Yes, and I thought the same thing too, but please understand… They’re taking about wet-bulb temperature, which I had to look up.
Here’s a YouTube video that explains it too…
So from my limited understanding it would have to be really hot and humid to get a wet-bulb reading of 95°. On the National Weather Service Heat Index, at 80% humidity 95° feels like 136°
Not to panic though. We still have time but I really think it’s up to our youth to take control. Politically and environmentally. Trump just proposed to cut billions of dollars to NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, AND the National Cancer Institute. These old rich bastards probably won’t even be alive when it goes down so they don’t care.
I live in Texas. Temperatures above 100-101°F (i.e. 38°C) aren’t uncommon in summer but our humidity is often below 40%. In 2009 I was very habituated to the heat, young, fit, and healthy, and I saw forecasts for Taipei, where I’d be traveling, were going to be not higher than 99°F (37°C).
What I did not count on was a typhoon (Morakot) keeping humidity in the 95-99% range.
I had to sit down every minute I walked, even under a cloudy sky. It’s like trying to suck air through a towel soaked in bathwater. I was pouring sweat and it wasn’t evaporating at all because the air was saturated, which is the point of wet bulb temperature readings: if there’s no evaporation, sweating doesn’t cool you. At that temperature, neither does water; everything you drink is the same temperature you are. Staying still, not exerting yourself at all, only keeps it from getting worse; it does not get better. And the environment I was in only went to body temperature and cooled off to the high eighties (30°C) at night: as long as I didn’t move I’d be fine. We also had the privilege of functional technology, iced drinks: in a brownout that’s not an option.
You should absolutely be afraid of this. We must absolutely prevent this happening. We must move now, because humans will assuredly die, are already dying, and because we aren’t the only ones on this planet with the right to live.
Wet bulb temperatures (which are basically combined humidity and temperature conditions) over body temperature can be thought of as the point where the methods mammals use to regulate body heat just Stop Working. Every motion you make, every breath, every heartbeat, every nerve impulse heats you up and there’s nowhere in your environment you can dump that heat, so you just get hotter and hotter until you reach a temperature where your organs can’t function and you die. There’s nothing you can do to survive that other than ‘get colder’. And as the article pointed out, that may not be possible when heat impacts the power grid.
THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING
Bad news: much of our populace and most of our leaders won’t believe this can happen until it does happen.
I should be working on my finals but I can’t. I need to talk about this because the world is looking at us through Notre-Dame, and I need to use this. You want to talk about France? LET’S TALK.
We have been on the brink of civil war since November.
You can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to live in France right now. Every Saturday, we protest for our rights, our civil, constitutional rights. Some may remember the student protests of last year (if not, here is a chronology of what happened: x, x, x, x). Since then, it’s gone downhill. In my university, the dean faces charges but is still in function, he hired a milicia with bulldogs who patrols the uni and separates any group of student they deem too big. They used to control our id before going in. The police violence is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’m terrified to go outside, but I still go to protests because we are being silenced, slowly, methodically, by the Macron government. I was hurt multiple times during protests, almost always in the face. I was gassed, I was hit by water canons. The police isn’t even caring about the non-protesters. I’ve seen them shoot gas grenades at toddlers, three-year-old choking on lacrymo. Two girls, gassed, and a little nine-year-old who had her arm broken running away.
A mother falling to the ground because a plastic-shrapnel grenade exploded next to her ankle and destroyed her foot. Most of my friends have PTSD, any sharp sound can send every single one of us into a panic attack. We can’t handle fireworks or firecrackers anymore.
The blood. I can’t make you understand how much blood is spilled during the protests. The number of times they scream MEDIC during protests makes me sick.
On record, there are currently three persons who were shot in the eye. One man had his hand ripped off. Multiple men and women got broken ribs from the flashballs. THEY EVEN SHOOT AT REPORTERS from the national television and freelancers, with water canons and flashballs. They’ve beaten minors unconscious, they’ve shot a flashball into someone’s mouth and it exploded his cheek, they’ve thrown a disabled man off his wheelchair.
During the protests, we break things. Of course we do. We break glass, mostly, because it’s the cheapest to repair and it’s what’s the most impacting visually, so it’s our compromise. They break us.
If you carry a camera into a protest, they’ll track you down and target you until either your camera is dead or you’re too beaten up to be able to film. I’ve been there. I never bring my camera anymore. And even then, I wouldn’t film anyway, because the police is on social media, and they look at every video, they identify people’s faces, and then people get in trouble. They block entire streets so you can’t escape them. They make ‘nests’ where they circle around protesters until they’re surrounded, then they throw a gas grenade in the middle and when people run away towards the edges, they catch everyone one by one and beat them bloody.
And the worst is the misinformation. The media have done such a good job at misrepresenting the protests that there is infighting inside my own family, inside most families, at work, at school, between people who think the government is doing its best to control the situation and the protesters are violent anarchists set to destroy the country, and the people who’ve actually been in protests, who’ve peacefully raised their hands up when asked and where shot in the ribs with a flashball in thanks. My own parents didn’t believe me until I came back from a protest with a split eyebrow and sprained wrist.
This is a short documentary a French newsreport/gamer youtuber made. If you speak French, it will give you another inside view. If not, you can just watch the images from March 18th, until now the most violent protest since November.
In Paris, now the army is in the street. They pulled back the anti-terrorism squads soldiers (about 7,000) and put them in the street, against us. They had orders to shoot after three warnings and they are armed to kill. THEY ARE ARMED WITH LETHAL WEAPONS. The last time the army was sent to control a protest was in 1948.
You want to talk about France? Talk about that. We are scared. We feel abandoned by the world. And guess what? If France falls, you’re all coming with us. Right now, it’s easy to forget that the same thing is happening in South-America and all over Middle-East, because Western media doesn’t like talking about anything that isn’t white and pretty. But if they managed to forget to talk about just how bad it is here, then it’s going to happen to you too. So the first step? Is to talk about it. Share this, share other news report. Talk about it with your friends, your families. Contact your local news, ask them why no one is talking about it. Go to social media, tweet people, ask questions. Hell, ask ME questions.
France is heading straight to civil war, and I’m terrified.
Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers(IAM).
Since then, Boeing has fought to prevent unionization efforts of their workers in South Carolina. In February 2017, union organizers came up short in attempting to unionize about 3,000 Boeing workers. But organizers found success in May 2018, when over 60% of the nearly 200 Boeing flight line workers in North Charleston, South Carolina, voted to form a union, despite an aggressive anti-union campaign led by Boeing which included radio ad buys and attempts to delay and stop the election from occurring.
Boeing is formally appealing against the election results with the National Labor Relations Board.
“This is where the problems come in with US labor law. Boeing has a zillion options available to it,” said Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “All these things get a chance to get litigated and it slows down the process. While the process slows down, what happens at the plant site is they start firing people knowing in a year or two they might have to pay them some wages for firing due to union activity, but it scares people and scares them enough to think maybe they did the wrong thing to vote for the union.”
On this day, 3 May 1938, British colonial police massacred construction workers striking for a pay increase at the Frome sugar factory in Jamaica. Three were killed by gunshot, one by bayonet and at least 25 were injured. They also arrested 109 workers and charged them with “riotous assembly”, sentencing many to up to 1 year’s imprisonment. But the repression sparked widespread demonstrations and strikes by other workers across the island. More information in this account of struggles in the British Caribbean at this time: http://bit.ly/2EAVSCAhttp://bit.ly/2GTLZzm
