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.
People need to start changing their behavior about this heat. I know this sounds like victim blaming. I know people shouldn’t have to change their behavior because we saw global warning coming for 30 years and should have prevented this from happening. But it’s happening. You can’t go into Death Valley in the summer anymore. You just can’t. Please don’t put yourself in this position.
It’s a tragedy that this death happened. We absolutely need to adapt our emergency services to this heat to try to prevent something like this from happening again. But we also need to change our behaviors so we don’t end up in that position in the first place.
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.
Man, it’s almost like it’s called Death Valley for a reason or something
You can still ride safely in Mild Bummer Valley.
Yeah but judging by the success of Liquid Death water, there is a certain group of people who are attracted to things with morbid names.
And behaviour includes food, agriculture, luxuries (like hobbies), etc.
But not gamers, we are doing all the right things already.
no we quite literally do, if we want global warming to not kill our asses faster than our lack of intelligence in a fleeting moment where it mattered, we absolutely do need to change our behaviors.