Source: Opinion | Climate Change Has Made Deadly Heat Waves Normal – The New York Times
It doesn’t take the end of the world to upend the way billions live in it. The punishing weather we are uneasily learning to call “normal” is doing that already.
Late last month, a heat wave swallowed South Asia, bringing temperatures for one-fifth of the entire human population to 10 degrees warmer than the scenario imagined in the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson’s celebrated climate novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” in which a similar event on the subcontinent quickly kills 20 million. It is now weeks later, and the heat wave continues. Real relief probably won’t come before the monsoon in June.
Mercifully, according to the young science of “heat death,” air moisture is as important as temperature for triggering human mortality, and when thermometers hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit in India and 120 in Pakistan in April, the humidity was quite low. But even so, in parts of India, humidity was still high enough that if the day’s peak moisture had coincided with its peak heat, the combination would have produced “wet-bulb temperatures” — which integrate measures of both into a single figure — already at or past the limit for human survivability. Birds fell dead from the sky.
In Pakistan, the heat melted enough of the Shipsher glacier to produce what’s called a “glacial lake outburst flood,” destroying two power stations and the historic Hassanabad Bridge, on the road to China….
Addenda:
Two relatively recent critiques of “The Ministry for the Future,” one from the radical left, by Samuel Miller McDonald in Current Affairs, and one from the “eco-modernist” center, by Ted Nordhaus in the Breakthrough Journal (this one embedded in a longer essay on climate alarmism).
- The World Weather Attribution group’s guide to the state of attribution science and its recent report on the floods in South Africa, which killed at least 435 people in April and were made, according to the study, twice as likely by climate change.
- Saudi Aramco, the petroleum and natural-gas producer, has once again become the world’s most valuable company.
- The 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who welcomed Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to the pre-crash Crypto Bahamas conference and recently compared forms of crypto yield farming to a Ponzi scheme, told the Financial Times that Bitcoin doesn’t really have a future as a payments network.
- “The state of Texas allocated none of the $1 billion in federal funds it received to protect communities from future disasters to neighborhoods in Houston that flood regularly, according to an investigation by HUD.”
- There are some signs that coronavirus infection may play a role in the worrying rise of hepatitis in young children globally, though the etiological picture of the phenomenon remains a bit unsettled.
- According to the Sierra Club, pandemic lockdowns didn’t improve air quality in 2020, as we all thought.
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