Comment

"Hellish heatwave" in Pakistan sets hottest temperature in Asia's history, 53.5°C (128.3°F); in India, hundreds die, dea

1
lostlakehiker6/20/2010 7:14:49 pm PDT

130 would be impressive. When I visited India they were in the middle of a heatwave and the daily highs were running around 117 fahrenheit. It was not yet the monsoon season, of course, so humidity was not a problem.

We touristed anyway, but it took a lot of water to stay hydrated. People worked, even in construction, and there were some fifty dead a day but nobody could afford to quit their job and no employer could afford to miss his completion date so the work went forward.

I would bet that I could so survive walking around in mid-day heat of 130, given adequate water and suitable clothing, and that so could most adults and adolescents. As to those who cannot, wait out the noonday heat and resume activity when things cool to around 100. The elderly and infants are in real trouble unless there is a shelter with some thermal mass. These could be dug or built given a few years lead time to realize that they’re going to be needed. A civilized nation can also supply its people with drinking water in abundance. India had set up street corner drink stations in the downtown, so anybody could just hold out their hand and get an iced drink.

But this sort of heat wave is a crushing blow to crop yields. They cannot dig themselves a hole and wait out the noonday heat. Heat waves don’t come with rain; the crops will be low on water going into them. And we can’t wait out a failed harvest. The danger these heat waves pose is not so much death by heat stroke, though that will be the fate of some, but hunger. And it won’t be so easy to just open new farmland in the Yukon, NW Territories, and Siberia. The soil there is not well suited to farming, with occasional river valley exceptions, and even if they become much warmer, they still won’t get much sunlight. With scant sunlight, crop yields will not match our current yields from more temperate latitudes.