it's
a way to go, I guess, but I don't know.
It's a look it's too much. It's too much. I
don't know. I mean, there's a long time ago. He
may not be into that now. But white couches and
(31:31):
big white marble floors, I mean, I like white couches
and and I do like white stuff, but it's also like,
gotta have lots of color. Like the white stuff is
just a it's just a backdrop for your color. That's
in my that's my opinion. We are too messy. We
can't have white things. I understand, you know. Yeah, told
well you need to have if you have a white couch,
it's got to be a uh slip cover because you're
(31:55):
gonna have to wash it, yes, if you drink red wine.
But but there is one that we haven't covered you.
I think we should before we take a break, and
it is air pollution, which uh might be overlooked by
some people, but it really makes a lot of sense
because number one, we're like demanding way more from power
(32:16):
plants than usual during a heatwave with all that a c.
So those power plants are putting out more emissions than usual.
But then the actual like conditions of the heat wave
itself make the air pollution worse, does it not? Yeah?
I mean that that same cap that uh kind of
forces all that air down and keeps everything stagnant, that
(32:37):
same cap is in place for uh, these emissions that
are going up into the air. So it's just it's
just like bottling it all up. It's gonna make things
a lot worse. Yeah, and so, and also ozone is
more easily produced. You've got ozone and like particulate matter
from from emissions, all combining to make your breathing much
more difficult. Danger. Right, So let's take a break, man,
(32:58):
and then we'll talk about some couple of famous heat
waves and what the future holds. How about that, let's
do it. Learn it's stuff with Joshua John stuff all right.
(33:47):
So if you were alive on the earth this summer, um,
you might remember and said, all you almost started with it,
and you didn't. You've really come a long way John
with what you almost said, unless you're living under a rock.
Oh no, no, no, no, no, it really wasn't all right, Um,
so between June and June, Uh, something was brewing down
(34:11):
in Mexico that was very hot, and this big, massive
warm air moved up and kind of settled over the
middle of the United States and and didn't move for
a while. And uh, it was just sort of your
classic heat wave. But even in places like where that
they're used to the heat in the summertime, it got
(34:32):
exceedingly hot. Like if you were in Arizona and Phoenix,
you're used to hot weather for sure, but it it
cracked a hundred and fifteen degrees for six consecutive days,
which is a record for even Phoenix. That is not
okay for anybody, no, but so so it's bad enough
for Phoenix. But still, I'm sure the people of things
(34:54):
were like, yeah, it's kind of hot, but come on,
we could we could handle worse. Um, it was play
this is where it's not normally hot at all. That
really took the brunt of that heat wave. And as
a matter of fact, the heat wave is generally called
referred to as the Pacific Northwest heatwave because that's where
it really stunk the worst. Yeah, I can't believe Portland,
(35:15):
Oregon got up to a hundred and twelve degrees. That
is bananas. Yeah, And we should say when you're talking
about air temperatures and you are seeing the temperature on
the news or whatever, that measurement was taken in the shade.
That's not the sunlight sunshine temperature. That's what that the
temperature is in the shade. Okay, So wrap your head
(35:35):
around that one. Yeah. So a hundred and twelve in
Portland's hundred and four in Seattle, which broke a record.
Um it was. It was bananas and and that kind
of like a lot of people in that part of
the country. I don't really know percentages, but there are
there are people who don't have h VAC units. They
(35:57):
count on opening their windows and stuff like that. There
are places in the United States, believe it or not,
that don't have HVAC and that that use ceiling fans
and stuff and they just don't eat. Yeah, for sure. Um.
There was another town too that we have to mention,
chuck Lytton, British Columbia, which is north a couple hundred
miles north of Seattle. They hit a hundred and sixteen
(36:19):
and set a new record not just for themselves but
for Canada as a whole and then the town burned
down from a wildfire right afterward. Very sad, so like
it was a really big deal. And one of the
things that that I think this the Pacific Northwest heat
wave in June, and I think there were multiple ones
around that region over the well not just in the
(36:41):
Pacific Northwest, but in like the Midwest States in particular
U this year. But what I think these the heat
waves in the U s s you're kind of woke
people up to, is like these things are like really deadly.
They looked at excess deaths, which they kind of take
the background number of deaths, the deaths you'd expect, and
then see how many more occurred on a particular day
(37:04):
or over a particular period or during a heat wave.
And they've concluded thus far that in Washington State alone,
six people died from that heat wave over the course
of a few days. Yeah, like thousands of people total
um all over that region. And you know this is
that's a little bit of a squishy number because it's
(37:25):
and we'll talk a little bit about this, like people
who study is kind of stuff, they're doing the best
they can. They can't necessarily say like every single one
of those deaths was because of the heat wave. But
it is a really good measure. Um, And if you're
if you're just looking at sort of round numbers, uh,
it's it's not the kind of thing that you can dismiss.
And Plus, if history is any kind of guide that
those numbers will probably be revised upward in the next
(37:48):
year or so, I would guess. Yeah. And it's not
just the United States. There was a heat wave in
Europe in two thousand three that was it was the
warmest summer on record since the fifteen forties. And I
was like, how do they know that? I don't know.
So I looked, there's a bunch of different ways they
can kind of miss us out. Yeah, parchment is the answer. Um,
(38:10):
there's there's They take bore holes is basically one of
the best ways I saw, where when when it's hot
on on this Earth's surface, that temperature radiates downward through
the Earth. And if you take a core sample, a
borehole sample sample, you can actually kind of deduce from
whatever temperature a specific moment in time is, like say
(38:35):
like in the fifteen forties, this would have been at
the surface, that it actually that you can actually get
the temperature roughly from that era. I think we talked
about that before. This was really familiar. Okay, well it
sounded new to me. I had no idea, But I
think that's pretty interesting because there was nobody in fifteen
forties saying, oh, it was eighty degrees celsius it was
(38:57):
super hot, which I think that's like really really hot,
if I'm not mistaken. But um, nobody was recording temperature
like that. Some people did record the weather, but it
was just like a smattering of observations and nothing scientific.
Because this is pretty scientific. Um, so they have to
use even more scientific stuff today to kind of deduce
what it was before. Right. You might see, like it
(39:20):
was very hot the day we burned this person at
the stake, right, and we made even hot glancing reference.
But yeah, I mean Milan, Paris, London, all these places
broke record temperatures, uh, temperatures, temperatures. I can say that
like a lazy Southerner temperature temperature because of hookworm, you
say it like temperature. Yeah, but in the you know,
(39:44):
in a couple of years after they calculated that, about
thirty thousand people died all over Europe, and then later
on they said that could have been as high as
seventy tho people when they studied it. Years after that,
seventy thousand people died from a two week Hey wave
in Europe in two thousand three, and this may be
(40:04):
what we're looking at going forward. Yeah, so we talked
about you were you were saying, like, um, that there's
there's people who like are trying to figure out how
much this is increasing, how much of it has to
do with climate change. There's a it's a new branch
of science called attribution studies, and it's pretty much in
league with climatology. I get the impression that it's made
(40:24):
up of climatologists and it's a brand new type of
science and it's really hard to do. Um. But they're
they're starting from an article I read the data set
post climate change. Basically this this one point to degrees
celsius that has risen since we started keeping records in
(40:45):
eighteen eighty. I believe it's like the benchmark here that
it's starting to happen, like weird stuff is starting to
happen in more and more frequency, that this data set
is growing. And then they have since the eighteen eighties
to compare it against and so using a lot more
sophisticated statistical analysis that I can quite wrap my head around. Um,
they're figuring out how to say this weird weather event
(41:09):
like the one in the Pacific Northwest had ex chance
of happening had climate change never happened, had we never
started releasing greenhouse gas emissions during the industrial age. And
they've actually done that. There was a study that that
actually kind of came to some pretty interesting conclusions about that. Yeah.
(41:30):
They you know, they you hear about like a hundred
year storm or something like that. Uh, they did a
calculation and they said, you know, this was that that
heat wave in this year in the United States was
in a one thousand year event. And that's factoring in
like the current climate that we are already in. Yeah,
like if we frozeur if our climate did not get
(41:51):
any hotter or change in any way than it did
now for from now on, that it would have been
a thousand year event like now basically right, And then
they can further extrapolate and say with this was pre
um pre end of the nineteenth century, I guess, Yeah,
eighteen eighty that's that benchmark date when everyone around the
(42:13):
world started to keep like pretty accurate weather records from
that point on. They said that that would have been
about a hundred and fifty thousand year event back then,
and in the future it might become like a five
or ten year event. Yeah, by the twenty fifties maybe, Yeah,
because I think that it's like thirty or forty years
from now, the overall global temperature there it is again,
(42:39):
is gonna rise in another two degrees celsius. No, two
degrees celsius total since eighteen eighty Okay, yeah, I guess
that would be catastrophic. Yeah, I don't know what would happen.
I think we should do an episode explaining temperature rise
in like what effects it's going to have and all
that sure sot into our doomsday series. So even even
taking aside like climate chain UM and an increase from
(43:02):
climate change, UM, there's there's a lot of data that
just says, yeah, we're actually seeing a lot more heat
waves than we used to just in the past, like
fifty sixty years UM, and just taking data starting in
nineteen sixty I think UM the weather the National Weather
Service to a study that basically said, UM, looking at
(43:26):
fifty cities in the United States, forty six of them
have seen a signific statistically significant increase in heat waves
since the nineteen sixties, so much so that like during
the nineteen sixties they could expect about two heat waves
per year these fifty cities in the United States. Now
they're averaging about six per year. And the season for
heat waves in these cities is on average forty seven
(43:48):
days longer than it was in nineteen sixty. So there's
definitely a big upward trend in heat waves. It's becoming
this new normal for us. Yeah, and it's it's really
all about data. Um in more data you have, because
they you know, there are still freak weather events that um,
they don't want to just throw everything in there and
say it's all caused by the rising climates all over
(44:10):
the world. Uh. But the more time goes on, like
the more of this data set is enriched and the
the wheat is separated from the chaff just sort of naturally,
the more data you get, and those statistical anomalies will
they will be revealed, yes as such. Yeah, well, which
I think it behoo's us to say, like any good
(44:32):
attribution um climatologists is going to tell you like that
that heatwave in the Pacific Northwest could have just been
statistical bad luck. It may have had nothing to do
with climate change. It could have just been like that
was the one we drew. Because a thousand year event
means you have a one in a thousand chance on
any given year of that you could happen next year. Again,
(44:54):
statistically is unlikely, but it's possible just from statistics that
it was just bad luck that it happened. But um, yeah,
what you were saying is actually totally accurate that the
more unfortunately weird freak weather events go on, the bigger
the data set they're going to have to compare to
pre you know, climate change times and see what is
(45:17):
actually trending upward. And it looks like they're probably right
about heat waves. Yeah, and they you know, people should
feel good knowing that they're really trying to get good
accurate data. It's it's not they don't want to just
be doomsday uh people and say, you know, they want
to really get good accurate numbers in there. So if
(45:39):
you're a person who thinks climate change is bogus or
it's not human caused or whatever, or they're just trying
to scare you, and you know they're going to throw
everything in there that happens and say it's because of this.
They're not doing that. They're really really working super super
hard to get a super accurate record and picture of
what things are like now and and what they're like
(46:00):
moving forward. You're not being good winked. I think people
who are still saying that are basically like standing in
a burning house being like, the house isn't on fire,
It's fine. Yeah, Um, so what can we do to
stop this stuff? Well, you can't stop it. What can
we do to help ourselves out in the meantime. No,
eventually we probably will be able to control the weather,
which sounds like Bond villain esque, but we'll probably be
(46:22):
able to control it to our benefit and the benefit
of the planet I'm guessing in the next like hundred
years possibly. But until then, we can do absolutely nothing
about this except kind of try to mitigate the effects
of it. One of the things that's starting to happen
our local governments are starting to get a little more
hip to the idea that they need, you know, plans
in place so when a heat wave comes along, because
(46:44):
they're actually pretty easy to forecast by many days out,
so you can give people a lot of warning and
then if the government has this plan in place, they
can open up cooling center. So you've got a convention
center is not being used well that now is a
cooling center where you're running lots of ace for residents
who don't have a c to come cool off. You
can start um reroofing buildings in your city with you know,
(47:08):
green roofs or even like like um cool roofs, which
is basically a roof that's not black and that's all
it takes to to cool that roof by fifty degrees
sometimes on a sunny day. Um. There's just a lot
of stuff where if you just stop and look at
the infrastructure and even the color of the infrastructure use
in cities, just changing it to lighter colors would have
(47:30):
an enormous effect on the urban heat island effect. Oh yeah,
plant more trees. I love those green roofs are good
looking anyway, Sure they look like Hobbit houses, a Hobbit skyscraper.
No less uh, making the electrical grid more efficient because again,
if you've got a heat wave and that thing breaks down,
it's just exacerbating the problem. So those are all things
(47:51):
we can do to help out a little bit. Yeah,
we'll probably figure it out more as it goes on,
but does it's a pretty good start. And the other
thing that you can do is you can actually if
you watch your local news and the weather person says
there's a heat advisory today, like that means that it
could be dangerous to be outside. Like they're not just
whistling Dixie there, hope. I had a borderline heat stroke,
(48:11):
uh this summer, first time in my life. What I
was playing golf, I got I was able to play
the historic East Lake Golf Club near where I live,
and I it was brutally hot. It is a walking
only course, so it's not like you're riding around a
golf cart. And you know, golf courses aren't their trees
(48:32):
on the edges, but you're out on that sun if
you're hitting them straight, you know what I mean. And
I started feeling funny. I got a little dizzy a
couple of times. And I'm at the age now where
I'm smart enough for where I was like, I gotta
do something here, dudes, Like this isn't right. I don't
feel right. I've been hot all my life and I
don't feel right, So I they called sort of embarrassing,
(48:55):
but they called a golf cart out and I went
back to the clubhouse for like three holes in cool down,
oh yeah, and then went back out. I missed those
three holes, but I rejoined my buddies and uh and
finished out the back nine. But you had the lowest
score of all then, exactly it was. But I'm glad
that I was smart en if I was like, well,
this is a little embarrassing, but I just I've got
(49:16):
to take care of myself, Like not dying of pete
stroke is much better than you know, playing on to
not be embarrassed. I mean, that's come on, because you
know what's really embarrassing is dropping dead. Of course it is.
And then it would think about how it would affect me, chuck,
I would have to explain it to all of our listeners. Man. Uh.
(49:38):
It took me a long time to cool down. Like
I went in the icy, coldest clubhouse I've ever been
in and it was just pounding water and it took
me fifteen minutes to feel normal. And then I took
a cold shower upstairs in the clubhouse. In the clubhouse
and the bought a new shirt in the clubhouse nice
(50:00):
and um, and then came back out and I was like,
I felt normal again. But it took a half hour.
There there's your answer. That's why it's an all walking course,
because they want to move those replacement shirts unsuspectingly eive. Wow. Well,
I'm glad you made it, buddy, and you did the
right thing. And I hope everybody learns a lesson from you.
(50:21):
It doesn't matter if it's embarrassing. We're talking about your
life and your health here. You just go cool off,
or you stopped playing, or you just don't gotta do
it like you gotta look out for yourself everybody. Yeah,
and it's just dumb golf. Yeah, who cares? Okay, Uh,
you got anything more on heat heat waves? Nope? Well,
if you want to know some more stuff about saving
(50:43):
your took us from heat stroke and stuff again, go
listen to our Desert Survival episode. And since I said that,
it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this Merchant's
house museum. This from the Embalming episode. Hey, guys, been
listening since you started when I was in high school.
(51:04):
You've been a real comfort more than ten years and
You've kept me company, distracted me, and made me laugh.
I'm emailing you because Josh mentioned the Merchant's House Museum
in the Embalming episode. I work at the Merchant's House
and it was so cool to hear you guys mentioned
the museum. I'm impressed Josh even remembered Seabury Treadwell's name.
It's a great small museum in the Greenwich Village East
(51:26):
Village area that most New Yorkers and tourists don't even
know about. I wanted to see if you could plug
the MHM a bit because for the last ten years
has been fighting a real estate developer who wants to
do construction on the site next to the house, and
now it would endanger the hundred and eighty nine year
old building. Enforced UH force it to close temporarily, if
(51:47):
not permanently. Our small staff are always looking for more visitors, volunteers,
and donors interested in saving the landmark. Thank you for
mentioning the Merchant's House Museum. And this is from Lizzie
in Deck UH. She her and Lizzie and everyone else
out there doing the work at the Merchant's House Museum.
Thank you, And if you go to New York City.
(52:07):
Go visit the Merchant's House Museum. If you can't go,
maybe go in line and make a donation. Yeah, nicely done, Chuck,
Thanks again for writing in Lizzie. That was good stuff.
I'm glad you did. Um and who could ever forget
Sea Barry Treadwell's name, Come on, great name Well. If
you want to get in touch with us like Lizzie
did and help you fight off a real estate developer
(52:28):
who wants to ruin your museum or historical location, we
want to hear from you. You can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(52:49):
favorite shows,
Stuff You Should Know News
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Josh Clark
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