Reading this:
It was pretty obvious that we were gonna see this:
Earth may not care but all the animals dying in the ice ages and warming cycles sure do :rolleyes:
Your implication that working for a living leaves you no opportunity to listen to an afternoon talk show (thus also implying that those who have the opportunity do NOT work for a living) is belied by your … enthusiastic posting history.
At least pick a position of supposed superiority that DOESN’T make you look like* a hypocritical prick.
- “look like” included on the offchance that you’re not ACTUALLY a hypocritical prick.
It’s the three Hs of Pittsburgh in the summer: Hazy, Hot, and Humid. Breaking into a sweat just sitting in front of the computer is so much fun!
Of the worst kind. He regularly reports that John Doe “assumed room temperature.” Then he reported that he was going to be off for a few days because one of his relatives had “passed away.” When called on it he waffled.
Because we are worth more than you are.
Your point being?
Your point?
WHAT IS YOUR FRIGGN POINT???
In the shorter term, I think that the humans that depend on coastal fishing will care when disrupted ocean currents screw up the ecosystem and kill off their livelihoods, likewise with south Asian farmers when the monsoons become erratic. I suspect that the formerly sub-Saharan Africans might raise a concerned eyebrow too.
Hey, watch where you’re pointing that spite. On the other hand, if you agree with duffer that I was lying about where I’m from, then that certainly has an effect on the landscape :dubious:
You do bring to mind an interesting point, though: the heat wave is a pretty big deal in Queens, not because of the population size per se, but because a power outage there involves a larger, older, and in turn much more complicated system that I’d imagine would make repairs pretty difficult. Add to that the demand on emergency and healthcare workers, and it’s a lot harder to manage problems related to the heat in a city with 1,000,000 people than one with 10,000 or even 100,000.
In the meantime, duffer, I’d like to apologize for some of the things I said.
Abolutely BRILLIANT! There was no petroleum pollution during the previous ice ages, ergo, petroleum pollution has no effect on the climate. If it didn’t cause it yesterday, it cannot be a factor today. You need to get your theory into a paper. You just might re-write most of modern science. You can call it the Ostrich Effect.
Oh wait. Someone has beat you to it.
You don’t really wanna play the temperature and dewpoint game, do you? Here’s a fact for ya – I drove home last night at midnight, and it was 82 degrees and foggy. That’s my reality for 5 - 6 months out of the year. Today it’ll hit 95 with high humidity.
In addition, I just pulled the forecasts and current temps for Fargo and for Pittsburgh, just to see how justified your ill-informed ranting at Guinastasia might have been. Current conditions in Fargo: 72, humidity 57%, dewpoint 56. Pittsburgh: 86, humidity 65%, dewpoint 73. Tampa Bay: 89, humidity 63%, dewpoint 75. So if the dewpoint really is the killer, perhaps you should apologize?
No matter how bad it is where you are, it’s worse somewhere else. And your comfort level has no bearing on that of another, nor does it lessen the impact of people dying from the heat. I also submit from personal experience that standing on a street corner in Midtown in a suit, waiting to cross the street, surrounded by buildings and concrete that block the wind and hold the heat in very well doesn’t really compare to being in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of a rural area.
As far as ND having less demand for services and fewer people dying from heat-related causes: NO SHIT, YOU FUCKING MORON. North Dakota has 642,000 people, more or less. Metro NYC has around 25 times as many. Of course they have a higher demand for services and a higher number of heat deaths than you, you stupid piece of shit. It’s a numbers game.
The reason North Dakota handles its demands more easily is exactly that there is less demand. With a population that is distributed across smaller towns, it is easier to keep track of individual elderly people and babies–the groups most harmed by the heat. It has nothing to do with “knowing how” to offer services and much more to do with having less need to offer services.
Regional partisanship is a stupid (if common) human trait. Urban dwellers who sneer at rural folks and rural types who sneer at urban people are both ignoring their symbiotic relationship. Without the farmers, the city folk would not eat. Without the manufacturing that is only reliably available when one concentrates one’s work force (thus requiring cities) the farmers would be required to hand forge their own tools with which to scrape out subsistence living. There are costs to the manufacturing/urban situation, however, including the requirement for both a much larger infrastructure to provide the people with water and sewage and trash services and the creation of housing that will trap heat in ways that will place “going out in the yard” either impossible or an exercise in futility.
(As for having “resources,” it hardly hurts North Dakota’s position that of every dollar they send to Washington, they gat back more than a 1.50 from the Feds (consistently ranking in the top five for the country, year after year), while New York (for example) gets back less than .90, consistently ranking in the bottom ten–which is similar to the other states with large cities.)
As to what people “notice,” that is simply a function of population. If your 3-digit temperatures were unique to the country, they would be front page news. (I am basing this on the fact that when you get your -40° storms each winter, they do show up on the local news in Ohio.) However, when a situation occurs across the whole country, it will be reported according to where the most people live. That’s just how news reporting works.
Actually, you were criticized for several of different things: extrapolating your personal experience of local weather to global conditions (something that lots of people do); ignoring the scientific evidence that there is actual warming occurring on a global scale; repeating “it’s a cycle” like some sort of mantra while ignoring the periods and ranges of the current “cycle” and simply refusing to accept any evidence that did not reinforce your “common sense” (i.e. not-based-in-facts) views; and repeating the claim that the “Earth” would survive whatever humans do while ignoring the fact that most people are pretty concerned with how climate is going to affect the survival of humanity, regardless whether the rock on which we live survives.
The criticism of Rush did not specifically derive from his stupid remarks about global warming but about his verifiably false claims regarding the survivability of people in heat waves with moronic claims that people were “tougher” before air conditioning. The facts are that the heat wave of 1936 killed over 5.000 people while the current situation has (so far) resulted in fewer than 300 deaths. Rush is a liar.
I don’t think anyone actually reads your posts closely enough to notice where you may or may not live.
Just out of curiosity, is it true that you can acclimate to heat? If it is true than you would think that spending all your time in an air conditioned environment would hamper this ability.
Perhaps if you toughed it out, for a few weeks, or got used to it gradually like, say, as the seasons change, than it would not effect you so much.
Contrarily, spending all your time in air conditioning and then suddenly being exposed to outside heat for an extended period could be quite a shot to the system.
So, is it true that one adapts and toughens up to the heat? Is it true that spending time in air conditioning hampers this ability?
Nah, the Army Rangers just made up their Heat Acclimatization Guide (pdf) for shits and giggles:
It sounds like you can hit the AC, as long as you also do exercise in the hot.
Ok, so let’s say there’s a set of people who are at risk: The elderly, small children, those with various conditions that make them heat susceptible. For these people, air conditioning is a necessity.
The rest of us then, are a bunch of wimps, right? We’re an obese nation, so if we all got off our asses and exercised for an hour or two outside every day, we’d be acclimated to the heat to some kind of degree. We’d be tougher, stronger, and we wouldn’t feel as strong a need to waste valuable resources refrigerating our fat asses unnecessarily.
Since, we don’t do this (as a whole) we are using too much A/C.
So, Rush is right, right?
Some of us complain about wasting resources and the tragedy of the commons as exemplified by the driving of SUVs. This seems worse. If we are fat and lazy and don’t exercise and use a lot of A/C because of it we are wasting valuable resources that are severely needed by others, and we are wasting that at the time of direst need. Our insistance on excess A/C causes shortages, brownouts, and blackouts which deprive those who desperately need the A/C for health reason, and may in fact cause them to suffer and die.
Further, the waste of A/C on those who could acclimate resulting in brownouts and blackouts causes regrigerated goods to spoil, shuts down industry, and can cause emergencies, the loss of power to large groups of people and business, hardship and millions if not billions of dollars in damage… all this aside from the wasted resource.
Now, I do exercise outside every day, so I am acclimated. Nevertheless, I spend all the rest of my time, day and night in the A/C because acclimated or not, it is just really damn uncomfortable out there.
So, I guess this makes me one of the worst offenders. I don’t need it, I am acclimated, and my usage of the excess power in a time of need is both wasteful and can damage others.
I know we all hate Rush Limbaugh and all, but how is actually wrong here?
Not having read this thread, or heard what Rush had to say, I’d guess that he skipped the bit about acclimatization taking a couple weeks to really kick in.
When the weather suddenly turns unseasonably hot, no one is acclimatized to it. If the hot spell lasts less than a couple weeks, you’re screwed; you’re not going to acclimatize to it.
Refund my money fuckwhistle. I’m paying for this shit? Fuck you.
Good point. Nevertheless, we would be more accimatized if we customarily exercised in the summer heat.
According to the OP, Rush made two assertions:
He first asserted that global warming is false. This is a lie. The degree to which human activity has caused or accelerated global warming is open to debate (although the numbers continue to point toward human involvement), but the evidence that global warming is occurring is beyond rational dispute.
He further asserted that people in the 1930s were tougher and that we are now weak. This appears to be a lie. What may be true is that people today have not chosen to acclimatize themselves to the heat of summer, but, given the much higher death rates from various pre-air-conditioned heat waves, there is no basis for any claim that we are now “weak.”
A problem with this is that the groups most at risk - very young kids, pregnant women, elderly people - often aren’t capable of exercising full stop, let alone in an heated environment ( kids might; for them it depends on their age, really). And while for an average person exercising in heated conditions is a good way to acclimatise, for these people already at risk the preperation might actually be as bad as the problem itself.
Theoretically, if us strong manly types would just exercise, and walk around all sweaty we could conserve the A/C for those at risk.