Six motorcyclists rode into Death Valley National Park on July 6. Only five came out alive. With temperatures reaching 128 degrees Fahrenheit in California, the cyclists faced extreme heat exposure that killed one and sent another to a local hospital, according to the National Park Service.
When there’s a medical emergency like this, helicopters are typically dispatched to get people to a hospital. However, the extreme heat made it impossible for the helicopters to fly.
The next day, an emergency helicopter pilot in Stanford, California had to cancel a flight because the tarmac near a patient was too hot for him to land. As reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, the pilot said he’d never seen temperatures this bad in his 27-year career.
Extreme heat, as many across the U.S. are experiencing this summer, can cause computer and mechanical systems on board helicopters to overheat and malfunction. But it’s not just a mechanical issue as air pressure is also a factor. Air expands when it’s hot and contracts when it’s cold. As it gets hotter outside, air pressure plummets. The air literally gets thin which means that spinning helicopter blades have less air to cut through and it’s harder for them to achieve lift. That makes it dangerous, and sometimes impossible, to fly.
The whole reason we’re in this situation is because we refuse to change our behavior.
No, we’re in this position because of a failure of leadership. Leaders can unite people behind doing things they don’t want to do. It’s how rationing was tolerated for years in WWII. But we have an entire political party built around telling people what they want to hear while working against their interests for the wealthy’s short term gains. We could have conquered this from the top-down with a good plan and charismatic leaders supporting it.
Except we wont elect leadership that will do something. The electorate has been brainwashed by decades of advertisements that have convinced them that they deserve the very best of everything. Any possible leader that would push for a strong solution to climate change wouldn’t get the votes and they wouldn’t get those corporate “campaign contributions”.
We have two entire political parties built around telling people what they want to hear.
Even mild solutions get shouted down. In Canada we have a carbon tax that mostly ends up getting returned to Canadians in the form of a rebate. Reportedly 80% of Canadians receive more from the rebate than they spend on the tax.
The conservative party have managed to politicize the tax and seem poised to win the next election, with “scrap the tax” being a big part of their platform. We have a province literally going rogue and refusing to pay the tax, causing our tax agency to garnish them essentially.
Shit is fucking wild. All over a marginal tax that benefits poor people and punishes the heaviest polluters. People are so fucking stupid and selfish it drives me fucking nuts.
It seems to me that people want to make the world worse, because that’s what people are doing.
“We” is incorrect, it is mostly the rich refusing and sabotaging change,
It’s the global 1% not just the ultra rich
Exactly, a middle class American has an enormous carbon foot print compared to a middle class person in the rest of the world.
This is cope. I know too many people who roleplay as environmentalists, but are fully engaged in consumerism. Friends who look at me funny when I insist that we can have the same conversations over discord that we can when I drive an hour to to see them or who think that Biden’s Green Deal will be enough. My primary concern for the past 30 years, more time then I’ve been an adult, has been to reduce my co2 output or make sure that what co2 I do output has been productive. There’s a huge disconnect between myself and my supposedly like minded friends that can only be explained my a deep unwillingness to be put in any sort of discomfort. So they cope by telling themselves that they deserve this vacation that requires air travel or ignore the mountain of waste that the average movie production produces or that plastic recycling works and you can drink your Pepsi™ if you just put the bottle in the recycling.
If the rich are responsible for all of our problems, we’re responsible for letting them be rich.
Why bother when it’s far too late and nothing is going to change?
Funny how it went from not being real to being far too late. Almost like there’s always a “reason” not to do anything.
What are you going to do about it?
I’m saying your being manipulated into inaction.
We’re locked in for between 4-10C of warming at this point, with the highest probability being ~6C. Even 4 is catastrophic for global food production.