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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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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 about the dreaded humidity right after this. Learn it's stuff with Joshua John Okay, Chuck lay it on him that 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 favorite shows,