bossito‘Hell on earth’: Phoenix’s extreme heatwave tests the limits of survival
md5cryptoPhoenix never should have been the cite of a major city. Whoever is there right now has to be thinking - how the hell do I get out of this hellfire?
rockerFor those of us that have been here for many years (half my life and I'm in my 40's), its not bad. Yeah, its very hot and very dangerous, but we know how to live in it and take care of ourselves for the most part. By mid-morning, all the humidity is burned off and I actually think it feels kind of nice.
I’ve been to Phoenix in July and August before. The heat is so dry that drinking a cold water actually does wonders. You can spend all day outside if you manage it well.
It’s not like it’s 85 with a humidex of 105 where drinking water just makes you feel like you’re drowning, and the sweat on your body has nowhere to go. You have no recourse but to find air conditioning.
Understandable. Heat + humidity is the real problem. Relevant wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
TLDR:
Hot + low humidity -> sweat easily evaporates, your body is able to regulate your temperature.
Hot + high humidity -> sweat doesn't evaporate, your body slowly fails to regulate your temperature, and you get hotter and hotter till you pass out or die.
30C/86F at 99% humidity is the equivalent of 50C/120F at 20% humidity. You're no longer able to sweat fast enough to cool down if it gets hotter/more humid.
What's the future plans for water management?
Saudi’s have been gobbling up water down there too. apnews.com/…/water-foreign-farms-arizona-drought-…
So…I hope they do something. But…Capitallissssmmm
In Arizona, fresh scrutiny of Saudi-owned farm's water use
In Arizona, worsening drought has brought renewed attention to a farm owned by a Saudi Arabian company and whether the state should be doing more to protect its groundwater resources. Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of Almarai Co., has for nearly a decade grown alfalfa in the American Southwest that is sent to the Gulf kingdom to feed cows there. The state last week rescinded a pair of drilling permits that would have allowed Fondomonte to pump up to 3,000 gallons of water per minute to irrigate its forage crops. That came amid a broader examination of the company's operations by Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes. Fondomonte has said in the past its operations are legal and it has spent millions to improve infrastructure.
Thankfully the new governor Katie Hobbs is doing a lot to curb this nonsense.
Saudis funded the death of Americans and now they’re buying the PGA, soon the nba, your water. Never forget 9/11 tho
JarmerIgnore that the question exists, then when it becomes an emergency, declare “oh no, we had no idea, we need billions of tax assistance” … ???
So like fl and ca property insurance...
Man do I love bailing rich people and their bad RE InVestMenTs
kescusayBut it’s been like that for two solid weeks. A lot of people simply can’t handle long stretches of heat that simply don’t stop.
The fact that there are so many tournament class golf courses there is what always perplexes me
There’s money and land there. Which are the two big needs. While it obviously costs a ton to have the grass, they really only have grass where it’s absolutely needed and everything else is super cheap to maintain, also less grass increases the difficulty.
Apart from the views, desert golf is vastly overrated though.
AnimoscityPhoenix is a monument to man’s arrogance
Phoenix is a monument to man’s arrogance
It truly is. I had to go there for work once and the entire time I was there I was thinking this exact phrase. just … WHY.
I’ve only been to the Sky Harbor there in a layover and the brief walk off the plane into the airport made me wonder why anyone chooses to live there. Just blasted by dry heat that feels like it sucks the moisture out of your eyeballs.
This is fairly normal for Phoenix. It's on the hot end, sure, but it's very dry there so 110 feels nothing like it would in Florida where you'd actually die. The bigger issue to Phoenix is dwindling water once the aquifer finally runs out of water.
It’s 120f in Italy at the moment.
ImFresh3xI’m seeing records of 104 (40c).
Thanks. I couldn’t find that when I looked.
I was mistaken, it’s predicted to reach 120f.
SanctusI’m literally thinking of leaving in five years time. The colorado will run dry and this place will be unlivable. Oh, and we just appointed some Saudi pocket mongrel to handle our water. Ahould be fine trusting our life source with the corpos.
Lived in vegas for a few years once. Every year around June I’d start seriously planning my escape. Then summer would end and I’d hate it less. And get back to my routine. Repeat.
Leaving that place was one of the best feelings. Instantly happier.
ManosTheHandsOfFateSad, grim story aside, check the article out for a picture of the worlds most ripped homeless guy. The dude should be modeling swimsuits.
So true 😅
Ridiculously photogenic unhoused man
Damn you weren’t kidding…
Holy ffff…what did he look like before he got homeless?? Seriously though I could see him going down the Jeremy Meeks (photogenic prisoner turned runway model) path with this kind of exposure. He looks ridiculously healthy despite his living situation which probably can’t be easy to maintain.
MF is 49 years old.
My man is jacked.
guyrocketHow long until cities like Phoenix empty because everyone moves north?
I am in a small town in central NM and we are discussing moving north.
Phoenix is still one of the fastest growing cities in the US. I can’t imagine that the homes these people are buying are appreciating assets as a result of climate change. A lot of people are going to be completely fucked financially whenever the climate eventually forces move and it turns out they have just been lighting tens of thousands of dollars on fire.
It is absolutely bonkers to me that people still aren’t considering this sort of thing whenever they choose to move to a new city.
The price of housing is scaling rapidly there too. A house that cost about 120k in 1988 now Zillows around 500-600k, and even the new developments in fringe areas start in the 400s.
I almost wonder if there will end up having to be some catastrophic buy-down programme. Maybe people stop coming to Phoenix. Maybe we’d end up just infrastructure abandonment of areas-- “we can no longer guarantee services because we can’t actually have workers fix the electrical wires/sewer/etc when it’s 55C” which likely reduces the property value to near zero. Someone is going to have to eat the loss, and none of the obvious targets (a bunch of elderly landowners who vote in every election? Suing the fossil fuel industry who wrecked the place?) are easy political targets, so the most palatable approach might be to buy people out to get their problem off the table; pretend the house still appreciated like it wasn’t in a hell-dimension, and take this buyout to move to Montana while we demolish the entire city of Mesa for a giant solar farm.
I live here. A couple weeks ago my AC went out and I had to have an after hours/emergency tech come out - blown capacitor. The next day one of my co-workers had his AC go out - blown capacitor. Yesterday my mother-in-laws AC went out - blown capacitor. It’s so hot that these units are running basically nonstop. AC companies are making money hand over fist right now.
Y'all lucky to get a quick fix... Can't be cheap tho
If it helps at all, AC capacitors are extremely easy to replace, so if you had an extra or two on hand, that might save you some headache and money later. Tell you friends. I hope you can stay cool!
Do be carefully though, capacitors can store an electrical charge, even broken ones can still be dangerous.
Def did this one by one to all of the caps in my old AC unit. Amazing how resourceful you become when faced with a night of discomfort and a huge repair bill.
Alien SurferMine died. $12,000 to replace. It’s insane!!
I bought a book a few years ago and I think it is called Climatopolis. The first chapter talks about how major cities in certain parts of the world (focused mostly on the U.S.) are fast becoming super heated islands because of all of the steel and glass and concrete in densely packed over urbanized areas and furthermore, that there will be no escape for the poor and disenfranchised because the asphalt absorbs the heat so night gives no reprieve.
It blows my mind how homes in the desert hardly use swamp coolers. It’s just a sign to me how unprepared people are. If the grid becomes unstable, this place almost immediately becomes uninhabitable due to how inefficient ac is. Homes are hardly built with efficiency in mind. I see homes painted black, with floor to ceiling windows, set on top of sand stone cliffs. Nobody out here seems to realize how dangerous this all is.
But…but they told me global warming was a hoax…
The entire city of Phoenix told you that? Must have been pretty loud.
ARE THE GOLF COURSES OK???
What about the Saudi alfalfa farms???
elouboubI can't help but laugh. Isn't Phoenix home to some of the most vocal climate change deniers? Must be just local weather as it's not happening anywhere on the world. Sicily experiences these kinds of temperatures on the reg.
What do you call those people who remove the filters from their exhausts? Smoke-drivers or something?
Flying SquidThey can control the exhaust. It’s called “rolling coal.” They do it to me because I have a Prius. I don’t get it. “Haw haw! Yew pay less for gas than us!” Sorry I’m such an evil liberal for doing that?
CeruleanRuinYou know why they think that. They believe, truly, that God made the world for man to exploit and use up, and anyone who says otherwise is spouting the Devil’s lies.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, this conflict is a religious one, and anyone who denies that is only enabling the wingnuts destroying this planet.
BringMeTheDiscoKingI don’t know if it’s fatalistic nihilism or nihilistic fatalism but it’s a death cult.
I think there is a ton of truth to what you’re saying unfortunately. The apathetic part hit me hard.
Put that way makes it even more hilarious. Look at this dummy that cares about the environment. Carbon footprint? Is that when I stick my size 13 up your namby pamby ass, boy?!
Lol, wait till they drain the last of the aquifer. That will be hell on earth. Actual mad max.
justhachThat city ain’t right, I tell you whut.
I feel sorry for anyone born there or brought there as a child. They didn’t choose this.
People who moved there voluntarily are another matter. I don’t have much pity for them.
I’m a dumbass in group 2. I’m hoping in the next couple of years I’ll be able to find a good job in the north and move back out of hell.
Why is migration not happening on a larger scale yet? I thought world at large would be more chaotic than now. People are just this stubborn? Every summer they’ll now risk dying.
Moving out of hell is cheaper said than done. Most Americans can’t even afford an emergency $500 expense. Vacancy rates are near historical lows but housing costs are at all-time highs. Finding somewhere to live is hard, especially if you don’t have middle or upper class income. Most of the people risking their lives by not moving don’t have a choice.