Stuff You Should Know - Heat Waves!

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Heat waves are one of the easiest natural disasters to overlook yet they kill more people in the US than any other natural disaster (and maybe all others combined). And if climate predictions prove correct, they’re going to get longer and hotter. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us, but that's okay because we today are doing Stuff You Should Know, the Heatwave edition. That's the heatwave sound

effect. Have you been singing that song all day? I've been trying so hard not to and it's not working. How about you? Oh man, it's Martha and the Vandellas. How can you not? Yeah, the problem is, is all I just, just this constant loop of heatwave, like a heatwave. I know. Heatwave, just, that's it over and that's the only part I know and it's terrible. I think I know that one of the first lines is, whenever you're near me. Oh, is that the same song? I think so, right? Oh, because like, am I thinking of something else? No, I think it is, but every movie that ever uses it just uses that first line of inserts to fade out before they get to the heatwave part. So I never put two and two together. Great song. Great song for sure, but you don't want just heatwave on a loop

in your head, I can tell you. No, no, I just looked at the lyrics and I'm wrong anyway, but whenever I'm with him. Okay, but it's, that's what you were talking about. It's not like a totally different song or something. Oh, whenever I'm with him, something inside starts to burning and I'm filled with desire. Heatwave. Could it be a devil in me? Heatwave. The way love is supposed to be. Heat, heat, heat, heat, heatwave. Yes. All right, that's done. Let's never speak of that again. Sexy song. I didn't realize it was that sexy. Well, sure. She's talking about getting all hot for a dude, you know? I mean, that's real. Sure. There's nothing sexy about the heatwave that we're talking about. No, deadly. Maybe the antithesis of sexy. Yeah. Now that I think about it.

Heatwave sex? No, thank you. No. And there's such a thing as cold waves, which we'll touch on briefly. They are very much related to heatwaves. They're kind of, it's polar opposite if you'll excuse the pun. But the, you could make a case that that would be far sexier than a heatwave. Yeah, at least you're, you know, warming yourself up to survive. That's exactly right. And boy, we used a lot of great weather website references for this one, right? Yeah, yeah, great, great segue there, Chuck. So we got some info from Noah. Are you joking? No, actually, the thing is, I can't even be taken seriously when I'm trying to be serious and genuine. Like that was genuine. Oh, well, I'm still learning.

So that was, so Noah gave us a bunch of information, your nephew. There's also the Center for Climate Change and Energy Solutions. Is this my cue? Yep. World weather attribution, New York Times, the failing New York Times, NASA, AccuWeather. Yeah, and a bunch more, but those are the ones that we got the meat of this stuff from. Yeah. And we're talking about heatwaves, which is the, I was about to call it a phenomenon. I don't know if it is categorized as that, but it's a weather event. It's a natural disaster. Well, yeah. And as we'll see, one of the worst. It is when there are consecutive days where the temperature is higher than it usually is, that is to say,

higher than the historical average. But there's no like, it depends on where you are, what a heatwave is. Like it's not necessarily like three days, and it's eight degrees hotter than usual for those three days. No, because it varies region to region. Like in New Hampshire, a heatwave of two days or two consecutive days where it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit or more is a heatwave. And that's just like yawing to those of us down in the Southeast. That's like a fairly nice day. Yeah. It's regional like spices that go in hot dogs. Right. But the thing is, is like that depends, the reason that they do that, the reason there's no single definition for a heatwave is because people are acclimated to different kinds of weather. And if you're not

acclimated to warm weather, it's going to affect you and your body a lot worse. So it makes a lot of sense. But the two days in a row, as low as 90 degrees Fahrenheit, that's the minimum that I've seen in the United States that constitutes a legit heatwave. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. A legit heatwave. Oh boy. We're going to do that the whole time. I think I'm going to. Okay. Okay. This one speaks to my heart because as everyone who's ever listened to the show much knows, and as you, my friend, certainly know, I am a, I'm a polar bear. So the sun and humidity is not good for Chuck. I hate it. I hate it. I grew up in the South and it's, it's worse now, it feels like it's not like I've gotten acclimated. Like, you know,

it's easy to say you get acclimated, but even as much as I sweat, which is a, I can't imagine how hot I would be if I didn't sweat like I sweat. Well, yeah, you'd be like one of those people who can't sweat and can die from it. But when I lived in LA, it can get very hot out there. But generally, if you can park it under a tree, you might get a breeze and you can sweat and you're cooling down pretty good. But it's, it's, there's no relief when you live in the South because of humidity. And we're going to talk about all that, but I just want to kind of set, set up my personal involvement with heat waves, which is boo thumbs down. Okay. You are personally involved through sweatiness is what you're saying. Yeah. And when those heat waves, especially the late heat waves

in the summer, when it should be cooling down, come through, it's just, it makes me mad. Yeah. Those are not fun because your, your body's in your mind has been like, oh, okay, great. It's fall and then you're just dog days of summer again. It's terrible. I'm with you on that. But how do these things come about to begin with? Why is it hot for a week straight, way hotter than it normally is? And why doesn't it just cool down every night? Well, first we should say, because I don't want to lose anybody this early on, if they're like two days in a row of 90 degree weather, why are you guys even talking about this? The reason we are talking about this is because like we said, Chuck, it, NOAA classifies heat waves as a disaster.

And a lot of really terrible stuff can happen during a heat wave, even of just a few days. Like it's, it's an invisible, silent, deadly natural disaster that we're only beginning to awaken to. Silent but deadly. So as you're saying, how do heat waves work? You're kind of setting me up for that one, right? Well, yeah, but I thought you were going to hit him with the big stat, which is heat waves kill more people than all other natural disasters combined. Or I think you saw somewhere else, all but hurricanes. But point being, they kill a lot of people like way more than you think. Yeah. And even if they don't necessarily kill more than kill more people, at least in the United States, that was just the statistic I saw than all other natural disasters combined,

that at the very least it, it kills more people per year than all other natural disasters. The deadliest kind of natural disaster. The thing is, is it doesn't happen all at once, like say a flood that takes a bunch of people's lives in a very, a very acute area, right? Concentrated area. It happens slowly over the course of days in a very large region and people just kind of die and it's not immediately apparent like, oh, I found you in floodwater, you drowned in a flood. I found you dead on your sofa in your apartment and I'm not maybe at a heart attack or something like that. That's why I was saying we're just beginning to awaken to it because it's not an obvious natural disaster, but it is most decidedly a natural disaster.

Yeah, that's a good point. Like it's not quite as grabby in the news. I mean, they certainly report on it, but it's not in, you know, the news is, well, I don't want to talk about the news. Let's talk about heat waves. Heat waves. That's right. So the whole thing about a heat wave is it's a, basically a warm mass of hot air that's a, just a low, or no, a high pressure system. So let me just restate that less confusingly. It's a high pressure system that's made up of very stagnant, still warm air that kind of finds its way over a region and doesn't move for a little while and things get really oppressive during that period. Yeah. And these high pressure systems are just part of the normal weather patterns and they generally kind of circulate clockwise and kind of

move on through. The jet stream takes care of that, thankfully, that west to east air current that moves, pushes all the weather around, always shoving the weather around. Yeah, in the northern hemisphere at least. Yeah. Well, come on. Is there any other hemisphere? Sorry, I'll tell you. America centric or anything. No, not at all. But are in the northern hemisphere, the jet stream hits us about at the belt between Canada's shirt and America's jeans. And like I said, it usually pushes stuff around and it'll get hot and then it'll push that hot stuff out. But during the summertime, the jet stream slows down. They have found that overall, and we're going to talk quite a bit about climate

change, overall, it's slowing down period some. But in the summertime, it definitely slows down from its 250 mile per hour or so peak. And that's going to obviously keep that hot weather there a little longer. Yeah, even under normal conditions, let alone climate change conditions. Right. So when all of the, all those factors are kind of falling into place where the jet stream is feeling a little loggy and not moving too quickly. And there's a big mass of hot air that kind of moves up as a high pressure front and just settles in over a region. You've got everything you need for that mass of hot air to just stay put and continue heating up, which is the big problem. Because a high pressure weather system forces air downward and it's hot air too. Normally,

you have hot air at the surface or air that warms up at the surface and it moves upward, it floats upward and it's replaced by cool air that comes in and you've got breezes. Well, one of the things that's a hallmark of a high pressure system is there ain't no breezes because it's just sitting there pushing the air downward toward the surface of the earth, which prevents that air from rising. So there's no cool air to come in. So there's no breeze, but also because that air is just sitting there at the surface, it's just getting warmer and warmer and warmer and the surface air temperature is what we're concerned with because it's the temperature of the air at about two meters above the earth's surface, above the ground. So it's about six and

a half feet, which is where a lot of us are trying to take a breath in this really hot air. Well, a lot of you, taller people. Sure. But even still, if you stood on your tippy toes, it would affect you a lot too. Well, the other thing that happens too, because that air isn't rising, that means it's not going to rain and rain obviously can be a way to cool things down. So it just, it sort of acts as this, sort of like a feedback loop basically, where the hotter it gets, the hotter it's going to get. Yeah. And even the other thing about a high pressure front is it pushes like air away from it, outward from the edges of it. So there's no fronts coming in to like kind of relieve it.

So the stronger they get, the more all of these factors contribute. And then like you said, creates this positive feedback cycle. And basically, you're just totally at the mercy of the jet stream to move this thing away eventually, and it can take some time. And so that's what a heat wave is. It's when one of these, like all of these factors kind of come together and this mass of hot air settles in over a region and just keeps getting hotter and hotter. And in the daytime, that's the like the money time as far as people are concerned with heat waves because the sun's out, it's really, really hot, the temperatures are really high, and it's pretty bad. No one's going to argue that the daytime during a heat wave stinks. But it's the

nighttime that's the more insidious part that's the real problem with the heat wave, right? Yeah. I mean, even if it gets really hot, but it's not a heat wave, the earth helps itself out by cooling down at night. Your body, like everything cools down at night. Yeah. It's a great chance to just kind of kick off your shoes and relax and recharge. Yeah. Like humans, the human body needs it. Animals, bodies need it. The earth itself needs it. The buildings and the concrete and the asphalt and the steel and the glass. It all depends on cooling down some at night. So it can be like, well, I'm going to get hot again tomorrow, but at least I cool down tonight and kind of relaxed and, like you said, repaired my energy. But

when a heat wave comes, it's not cooling down at night. So I mean, just imagine yourself, if you never get a chance to cool down at night and you stay hot, then that sun comes up the next day, it's going to be twice as bad. Yeah. Because you're starting from a higher set point at the beginning, and that's one of the hallmarks of a heat wave is it's hot even before the sun comes up. That's, which is not pleasant. And it's certainly not good sleeping weather. Those are the worst, man. Like, especially here in the South, when you go outside, like you go to let your dog out at 11 o'clock at night and it's like 87 degrees or something. You just start sweating immediately before the sun goes out.

It's just brutal. Yeah, it's pretty bad. All right. Well, let's take a break. I need to go, I don't know, soak in a bathtub or something. Are you sweating now? No. I'm getting a little hot down here. And we'll talk about the dreaded humidity right after this. Thanks. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, lay it on him, that very famous phrase that actually holds true.

Youth is wasted on the young? Sure, that one. But also? Early Burgess is a worm. Never say candy man into a mirror? Well, certainly not three times in a row. It's not the heat, it's the humidity. There's the one I was looking for, right. Right. That's the one, and that's true.

I mean, we were talking about humidity earlier. That is what, you know, the humans have this great mechanism built in, kind of a self-contained air conditioning system, which is called sweat. And if the air is fairly dry outside, and like I mentioned, getting under that shade tree in Los Angeles, you can sweat, and that water's going to evaporate off of you, and a cool breeze will come through, and it actually feels good. And that is how you regulate and cool down.

When the humidity happens, it's hard to near impossible for that sweat to really cool you down. You'll still be sweating, but it won't have that same effect. Right. Yeah, it's just, there's no place for that sweat to go. It doesn't just move into the air, because there's already so much water vapor into the air. So the higher the humidity is, the worse off it is for you. And then if you take high temperatures as well,

that combination of high humidity and high temperature can be really bad. And back in the 70s, there was a guy actually in 1979, somebody named R.G. Steadman. They came up in 1979 with an assessment of sultriness, which we call today the heat index. It was the paper that put the heat index out there, and the heat index is basically... That was way too sexy.

Yeah, it really is, you know, it sounds like a Tennessee Williams play or something like that. Yeah. So the heat index makes a lot of sense, because when it's really humid out and it's high in temperature, that humidity makes it feel even hotter because we have trouble sweating. So R.G. Steadman came up with the heat index that kind of gives you a much better understanding of what the actual temperature as far as your human body is concerned. That's why they also call it the apparent temperature

or the feels like temperature. Yeah, and that's the only one I care about. I don't even know why they list regular temperature. It should just be heat index and wind chill in the winter, because that's the only thing that matters. And I guess it's like showing your math or something, so they have to go through it all. But as far as your human body is concerned,

those are really the only two measures that matter, or at least for me. Yeah, so you know how sometimes you can end up down a rabbit hole and not find a way out, and you have to just crawl backwards out of it, and you're kind of worse off for the wear because you went a little mad in there. Sure. That happened to me with humidity, heat index, evaporation, condensation. I'm like researching it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, there's a lot of, there's some connections here between all these things that my brain is not making. I'm just sensing that it's all very much connected. And I'm even reading stuff that's saying it's connected. I just can't figure out how it's all connected because it's not as simple as like humidity, the heat index is humidity times temperature divided by two or something like that.

That's not how it works. It's way more sophisticated than that. And it takes into account a lot of different stuff so that if you actually put a lower temperature in with higher humidity, it'll bring the temperature down. And then there's some temperatures like say 70 degrees, where it doesn't really matter what you do with the humidity. It's still just going to feel like 70 degrees.

So there's like a lot of different weirdness in there. But the thing is the upshot of all this, I was just kind of confessing and getting off my chest that I'm a little obsessed with this. And if any meteorologist or climatologist can explain all this to me, I would love to hear it. But as far as heat waves are concerned, if you have high temperatures and high humidity,

some really astounding stuff happens when you put those together as far as the heat index is concerned. Yeah, and just not to harp on my personal sweating issues. We've talked about it a lot over the years, but the embarrassing thing for me is not that I sweat a lot because A, that's why I never had like acne growing up because I'm just constantly sweating everything through. I've got like the cleanest pores in the world.

And it helps cool me down, but it's when it's like 76 degrees and super humid. And other people are like, or even in the 60s or 50s, and they're like, it's really cool. Why are you sweating? Because it's humid. I don't care if it's 40 degrees. If it's super humid, I might break a sweat. It gets through.

If you're sweating at 40 degrees, that's some sweatiness for sure. Maybe not 40. 50? We could do some tests. All right, let's do, oh yeah, let's do some science. I'm going to get a lab coat. We have to set up a humidity lab or something. Okay, but I still get to get a lab coat, right?

Oh, sure. Of the color of my choosing? I'll let you select from three colors of my choosing. What are they? Cinnamon, powder blue, and orange. Okay, great. Okay, any one of those then. That's my tip.

Banana yellow was going to be in there, but you missed the boat. At least you didn't make me dress up in a banana costume. Yeah, it's funny, I was shopping for Halloween for this year, and I kind of didn't want to go as a divo. And so I was looking up for those yellow jumpsuits. And I was waylaid because you kind of end up having to be whatever your kid says you have to be. So I think we're all going to be spooky things this year, but I had to put the divo thing on the back burner.

You could be like zombie divo. No, I'm not a bad idea. No, it's not. It's a great idea. Yeah, you can be zombie anything. That's kind of the beauty of the zombie. Right. Zombie Bjork.

Zombie Mark Mother's ball. Zombie Bjork, I like that. Just wear that swan dress and walk around saying brains. I was trying to think of how Bjork would say brains, but my head couldn't put it together. That was perfect. So you mentioned insidious effects. And we're going to talk about those because very wide reaching.

It's not just people get hot and people die. It affects kind of everything on the planet. And it's easy to kind of think of heat stroke and dehydration and something like that during the day, like you said, because that's when you count on it and that's when you might take precautions. Which, by the way, go listen to our Desert Survival episode for that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. Good tips there. But at night, like you said, that's when it's really bad because the human body really depends

on that rest and that reset and that cool down. And if you stay hot, your body, especially if you have high blood pressure or like heart issues, it's working overtime at night when it should be cooling down. Absolutely. Because I think your lowest body temperature of the 24-hour cycle is during sleep. So if you're not hitting that cool down cycle, then everything is just doing a lot of extra work. Yeah. And in particular, your heart is.

And when your heart is working hard and it has to work hard again the next day, it's like that set point doesn't ever, or the set point starts higher the next day. So after a few days of this, especially if you have a bum ticker to begin with, it can be quite dangerous for you. And so people like the elderly, children, like very young children, they're usually the first casualties of a heat wave. But there are a lot of other people who are susceptible to, especially people who don't have easy access to air conditioning,

people who are of low income, who very sadly might even have air conditioning, but don't have power right then or don't have the money to run their air conditioner, the homeless, people who work outside. And sorry, I got to work no matter what to keep food on the table, whether it was a heat wave or not. They can be in big trouble as well. But then so can any of us, especially when that heat index starts to jump, like when you have like 100 degree temperatures with like 55% humidity, you put those together, it's suddenly 124 out.

That's not good for anybody, you know? No. And I mentioned earlier that it's like people and animals and buildings and everything. The infrastructure, it takes a hit. Like railway railroad tracks can literally warp and buckle. Yeah, they won't run trains during a heat wave a lot of times for that reason, because they could derail. Yeah, concrete and asphalt, any kind of metal and glass on a building, you've, I mean, buildings can, like their shape can briefly change and expand and contract,

or I guess expand and not contract for a little while. That's nuts. All due to this heat wave. And, you know, we talked a little bit about the urban heat island effect at some point. But this is, you know, this is why you go to New York City and a heat wave, and it's one of the hottest places on the planet, it feels like. Yeah, because it actually is way hotter than other places, because of all those building materials, number one, that are excellent absorbers of heat,

all that black top and asphalt and all that steel, but also check like the distinct lack of vegetation, like trees and stuff that actually help cool the air. Like it's not just shade that they do. Like they actually like release water vapor into the air and actually cool the nearby air. So the more trees you have, the lower the urban heat island effect. But that's just not like a huge, huge trait of the average city. Like somebody actually wrote a book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That's how significant the idea of a tree in Brooklyn was.

You know what I'm saying? That's funny. Energy takes a big wallop too, for the obvious reason, and more obvious when being that, you know, everyone's cranking those air conditioners, everyone's refrigerators and freezers are working overtime, industrial refrigeration is working overtime. And you combine that with the fact that transmission capacity is reduced during these high temperatures. It's going to strain the electrical grid even more.

It's just nothing is running with any kind of efficiency. And if you want to really have some people die quickly, you have an energy power outage during a heat wave because of these overstressed systems. And that's when all of a sudden like nobody has refrigeration or air conditioning. And it can get brutal pretty quickly. Yeah. Because I mean, if you think about it, you've got incredible demand on the system. And then the system itself can't really, it can't get rid of its, you know,

waste heat like it needs to just like a human body does. So yeah, if the system blacks out or even browns out, that's not the time to do it. But that's when it's most likely to happen. And then on the opposite side of the same coin chuck are those cold waves I was talking about. And that was what happened in Texas this past winter. It was a high pressure front, but instead of a mass of like super hot air, it was a massive super cold air and it just settled in and stayed there and froze Texas. And Texas's infrastructure suffered.

I think we talked about it on the electrical grid episode. And it was the same thing. They just couldn't keep up with the demand and the weather itself was taxing the system too. And it's the same thing in a heat wave. It's just for the opposite reasons, but the same outcome. Right. And if you're thinking, hey, you know, look at the bright side, warmer winters mean we're not going to be using as much energy in the winter time to

heat our homes. So it all balances out. That's not true. They've done a lot of studies and they're pretty much coming to the conclusion that the heat is tipping that scale too far in the other direction. And even if we are saving a little bit of energy and or even a great deal of energy in the winter time due to warmer temperatures, it's not going to balance it out. Right. Water is another big one too, Chuck, which makes a lot of sense.

Like people drink more water. They need more water. They might take cool baths to cool down, but not just humans. Livestock need more water during this time. Power plants need more water to stay cool. Crops need more water. Everything needs more water, but the problem is, is during heat wave, when you need water the most, that's when it's like the least available because it

becomes pretty scarce because drought and heat waves are, they work really well together. They kind of go hand in hand actually in a lot of cases. Yeah. I mean, that kind of creates a similar feedback loop in that when there is moisture in the ground thanks to rain and stuff like that, even when it gets hot, the earth is going to soak up a lot of that sun and use some of that energy to get rid of that water and turn it into water vapor. If that ground is already super dry because of a drought, then it's just basically just

baking like an oven and that energy has no other use. It doesn't have the use of turning it into water vapor. So it's just baking. Yeah. Just heating that ground up instead. So it just gets hotter and hotter, which is terrible stuff. So plus also with drought, stricken landscapes, those are more susceptible to wildfire. So as there's more and more heat waves, we can expect worse and more widespread wildfires, basically, too.

We talked about animals. Yeah. It's not animals. I think a lot of people forget about animals in situations like this. I think people think more about animals when it gets super, super cold and really bad cold fronts come in, but they're susceptible to the heat, too. And it's not just our little domesticated pets that we love. And unfortunately, some of the street animals really suffer.

But livestock, if you're on a farm, those cows and chickens don't like that kind of heat either. Sometimes it can affect their mortality rates. It can affect things way downstream because they don't want to have that heat wave sex either. That's true. So they might be reproducing less, which is going to have a downstream effect. And then all the crops are going to be affected, too. Yeah, especially the ones that cops when it comes snatch. That what?

Cops want to come and snatch my crops. What is that? You don't remember that as the Cypress Hill lyric, a very famous one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I remember now. Boy, we've mentioned Cypress Hill a lot on the show. Yeah, they're kind of like a mascot now, like Frank the Chair. I knew that sounded familiar. Cops come and try to snatch my crops.

There it is. And then that has to be followed, of course, by heat wave. Boy, somebody should sample that on a hip hop tune. That'd be great. What, heat wave? Yeah, I bet it has been. Sure. I could see Puff Daddy sampling that. That'd be up his alley.

Oh, yeah. Did I ever tell you I went to his house one time? It sounds vaguely familiar, but I'd like to hear it again. It's not the biggest story, but I ran an errand as a PA over to his house one time and had to drop something out. So I had to go and knock on his door and walk inside the front and drop something off. Something? Was something in air quotes? No, it was something for the job. It wasn't a big deal, but it was like clothes or something.

But it was just very shiny and white. Everything was shiny and white. I can imagine, which is, you know, it's a way to go, I guess, but I don't know. Yeah, it's a look. It's too much. It's too much. I don't know. I mean, this is a long time ago. He may not be into that now, but white couches and big white marble floors. I mean, I like white couches and I do like white stuff,

but it's also like, gotta have lots of color. Like the white stuff is just a backdrop for your color. That's in my, that's my opinion. We are too messy. We can't have white things. I understand. I know. Yeah, well, you need to have, if you have a white couch, it's got to be a slip cover because you're going to have to wash it.

Yes, if you drink red wine. But there is one that we haven't covered yet. I think we should before we take a break. And it is air pollution, which might be overlooked by some people, but it really makes a lot of sense. Because number one, we're like demanding way more from power plants than usual during a heat wave with all that AC. So those power plants are putting out more emissions than usual.

But then the actual like conditions of the heat wave itself make the air pollution worse. Does it not? Yeah. I mean, that same cap that kind of forces all that air down and keeps everything stagnant. That same cap is in place for these emissions that are going up into the air. So it's just like bottling it all up. It's going to make things a lot worse. Yeah. And also ozone is more easily produced. So you've got ozone and like particulate matter from emissions all combining

to make your breathing much more difficult and dangerous. That's right. So let's take a break, man. And then we'll talk about some couple of famous heat waves and what the future holds. How about that? Let's do it. Who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So if you were alive on the earth this summer, you might remember in June. You almost said it. You almost started with it and you didn't. You've really come a long way, Chuck.

With what? You almost said, unless you were living under a rock. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I really wasn't. So between June 20th and June 23rd, something was brewing down in Mexico that was very hot. And this big massive warm air moved up and kind of settled over the middle of the United States and didn't move for a while. And it was just sort of your classic heat wave.

But even in places like where they're used to the heat in the summertime, it got exceedingly hot. Like if you were in Arizona and Phoenix, you're used to hot weather for sure. But it cracked 115 degrees for six consecutive days, which is a record for even Phoenix. That is not okay for anybody. No. But so it's bad enough for Phoenix, but still I'm sure the people at Phoenix are like, yeah, it's kind of hot, but come on, we could handle worse. It was places where it's not normally hot at all that really took the brunt of that heat wave.

And as a matter of fact, the heat wave is generally called or referred to as the Pacific Northwest heat wave because that's where it really stunk the worst. Yeah. I can't believe Portland, Oregon got up to 112 degrees. That is bananas. Yeah. And we should say when you're talking about air temperatures and you are seeing the temperature on the news or whatever, that measurement was taken in the shade.

That's not the sunlight, sunshine temperature. That's what the temperature is in the shade. Okay. So wrap your head around that one, Bucco. Yeah. So 112 in Portland, 104 in Seattle, which broke a record. It was bananas. And that kind of like a lot of people in that part of the country, I don't really know percentages,

but there are people who don't have HVAC units. They count on opening their windows and stuff like that. There are still places in the United States, believe it or not, that don't have HVAC and that use ceiling fans and stuff in windows. They just don't need it. That does the trick. Yeah, for sure. There was another town too that we have to mention, Chuck Lighton, British Columbia,

which is north, a couple of hundred miles north of Seattle. They hit 116 and set a new record, not just for themselves, but for Canada as a whole. And then the town burned down from a wildfire right afterward. Very sad. So like it was a really big deal. And one of the things that I think this, the Pacific Northwest heat wave in June, and I think there were multiple ones around that region over the, well, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but in like the Midwest states in particular this year.

But what I think these, the heat waves in the U.S. this year kind of woke people up to is like, these things are like really deadly. They looked at excess deaths, which they kind of take the background number of deaths, the deaths you'd expect, and then see how many more occurred on a particular day or over a particular period or during a heat wave. And they've concluded thus far that in Washington state alone, 600 people died from that heat wave over the course of a few days. Yeah, like thousands of people total all over that region.

Yeah. And, you know, this is, that's a little bit of a squishy number because it's, and we'll talk a little bit about this, like people who study this kind of stuff. They're doing the best they can. They can't necessarily say like every single one of those deaths was because of the heat wave, but it is a really good measure. And if you're just looking at sort of round numbers, it's not the kind of thing that you can dismiss.

And plus if history is any kind of guide that those numbers will probably be revised upward in the next year or so, I would guess. Yeah. And it's not just the United States. There was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that was, it was the warmest summer on record since the 1540s. Yeah. And I was like, how do they know that?

I don't know. So I looked, there's a bunch of different ways they can kind of. Parchment. Suss out. Yep. Parchment is the answer. There's, there's, they, they take boreholes as basically one of the best ways I saw, where when, when it's hot on the earth's surface, that temperature radiates downward

through the earth. And if you take a core sample, a borehole sample, you can actually kind of deduce from whatever temperature a specific moment in time is like say, like in the 1540s, this would have been at the surface, that it actually, that you can actually get the temperature roughly from that era. I think we talked about that before. This is really familiar. Okay.

Well, it sounded new to me. I had no idea, but I think that's pretty interesting because there was nobody in 1540s saying, oh, it was 80 degrees Celsius. It was super hot, which I think that's like really, really hot if I'm not mistaken. But nobody was recording temperature like that. Some people did record the weather, but it was just like a smattering of observations and nothing scientific because this is pre-scientific. So they have to use even more scientific stuff today to kind of deduce what it was before.

Right. You might see like it was very hot the day we burned this person at the stake. Right. And we made it even hotter. Glancing reference. But yeah, I mean, Milan, Paris, London, all these places broke record temperatures. Temperatures? Temperatures?

No, I think I say that like a lazy southerner. Temperatures? Temperature? Because of hookworm. You say it like temperature. Yeah, but in the couple of years after, they calculated that about 30,000 people died all over Europe. And then later on, they said that could have been as high as 70,000 people when they studied

it years after that. 70,000 people died from a two-week heat wave in Europe in 2003. And this may be what we're looking at going forward. Yeah, so we talked about, you were saying that there's people who are trying to figure out how much this is increasing, how much of it has to do with climate change. It's a new branch of science called attribution studies. And it's pretty much in league with climatology. I get the impression that it's made up of climatologists.

And it's a brand new type of science, and it's really hard to do. But they're starting from an article I read, the data set post-climate change, basically, this 1.2 degrees Celsius that has risen since we started keeping records in 1880, I believe. It's like the benchmark year. That it's starting to happen, like weird stuff is starting to happen in more and more frequency that this data set is growing. And then they have since the 1880s to compare it against.

And so using a lot more sophisticated statistical analysis than I can quite wrap my head around, they're figuring out how to say this weird weather event, like the one in the Pacific Northwest, had X chance of happening, had climate change never happened, had we never started releasing greenhouse gas emissions during the industrial age. And they've actually done that. There was a study that actually came to some pretty interesting conclusions about that. Yeah, you hear about like a 100 year storm or something like that. They did a calculation and they said, that heat wave in 2021 of this year in the United States

was in a 1,000 year event. And that's factoring in the current climate that we are already in. Yeah, like if we froze our, if our climate did not get any hotter or change in any way than it did now, from now on, that it would have been a 1,000 year event like now basically. Right. And then they can further extrapolate and say with this was pre-end of the 19th century, I guess. Yeah, 1880.

That's that benchmark date when everyone around the world started to keep like pretty accurate weather records from that point on. They said that that would have been about a 150,000 year event back then. Yeah. And in the future, it might become like a five or 10 year event. Yeah, by the 2050s maybe. Yeah, because I think that it's like 30 or 40 years from now, the overall global temperature, there it is again, is going to rise another two degrees Celsius?

No, two degrees Celsius total since 1880. Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that would be catastrophic. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what would happen. I think we should do an episode explaining temperature rise and what effects it's going to have and all that. Sure.

Follow it under our Doomsday series. So even taking aside like climate change and an increase from climate change, there's a lot of data that just says, yeah, we're actually seeing a lot more heat waves than we used to just in the past like 50, 60 years. And just taking data starting in 1960, I think the National Weather Service did a study that basically said, looking at 50 cities in the United States, 46 of them have seen a statistically significant increase in heat waves since the 1960s, so much so that like during the 1960s, they could expect about two heat waves per year, these 50 cities in the United States.

Now they're averaging about six per year and the season for heat waves in these cities is on average 47 days longer than it was in 1960. So there's definitely a big upward trend in heat waves. It's becoming this new normal for us. Yeah, and it's really all about data. In the more data you have, because they, you know, there are still freak weather events that they don't want to just throw everything in there and say it's all caused by the rising climates all over the world, but the more time goes on, like the more this data set

is enriched and the wheat is separated from the chaff just sort of naturally, the more data you get and those statistical anomalies will, they will be revealed as such. Yeah, which I think it behooves us to say like any good attribution climatologist is going to tell you like that heat wave in the Pacific Northwest could have just been statistical bad luck. It may have had nothing to do with climate change. It could have just been like that was the one we drew because a thousand year event means you have a one in a thousand chance on any given year of that.

You could happen next year again, statistically is unlikely, but it's possible just from statistics that it was just bad luck that it happened. But yeah, what you were saying is actually totally accurate that the more, unfortunately, weird freak weather events go on, the bigger the data set they're going to have to compare it to pre-climate change times and see what is actually trending upward. It looks like they're probably right about heat waves. Yeah, and people should feel good knowing that they're really trying to get good accurate data. They don't want to just be doomsday people and say, you know, they want to really get

good accurate numbers in there. So if you're a person who thinks climate change is bogus or it's not human caused or whatever, or they're just trying to scare you and they're going to throw everything in there that happens and say it's because of this, they're not doing that. They're really, really working super, super hard to get a super accurate record and picture of what things are like now and what they're like moving forward. Yes. You're not being hoodwinked.

I think people who are still saying that are basically like standing in a burning house being like, the house is on fire. It's fine. Yeah. So what can we do to stop this stuff? Well, you can't stop it. What can we do to help ourselves out in the meantime? No, eventually we probably will be able to control the weather, which sounds like Bonville

and Esk, but we'll probably be able to control it to our benefit and the benefit of the planet. I'm guessing in the next like 100 years possibly, but until then we can do absolutely nothing about this except try to mitigate the effects of it. One of the things that's starting to happen, our local governments are starting to get a little more hip to the idea that they need plans in place. So when a heat wave comes along, because they're actually pretty easy to forecast by many days out. So you can give people a lot of warning and then if the government has this plan in place,

they can open up cooling centers so you got a convention center that's not being used. Well, that now is a cooling center where you're running lots of AC for residents who don't have AC to come cool off. You can start re-roofing buildings in your city with green roofs or even like cool roofs, which is basically a roof that's not black. And that's all it takes to cool that roof by 50 degrees sometimes on a sunny day. There's just a lot of stuff where if you just stop and look at the infrastructure and even the color of the infrastructure we use in cities, just changing it to lighter colors

would have an enormous effect on that urban heat island effect. Oh yeah, plant more trees. Yep. I love those green roofs. They're good looking anyway. Sure. They look like Hobbit houses, a Hobbit skyscraper no less. Making the electrical grid more efficient because again, if you've got a heat wave and

that thing breaks down, it's just exacerbating the problem. So those are all things we can do to help out a little bit. Yeah, we'll probably figure it out more as it goes on, but it's a pretty good start. And the other thing that you can do is you can actually, if you watch your local news and the weather person says there's a heat advisory today, that means that it could be dangerous to be outside. They're not just whistling Dixie there. Nope.

I had a borderline heat stroke this summer, first time in my life. What? I was playing golf. I was able to play the historic Eastlake golf club near where I live and it was brutally hot. It is a walking only course. So it's not like you're riding around a golf cart and golf courses aren't, they're trees on the edges, but you're out on that sun if you're hitting them straight.

You know what I mean? And I started feeling funny. I got a little dizzy a couple of times and I'm at the age now where I'm smart enough to where I was like, I got to do something here, dude. It's like, this isn't right. I don't feel right. I've been hot all my life and I don't feel right. So I, they called, it was sort of embarrassing, but they called the golf cart out and I went

back to the clubhouse for like three holes and cooled down. Oh yeah. And then went back out and missed those three holes, but I rejoined my buddies and finished out the back nine. So you had the lowest score of all then. Exactly. It was, but I'm glad that I was smart enough. I was like, well, this is a little embarrassing, but I just, I've got to take care of myself.

Oh yeah. Like not dying of Pete's stroke is much better than, you know, playing on to not be embarrassed. I mean, that's, come on. Cause you know what's really embarrassing is dropping dead on the golf course. Yes, it is. And then it would think about how it would affect me, Chuck. I would have to explain it to all of our listeners. Oh man.

It took me a long time to cool down. Like I went in the icy coldest clubhouse I've ever been in and it was just pounding water. And it took me 15 minutes to feel normal. And then I took a cold shower upstairs. In the clubhouse? In the clubhouse. Wow. And then bought a new shirt in the clubhouse and then came back out and I was like, I felt

normal again, but it took a half hour. There's your answer. I think that's why it's an all walking course because they want to move those replacement shirts. Yeah. Unsuspecting heat stroke. Nothing was so expensive too. I was so mad.

Yeah, but. Wow. Well, I'm glad you made it, buddy. And you did the right thing. And I hope everybody learns a lesson from you. It doesn't matter if it's embarrassing. We're talking about your life and your health here. You just go cool off or you stop playing or you just don't.

You got to do it. Like you got to look out for yourself, everybody. Yeah. And it's just dumb golf. Yeah. Who cares? Okay, you got anything more on heat waves? Nope.

Well, if you want to know some more stuff about saving your tuchus from heat stroke and stuff, again, go listen to our Desert Survival episode. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Merchant's House Museum. This is from the Inbalming episode. Hey, guys. Been listening since you started when I was in high school. You've been in real comfort for more than 10 years.

And you've got me company distracted me and made me laugh. I'm emailing you because Josh mentioned the Merchant's House Museum in the Inbalming episode. I work at the Merchant's House and it was so cool to hear you guys mention the museum. I'm impressed. Josh even remembered Seabury Treadwell's name. It's a great small museum in the Greenwich Village, East Village area that most New Yorkers and tourists don't even know about. I wanted to see if you could plug the MHM a bit because for the last 10 years, it's

been fighting a real estate developer who wants to do construction on the site next to the house. It's very scooby-doo-esque. I know. It would endanger the 189-year-old building and force it to close temporarily, if not permanently. Our small staff are always looking for more visitors, volunteers and donors interested in saving the landmark. Thank you for mentioning the Merchant's House Museum.

And this is from Lizzie N. Deck, she, her, and Lizzie and everyone else out there doing the work at the Merchant's House Museum. Thank you. And if you go to New York City, go visit the Merchant's House Museum. Oh, yeah. If you can't go, maybe go online and make a donation. Yeah. Nicely done, Chuck.

Thanks again for writing in Lizzie. That was good stuff. I'm glad you did. And who could ever forget Seabury Treadwell's name? Come on. Great name. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Lizzie did and help you fight off a real estate developer who wants to ruin your museum or historical location, we want to hear from

you. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.