How hot is hell?
A couple of newspapers (and the Huffington Post) had the headline this morning “Hot as Hell” or “Hotter than Hell”.
How do they know? Seems like inaccurate (or at least inexact) reporting, unless the journalist has been to hell and has something to compare to.
How hot is hell? Is it warmer in hell than it is, say, in Arizona or California?
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Time Life “Mysteries of the Unknown”, book series has a description of parts of Hell frozen over. In some spots all you can see of the damned are their eyes in the frozen lake.
Also the concept of Hell might be a burning landfill. Like the first one in Israel.
Hell isn’t a place with a measurable amount of hotness.
Whatever you want it to be.
As a fictional place, you can set the temperature to any amount you deem necessary to qualify as torturous.
You could for example set to to 100 degrees, the boiling point of water, so that the inhabitants of hell will continuously experience the senstation of being boiled alive.
According to Dante, it depends on which circle of Hell you are in. The deepest circle is a frozen wasteland.
Today sounds quite lovely in Hell, Michigan. 73*, rain expected.
It’s just a figure of speech, no real heat index intended.
Hell is hot like lava.
The news keeps reporting the “feels like” number or “heat index” number. Back in the day we usually talked in terms of the actual temperature. I fully accept the world is trending towards hotter average temperatures, but this hysteria reporting on hotter than ever is just another thing I think will backfire.
Some places are hitting record highs, there has been some horrible flooding this summer, but I saw a reporter in Miami talking about 90° weather like it’s something unusual. We are in the 90’s every August and September, we can handle it. It was hot early this year, but it’s not hot like when Chicago has 105° and people die from heat. Probably we will cool down a few degrees for a week before true summer heat kicks in for its regular pattern.
I just looked at the Miami temperature now, 6 pm Saturday, and it’s 85. Granted, the sun is a bit lower at 6 pm. Las Vegas now, which is 3 pm Las Vegas time, it’s 111 degrees.
Isn’t Vegas often in the 100°s in the summer time? Too hot!
Mid-90s in Atlanta all this past week, but the humidity is awful. Feels like 105+
@JLeslie no. this is actually a typical Atlanta summer. The last couple (2021–2022) were unusually cool. We were spoiled.
The worst (abnormally hot) summer I remember is the 1996 – the summer of the Atlanta Olympics – where it was about 100 for 3 weeks straight, right during the games.
Hold on. I’ll call my brother in San Antonio, Texas and ask him.
@JLeslie I think they’ve become more aware of how humidity can make high heat even more dangerous. The problem is that when it is super humid, it does not allow your sweat to evaporate, and the cooling effect is even less.
@LifeQuestioner No, I think they are talking about hot weather because they want everyone to get on board with the effects of climate change and to get behind making changes to slow down the heating of the globe. If I think that, you can be sure Republicans are thinking that.
I want everyone on board, but this isn’t how I would go about doing it. Miami broke a daily record early in July, but it’s probably not the hottest it has every been in July, it’s probably just a shift of a week and then the temp goes back down and then the climate deniers just grab onto that.
It seems like climate change is less of a political issue lately, I hope that’s true. More Republicans seem on board, but maybe that’s just in my state. They talk more about handling the changes rather than preventing them, but it’s a start.
It’s 89*F here in Tacoma, Washington right now. I was outside doing yard work (including sprinkler pipe repair) and heat started to get to me. Not use to that level of heat. It is a pretty dry heat but there’s very little breeze at all. It got up to 89*F yesterday too. Lawn is starting to turn brown. Glad that the broken sprinkler PVC pipe is fixed.
If the heat in hell is like the heat in Tacoma toady then I’ll be OK. HA!
@gondwanalon That seems hotter than usual to me for Washington state. Is it?
@JLeslie Hotter than usual but not a record. A couple years ago it got up to about 105*F for one day. My neighbors came over to my house that day and we hung out in my living room (cooled by heat pump) and talked story.
@JLeslie When it’s really cold in the middle of winter, Republicans that I know in real life will make jokes about global warming, so I don’t think they’ve all gotten the memo yet about climate change.
When I was doing research with my close friend Dante Alighieri, we found that circle 1 at the entrance was the hottest. Clothing is optional in Limbo, but it is a dry heat.
Level 5 was Wrath and about likened to a New England winter
By the time we got to Treachery on level 9 we needed 2 winter coats and layers.
@jca2 For sure there are plenty who don’t believe it and don’t even attempt to understand it. I think states with shorelines maybe are more aware of flooding concerns. Sarah Palin talked about climate change before she ran with McCain. She had said those politicians in Washington have no idea how the climate is warming. Of course, Alaska has their shoreline changing and glaciers melting for many many years now. She just is with the deniers that any of it is caused by humans polluting the air. Hard to find that clip now of her saying it. I used to be able to google it.
@JLeslie the other thing that I hear Republicans saying often is that the Earth goes through temperature changes up and down, like the Ice Age, so this is just one of those changes.
@jca2 I mean I agree some of it is cyclical. Right now, we are in an El Nino phase, and probably everyone my age and older remembers being in an El Nino cycle previously. All the science says the trend is warmer and warmer though, and that we are affecting how fast we are warming.
I always say to the deniers, why not err on the side of caution? Plus, most of the suggestions by the scientist to slow the warming are to limit pollution, and I think God would want to us to take care of the earth, the waters, the air, and our bodies even if it did not affect the climate. Many of the measures help make the US independent from the Middle East and other countries. You would think the religious base of the party would be on board, but instead they go along with profit minded businesses who don’t care if they poison the earth and poison our bodies and make deals with countries that are not necessarily allies and not in line with our mores.
There are a few people where I live who do presentations basically saying climate change is a hoax. Two of them talk a lot about how CO2 is good and will cause the greening of the earth, which in turn will add more oxygen to the planet. They argue cold weather is more dangerous than hot. They cherry pick their statistics and one liners. It must be from right wing radio or something. These guys are pretty smart guys and worked for the government for many years. I challenged one of them asking if they statement that the cold kills more people than heat, and asked if that was including disasters that come with heat like hurricanes and flooding, and he said no. So, that talk is very misleading.
Since this is the social section and the topic has deviated to the climate issue, I would like to contribute the following:
The bottom line up front is that no matter what we do, human kind is headed for disaster. Why? We are hapless passengers on a very unforgiving planet.
Some of you know that I’m conservative. Some of you may know that I enjoy historical geology. I’m not a climate change denier. I’m far from that. I agree that human activity has influenced the weather and climate (as does solar, chemical reaction in the oceans/land and volcanic actions to a much larger extent).
The Earth’s climate has gone through at least 5 ice ages.
The first ice age (“Huronian Ice Age”) occurred 2.4 billion years ago in the Paleozoic Era and froze the Earth for 300 million years
The second ice age (“Cryogenian”) occurred 720 million years ago in the Neoproterozoic Era and caused the entire Earth (including the oceans) to freeze solid. It lasted for 65 million years.
The third ice age (“Andean-Saharan”) occurred in the Paleozoic Era 450 million years ago. It lasted for 30 million years.
The fourth (“Cenozoic “) ice age is actually a series of mini ice ages that started 35 million years ago. The Earth has been in this “interglacial period” (“Holocene Epoch”) for 11,700 years. Characterized by alternating warm millennia and cold millennia. The last Epoch of a string of glaciation began about 110K years ago and ended about 9,600 years ago. Then came the mini ice age between the 14th and 19th centuries. That was the coldest in 2000 years. Some scientists think that man’s contribution to global warming may be a benefit in that it may hold off the next ice age or cause it to be less severe.
At some point in time the Earth will likely freeze over again. When? I don’t know. Just be glad that you won’t be around to deal with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaTNc_4Dgo8
@JLeslie Vegas is often over 100 degrees in summer but it has extended into spring and fall when it used to not get that warm during those months. It has gotten worse there and if I were a betting person I’d bet that the growth of the city played somewhat of a roll in the increase of temperatures. The city was small when I lived there in the 80s. The population has increased significantly since then and concrete basically runs from mountain to mountain now. There used to be a lot of land between the city and the mountains. Not anymore.
^^Not arguing with the information you gave, but I wonder if during the last El Nino if spring was very hot. This past winter my mon was telling me it was mild and I said to her, “you know what that means,” and she replied, “hot summer.”
Like I said above, I don’t question for a moment the overall warming trend, but I find people sometimes have amnesia about weather. They are surprised every time it freezes after sprint started and worry about their flowers that were starting to cone up. They are shocked it’s so cold in January in Orlando. They don’t remember the Mississippi flooding ten years ago. They don’t remember the 4 significant hurricanes that hit Florida in one season 19 years ago.
Typo: They are surprised every time it freezes after spring has already started and worry about their flowers that were already starting to come up
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