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‘We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Further, what happens when everyone knows the power isn't coming back and instead the roads out of Phoenix all get backed up and people die in the heat of their cars trying to escape the heat of Phoenix. Because heat can kill a lot of vehicles, and a lot of people have ill-maintained vehicles, meaning roads being completely blocked from escape can happen fast.
I really think Phoenix will become the first mass casualty event from climate change in the USA.
EDIT: Obligatory Peggy Hill. Peggy gets it.
That's one of those nightmare thoughts - when the power goes out, what do people usually do for a while? Wait for it to come back on. Someone is coming to fix it, right? Much of modern society is built upon such assumptions, and it mostly works. So I think you're right for some, but many would perish at home, trying to outlast the day (and what if the night doesn't cool?)
And then their food goes bad. Three days of starvation is all it takes to eat cake.
Water also disappears. At some point water is being pumped by a power source. I suppose that's more when people get driven out, by hunger and thirst than by just curiosity or a plan. So much easier to leave before things go bad, but like Katrina showed, mobility is a class thing, some people can't leave like that.
And considering how rarely she "got" things, that's saying a lot!
Lots of cars > lots of traffic > stopped cars > radiators don't cool > cars break down > roads blocked
Car radiators have fans. They can idle indefinitely. You're more likely to eventually run out of gas.
Edit: oh you mean because of the heat. I don't think that's going to be an issue, ambient temp is still going to be far below the roughly 200°F of an engine.
This assumes a car with a working cooling system. How many people have old cars with bad head gaskets or a radiator leak and "just fill it with water" and not fix the problem, only to find that pure water isn't enough, as modern cars will walk up and down from 185-235F, which will blow steam before the fans kick on. They never noticed because they only drove a few miles a day, not long or hard enough to find out there is a real problem and not a nuisance.
That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.
For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.
The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.