This heat wave sucks. After the umpteenth story with that “dog-bites-man” theme, the Washington Post has come up with a new storyline to make everyone feel a little better:
Shiver or swelter? The great debate between derecho hell and snowmageddon
Shiver or swelter? It is a question that hardly anyone who has endured both Snowmageddon and Derecho Damnation wants to confront, if only because the question itself triggers its own torment.
I know what you’re thinking. If it’s a question that hardly anyone wants to confront, then how precisely could it be a “great debate”?
No, this “debate” isn’t up there with “paper vs. plastic” or “toilet paper hanging next to the wall vs. away from the wall.” So let’s skip the Post‘s interviews with regular people and cut to the proverbial chase — what do the experts say?
Doctors are clear where they stand on the matter. If they had to withstand a marathon Pepco outage (and it’s almost always a marathon Pepco outage, let’s not pretend otherwise), they’d prefer to endure it during the winter. Not in a heat wave. Because here’s how heat sickness turns into death:
“You start having severe muscle cramps,” explained Michael Kerr, an emergency doctor at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney. “Then, severe abdominal cramps. Nausea and vomiting start. Your muscles break down. Mental confusion. Maybe renal failure. Heat coma. Then, death.”
Freezing to death, this is preferable.
“Dying in the cold is very painless,” said Kerr, an experienced outdoorsman who likes camping in Montana and northern Idaho. “When you are out in the cold, you start getting confused, disoriented. You literally go to sleep.”
There you have it, people. One more reason to act now to slash greenhouse gas emissions and avoid truly catastrophic levels of global warming:
- M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — and Arctic warming of 20°F
- We are headed to warming of 13-18°F over most of U.S.
- Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter
Of course the real reason the Washington Post reporter wrote this story is so he could quote the classic Robert Frost poem, “Fire and Ice”:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Climate Progress readers know that if we keep listening to the do-little and do-nothing crowd, the world is going to end in fire — humanity’s burning of fossil fuels (and forests).
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
From what I know of fossil fuel
It will not be cool…
Is it dawning no people at last that a warming planet will eventually deliver the worst of all possible worlds? Yes, you may have icy blasts in the winter (at least for a while) AND drought/ heat waves in the summer.
They are just preparing the mob for their coming extermination. Keep mentioning it, in an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, and soon the brainless frogs will simply accept it as their lot, or, more likely given the level of religious befuddlement, ‘God’s Will’.
The poem that comes to my mind these days id Yeats’ “Second Coming”:
“TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
(Those last two lines capture what seems to be happening mostly in DC, if one can even talk about ‘best’ there.)
It goes on:
“a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
One performance only
We’ll fly you over burning forests
We’ll walk you through the starving hoards
We’ll show you drowned and bloated corpses
At a price you CAN afford
You’ll glide above the sky in comfort
You’ll sleep your nights in quiet hotels
You’ll sit and watch our views in wonder
Of mankind in a thousand hells
http://auntiejaynesolvesyourpoem.com/performance.html
The other factor, of course, is that it’s generally a LOT easier to handle a cold spell without power than a hot one.
And yes, I am aware that some homeless people will suffer the fate of The Little Match Girl (not usually regarded as a horror story, but always appeared that way to me).
Funny this should come up tonight; my brother and I were just talking about how by eating enough, wearing enough clothes and staying active it’s possible to sustain ourselves outdoors in absurdly cold weather but the “headroom” in the warm direction is quite small. We can’t stay alive outdoors when it’s too hot and too humid; if the wetbulb temperature is too high and you can’t go underground or into artificially chilled space you’ll die, simple as 2+2.
Related article: Future Temperatures Could Exceed Livable Limits, Researchers Find
healthcare systems get l;ess time to prepare in a heatwave than a cold snap. I quote from the UK Heatwave Plan
“In England in 2003 there were over 2,000 ‘excess deaths’ over the 10-day
heatwave period which lasted from 4–13 August 2003, compared to the previous
five years over the same period.
The first Heatwave Plan for England was published in 2004 in response to this
event. Since that time we have had a significant heatwave in 2006 (when it was
estimated that there were about 680 excess deaths compared to similar periods
in previous years). In 2009 there were approximately 300 excess summer deaths
during a heatwave compared to similar periods in previous years.
Excess deaths are not just deaths of those who would have died anyway in the
next few weeks or months due to illness or old age. There is strong evidence that
these summer deaths are indeed ‘extra’ and are the result of heat-related
conditions.
In contrast to deaths associated with cold snaps in winter, the rise in mortality as
a result of very warm weather follows very sharply – within one or two days of
the temperature rising.
This means that:
• by the time a heatwave starts, the window of opportunity for effective action
is very short indeed, and therefore;
• advanced planning and preparedness is essential.”
Maybe they’d do a sequel comparing what it’s like to LIVE with the consequences of heat stroke or heat exhaustion, not just die from its effects over a period of days to months. Kidney dialysis, liver dialysis and loss of brain function are medically demanding conditions. In contrast, losing a foot or nose to frost bite seems comparatively uncomplicated.