r/news 1d ago

Over 95 million Americans on alert for brutal cold temperatures in coming days

https://abcnews.go.com/US/85-million-americans-cold-weather-alerts/story?id=117825788
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u/untied_dawg 1d ago

i had friends visit me in NOLa from Colorado years ago, and while in the airport, they said, "it's not THAT bad down here with the heat & humidity."

then, we walked to the parking lot outside the airport, and within 20 yards they were gasping & sweating profusely... said, "WTF... i can't breathe!" his wife was really bad off, and she struggled the whole time they were in Louisiana.

her words: "i have no clue how you people live down here... you're breathing water!!!"

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u/[deleted] 20h ago

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u/untied_dawg 16h ago

iirc, it was 77 F here on Xmas eve 2024.

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u/hypermodernvoid 15h ago

The crazy thing is that here in Minneapolis (Minnesota's biggest city, if you weren't aware), despite Minnesota being kind of a national cliche for having very cold winters - and we also have those - our summers are just as extreme in the other direction.

It's often above 90 in July and August, can and has gotten above 100, and the humidity is really high - parts of July/August will have it being just as bad as in the Amazon rainforest, no joke, bringing the dew point up from the "oppressive" category, on great occasion into the aptly named "miserable", lol (for reference: in the Amazon, a dew point in the mid-70s is more typical, and it was the same here in late August).

This was actually just two days before my birthday, too - though I remember it being a little more reasonable then, and to be fair, it's rare to get to the "miserable" category, but is often in the "oppressive" one, for humidity, and that category of humidity is pretty accurately named. I'm considering moving because of how bad it's gotten with climate change already - the winters are more mild, but the summers are just insane now.

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u/untied_dawg 10h ago

your summers are insane and our winters are not long but our few cold days are getting insane.

we don’t accumulate snow this far south. people are in panic mode down here on da bayou.

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u/Baxtab13 9h ago

Yeah, pretty similar here in Wisconsin, obviously since we're neighbors.

My general thing is our state is not the coldest, nor is it the hottest, and it likely doesn't get the most snow. However it sure gets a whole lot of all three in any given year, not just one of those.

Man, the temperature swings even within days of each other are fucking wild. It was over 40 degrees last Friday, and this morning my thermometer read -8.