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Bangladesh suffers long power cuts amid worst heatwave in decades (www.aljazeera.com)

submitted 2 years ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

Global warming is absolutely crushing certain countries.

it's pretty likely we'll see a mass-casualty heat event in that part of the world sooner rather than later. while mercifully this doesn't seem to be the case here, wet-bulb temperatures are gonna be a particular problem, and likely what does it (especially if it's accompanied by power shortages or an outage).

a commonly reported threshold is humans can't survive wet-bulbs of 35°C—which would be 95°F heat at 100% humidity and is already possible in that area of the world, although thankfully still rare—but it's increasingly clear we also do very badly with substantially lower wet-bulbs:

After analyzing their data, the researchers found that critical wet-bulb temperatures ranged from 25°C to 28°C in hot-dry environments and from 30°C to 31°C in warm-humid environments — all lower than 35°C wet-bulb.

“Our results suggest that in humid parts of the world, we should start to get concerned — even about young, healthy people — when it's above 31 degrees wet-bulb temperature,” Kenney said. “As we continue our research, we’re going to explore what that number is in older adults, as it will probably be even lower than that.”

and obviously a critical threshold of 31°C is much more attainable in these areas both in the short and long term, which uhhhh yeah, not good!