Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis: For context 50C is 122F

For context 50C is 122F

More than 550 hajj pilgrims die in Mecca as temperatures exceed 50C

More than 550 hajj pilgrims die in Mecca as temperatures exceed 50Cwww.theguardian.com At least 320 of the dead are from Egypt and Saudi officials report treating more than 2,000 people for heat stress

That is an ungodly temperature to be living in.

It's fine it's a dry heat /s More seriously: I'm guessing most people who live there are in A/C. the pilgrims are struggling because they're moving and are not in A/C

i made it through 115 without ac in Seattle a few years back but I was laying on the floor by a little fan and in the shade, miserably spritzing myself with water every two seconds. plus the difference between 105 and 115 is immense, so the difference between 115 and 122 is probably a thing, too

And also heat acclimitization. I feel like that heat dome slammed y'all out of the middle of nowhere. NYC had an incredibly pleasant increasingly warming spring. There have been a couple of really warm days but not in a row. Our current heatwave isn't coming out of nowhere. It'll be interesting /1

to see how the data lands when it all settles. Today it was 87F and TBH I didn't feel it. Not in a snotty way I could tell it was warm, I made a point of drinking water. But it's not super humid, and there's been a breeze. I am legitimately not hot compared to last spring when it hit 90 in April.

yeah it's WILD how we can get accustomed to stuff. i spent a couple months in Southeast Asia in the summer and by the end of it I was wearing jeans in 95-105 degrees pretty comfortably haha

doing this in L.A. in 117F I kept a tub of cool tap water I got into every half-hour the tile counter in the kitchen was too hot to touch for long miserable miserable

And the sheer number of people crammed close together. Usually outside body heat radiates away, so at least we aren't making each other hotter. The way pilgrims are often crammed in though..

I need to pull the data but IIIR it adds another 5F or so to your very localized environment.

I am not so sure about the ubiquity of A/C there but the moment you’re outside, it’s gotta be painful.

I have not been but I know people who have and they say there's pretty heavy A/C use. This study is from 2015 and it says something similar. I can't imagine its much less air conditioned than UAE or Qatar www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Life cycle assessment and economic analysis of residential air conditioning in Saudi Arabiawww.sciencedirect.com Buildings consume 79% of Saudi electricity, of which 70% is consumed by air conditioning (AC) systems as a result of the high ambient temperatures dur…

When I went there, there was a fair number of A/C in hotels but the majority of pilgrims would not have the means to pay for these hotels. And the pilgrimage makes you spend a lot of time outside. But the Saudi authorities seem to be trying to limit this

(and they've been doing things for a few years now: www.zawya.com/en/press-rel... )

Study: Effectiveness of Saudi measures in limiting the impact of heat on pilgrims' healthwww.zawya.com 74.6% decrease in heat stroke cases during hajj season

Yes exactly. The issue is acute to the pilgrims not to the people who live there.

Dry heat is more dangerous to me because it can feel tolerable right up until the moment it switches to life threatening. Humidity and heat are an immediate assault. I know to get out of it.

That just does not seem like a temperature that should be possible. Climate is truly frightening these days

I just googled to double check and the world record I believe is 134F so

For now, anyway :/

It’s possible that the 134.1 record in Death Valley is unreliable. It was set back in 1913, and there’s some skepticism that it was well controlled. But, Death Valley regularly goes over 120F, so it’s plausible. It’s projected to be… 119F over the next three days, for example.

Looks like it hit 130F in 2021, which is a much more reliable modern temperature reading. Areas in the Sahara are probably hotter, but too remote to have reliable air temp monitoring.

Golly! It's almost like being a State almost completely dependent on extracting carbon fuels for income and also a State where your world-wide religion requires you to visit it during the summer during increasingly disastrous climate-change is sub-optimal! God is an iron.

Hajj is not always in the hottest time of the year.

I guess, we will see during our life times, that the time slot for a hajj that can be survived, will get rather short. Karma?

You realize the people going on hajj and dying are mostly not Saudi Arabian right? So karma for who exactly? For the Egyptians whose per capita ghg emissions falls behind such powerful 🙄 climate polluters as Malta, Botswana and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines?

I don’t think a German gets to invoke karma, buddy

As long as Islam may be the wrong religion for the wrong 'god', karma may be invoked by anyone thinking karma (or whatever other concept of imaginary friends up in the sky) may be the better idea of believing. Btw: aren't there any Buddhists or Hinduists in Germany?

Karma? What the fuck?

In the country with the second-most oil production 😕

I don't think they can fully air condition the outdoors yet though

They’ll figure it out eventually

That's so awful. Those poor people.

Oh my goodness. They’re boiling to death.

Selling and burning fossil oils and gases has consequences, yes. Some get rich of it. Others die from it.

Awful.

Really awful way to die, too. 😕

Recently I was pondering about when it’s 50C out how the water outside is as close to boiling as it is to freezing and how people have to conduct their day in those conditions. Just insane.

Oh no.

The horrifying thing is this is the New Normal.

Not quite hot holding temperature but damn close

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