Iranian City Soars To Record 129F Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements (washingtonpost.com) 376
A city in southwest Iran posted the country's hottest temperature ever recorded Thursday afternoon, and may have tied the world record for the most extreme high temperature. From a report on The Washington Post: Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to "53.7C" (128.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Kapikian said the temperature is a "new absolute national record of reliable Iranian heat" (alternative, non-paywalled source) and that it was the hottest temperature ever recorded in June over mainland Asia. Iran's previous hottest temperature was 127.4. Weather Underground's website indicates the temperature in Ahvaz climbed even higher, hitting 129.2 degrees at both 4:51 and 5 p.m. local time. If that 129.2 degrees reading is accurate, it would arguably tie the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth in modern times.
Survivability (Score:2, Interesting)
How long can a human survive in 53.7C?
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How long can a human survive in a mild sauna?
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Maybe a few days if they're on intravenous liquids.
Re:Survivability (Score:4, Funny)
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Humans have this thing called adaptability.
So long as they have water near them and consume it properly, and properly eat to compensate for the loss of energy,
they can do whole military training programs every day at even 60C until the point their bodies have reconfigured themselves
to function no worse at those temperatures than normal people at around 20C. Doesn't matter how weak they started out,
barring a few exceptional cases like asthma for instance, even the weakest twig-like physical equivalent of tra
Re:Survivability (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't there a point though, where the body can't get rid of heat fast enough and your body temperature starts to rise, causing hyperthermia and heat stroke?
The laws of physics say that if it's 129F and your body temperature is 98.6F, the heat transfer will be INTO your body. At what point is evaporative cooling via sweat no longer enough? There is a physical limit; there has to be.
Re:Survivability (Score:5, Informative)
Your body releases sensible, latent, and radiant heat. When the outside (dry bulb) temperature exceeds your body temperature, you are not able to transfer any heat via sensible means. This leaves perspiration and hopefully cool surrounding surfaces. Since the latter isn't going to happen you are 100% reliant on perspiration. Once the wet bulb exceeds your body temperature too then you are stuck and you are in extreme danger of heat stroke.
130F in the sun even with 0% humidity isn't really viable without heat stroke.
In this case, the dewpoint was around 5F; wouldn't want to be there for long.
Re:Survivability (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't there a point though, where the body can't get rid of heat fast enough and your body temperature starts to rise, causing hyperthermia and heat stroke?
The laws of physics say that if it's 129F and your body temperature is 98.6F, the heat transfer will be INTO your body. At what point is evaporative cooling via sweat no longer enough? There is a physical limit; there has to be.
Assume one were to get to one point, consider that many areas of the world have been very hot for ages... and obviously w/o air conditioning.
Back then, people would not go out between noon and, say, 4. You would get up very early to work, go to a siesta and resume work in the afternoon. It wasn't that long ago that people back in my country of origin would wake up before 4 to go to the fields with lanterns, be back by 11 with milk and produce, take a nap and wait till 4 to resume work.
Desert dwellers would travel at night, and so on. Adaptability is not just limited to the physical. It covers the behavioral and social.
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Refrigerators work by compressing refrigerant to the point where it's hotter than ambient air, at which point it cools off. The human body has nothing like this, so your point is not very useful.
Re: Survivability (Score:5, Informative)
Unless the relative humidity is 99%. Then you just stew in your own broth. 118 degrees of breezy, dry, desert heat feels like a bad 80-degree day in Miami. If it ever got to 120 degrees in Miami, people stuck outdoors would start to literally drop dead from heat.
Re:Survivability (Score:4, Insightful)
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Suffering from chronic mild asthma, I can share with you that my asthma will kick in when I stop work. Exercise-induced bronchospasm. Even when I've trained to do the work.
I'll hit the inhaler then. Another reason I am not a Marine.
Re:Survivability (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the humidity.
You can survive well if you can sweat, but if humidity approaches 100%, you're dead.
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This is why we only hire sub-humans to work the hot aisle of our datacenter.
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No, i have genuinely been in a sauna around that temperature. That's certainly on the hot side and it hurt to take deep breaths but it's far from lethal.
I've routinely been in saunas around 100C and find that quite pleasant as long as i can get out and take a cold shower or jump in a lake.
Still i wouldn't want the outside to be that hot, that'd be very very unpleasant.
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I'm not sure why i'm even bothering to respond.
It's right there on Wikpedia that Finnish sauna temperatures sometimes exceed 110C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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We've not been here long enough but the ice shelf and fauna has. Derp. There are many ways to correlate these fossil records to climate.
Re:Survivability (Score:5, Interesting)
Direct observation/measurement isn't the only method to estimate global temperatures over long periods of time. This chart isn't scientific, and the vast majority of the line is dashed to show the temperature is estimated (not observed directly), but a picture is worth 1000 words:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi... [explainxkcd.com]
(On the plus side, we seem to be preventing the next ice age from coming along.)
You could argue that direct observation is the only way to be certain, but that's like arguing that there's no way to be certain that trees existed before mankind showed up to observe and document them. You could take it one step farther and argue that even after humans developed written language, they were probably lying (en masse), in much the same way you believe that 98% of the scientists studying climate are lying. Any fossils found were faked or planted there by God to test the faithless (because he's definitely that petty/vindictive).
Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who writes temperatures as "129 degrees"? This is a science and tech site, at very least, if you're going to use outmoded, outdated, antiquated, anachronistic, non-standard, and mostly unused units of measurement, indicate the unit.
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I hate it when people need everything spelled out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/129th_meridian_east
WTF (Score:3)
Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to 53.7C (128.7 "degrees Fahrenheit").
Fixed that for you.
Re:Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does seem bizarre to talk about "modern measurements" and use outdated units for those measurements.
No celsius is correct (Score:2)
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Covered many times before, but I still think Fahrenheit is the best unit for weather temperature.
0f to 100f is livable.
0c to 100c is not livable.
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Maybe not livable, but get a glass of water and as long as it's liquid, you're somewhere between 0 and 100 degrees.
Re:Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Insightful)
my glass of water has some salt in it and it's -2c...
I wouldn't recommend drinking that.
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That is not a glass of water. It's a saline solution.
Calling it a glass of water is the same thing as calling a glass of wine a glass of water.
Re:Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Funny)
same thing as calling a glass of wine a glass of water.
To certain Nazarenes those are the same thing.
Re:Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Insightful)
Covered many times before, but I still think Fahrenheit is the best unit for weather temperature.
0f to 100f is livable.
0c to 100c is not livable.
Who cares if it is "livable"?
It regularly gets 110F here in summer and people still live. In Canada it often gets below 0F and people live.
The measurements 0F to 100F were based upon what at the time were perceived as the min and max temperatures the weather reached in Europe. That's not very scientific, even if it is meaningful.
You can perceive the difference just about in 1C change. You can't perceive the difference in 1F change. A Centigrade is more meaningful to a human being as far as perception goes.
Overall though... who really cares? If talking about the weather, either system works as long as you are familiar with it.
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The point is that the scale is more granular for indoor/outdoor temperatures while staying in integer units. For Celsius, you really have to go out to one decimal point to be very accurate with outdoor temperatures. In this case, it was Fahrenheit with an added decimal, because of the fact that it's a very specific record.
You say I can't perceive a 1 degree F change, but my thermostat moves in 1 degree increments and I do notice a difference based on the setting. And Celsius thermostats tend to all go in
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The Nest thermostat allows fractional (1/4, 1/3, and 1/2) F* temperature settings. You can easily feel the difference between 76.6 and 77.
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Uh, people that have to live in it?
But they generally don't live in those temperature. They have airconditioning or heating and try to avoid going out into those temps. It may be possible to survive in those temperatures, but it's not "liveable" in the sense that you're going to be very unhappy about it.
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It's not "livable" in 0F either without heating, so there goes that argument.
I would say 110F is more "livable" than 40F. 110F you need proper hydration. 40F you need heating and or warm clothes. 0 - 100 is not the "best temperatures for survival". 50F - 90F would probably be a better range for that.
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I live in an ambient temperature. So do you, unless you've found a way to live in a vacuum.
False (Score:3)
Who cares if it is "livable"?
People who want to live.
It regularly gets 110F here in summer and people still live. In Canada it often gets below 0F and people live.
You seem to have missed the point. 110F is survivable. 110C is not.
The measurements 0F to 100F were based upon what at the time were perceived as the min and max temperatures the weather reached in Europe. That's not very scientific, even if it is meaningful.
That's not true at all [wikipedia.org]. "The lower defining point, 0 F, was established as the temperature of a solution of brine made from equal parts of ice and salt. Further limits were established as the melting point of ice (32 F) and his best estimate of the average human body temperature (96 F, about 2.6 F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale). The scale is now usually defined by two fixed poi
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I've heard several different "origin" stories. Another one I heard is that 100F was used because it was the body temperature of the horse (horses have more stable body temperatures than humans so he used horses rather than people).
The actual scale though has shifted from when the system was initially set up. 0F and 100F are not what they used to be. To "compete" with Celsius the scale shifted a little to make it so that water froze at 32F and boiled at 212F. Farenheit as a measurement hasn't always bee
Re:Past the boiling point of water? (Score:5, Funny)
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...that goes up to -11.
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Anyone who correctly follows the official BIPM guidelines [bipm.org]. The unit is "degrees Celsius," not Celsius. If symbols are used, then (/. still doesn't handle Unicode) "[degree symbol]C".
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They actually did (incorrectly) include the measurement in the headline - it says "129C degrees" - according to our esteemed Slashdot editors, any water in that city is boiling off right now.
Now that's climate change!
Context (Score:3)
Who writes temperatures as "129 degrees"?
Pretty much anyone/everyone in the US. Fahrenheit units are assumed here, especially in contexts were Celsius would make little sense.
This is a science and tech site, at very least, if you're going to use outmoded, outdated, antiquated, anachronistic, non-standard, and mostly unused units of measurement, indicate the unit.
No this is a discussion/debate site which historically (less lately) has focused on tech. It also is based in the US and has a predominantly US based readership and I assure you nobody in the US was confused at all. I've be very happy to switch to metric but if someone gives an air temperature of 129 degrees I'm fairly comfortable assuming they aren't talking about Celsi
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Who writes temperatures as "129 degrees"? This is a science and tech site, at very least, if you're going to use outmoded, outdated, antiquated, anachronistic, non-standard, and mostly unused units of measurement, indicate the unit.
Ah, the virtue-signaling, it burns, lol
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Who writes temperatures as "129 degrees"? This is a science and tech site, at very least, if you're going to use outmoded, outdated, antiquated, anachronistic, non-standard, and mostly unused units of measurement, indicate the unit.
I petitioned these folks [wikipedia.org] for years on the very same matter. No luck.
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The text is from a quote in a US newspaper. I suppose the editors could have babied you and put in a translation for your sensitive foreign eyes. However, this website is ALSO hosted in the US, and most of its editors and audience are US-based. So realistically, if you can't abide by seeing US units on things treated as the default, perhaps you should consider visiting non-US websites. I hear there are a lot of them on the interwebs these days.
One wonders if you demand your friends immediately replace the
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If you're intelligent you use metric like the rest of the damn planet. [wikipedia.org]
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And if you're slightly more intelligent, you can guess the units from the context so you know when someone is using metric and when someone isn't.
I am personally so amazingly intelligent and my units inference algorithm is so reliable, that I even use it on all my Mars probes!
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Until a few minutes ago, the head read "Iranian city soars to record 129C degrees". That doesn't help when the so-called editors are making up stuff as they go.
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If you're intelligent you use metric like the rest of the damn planet. [wikipedia.org]
Outside of a tiny virtue-signaling group, nobody in the US cares about this.
Nobody cared in the 1970s, when the same tiny group was virtue-signaling about it in exactly the same way, and nobody cares now.
Everyone uses and thinks in F for ambient temperature. If you need C for some specialty purpose, you use it. Nobody cares that it is different, or has any trouble switching between them.
If possible - which I'm not sure it is - we care even less now, because we all have pocket computers that instantly
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I live in Central America. While most measurements are presented in metric, and interesting anomaly is the construction industry.
Not sure if it is the U.S. imports that caused this, or some other strangeness, but they want to measure short things in inches (pulgadas), while they would talk in meters on longer ones.
You can somehow get used to it, but the problem is, that sometimes they don't know what they are talking about. I went to a store and wanted to by a 40x40 cm concrete flooring "thing" (garden step
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And all the people in metric countries also read and post on Slashdot, because Internet.
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If you're intelligent, you don't give a f*ck.
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Yeah, but the headline gives the unit...and gets it wrong. "129C" it says. It's correct in the body, but still...
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Didn't see that. Which maybe explains how it's still there, but the original poster in this thread didn't seem to notice that part either - they even quoted it wrong.
Re:point five past lightspeed, AT LEAST (Score:2)
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With apologies to Blaise PAscal.
Sometimes I notice a typo and I think about fixing it, and then I just go "nah, it fits well enough".
If you don't let your accidents pitch in, then you have to make everything up yourself.
Besides, I was busy. I couldn't off the top of my head recall Rimmer's given name. Pressing matters.
Mass Migration? (Score:2)
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I hear Antarctica is very nice at this time of year.
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I think they already do. But it's not exactly for the weather.
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129 degrees?? (Score:3, Informative)
Wow .. the water must be boiling in the streets!
Oh .. you mean 54 degrees .. like was mentioned in TFA
The information comes from Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with Meteo France, the French national weather service.
Officially, he said the temperature was 53.7 degrees Celsius, which is 128.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Iran’s previous hottest temperature was 127.4 degrees.
Re:129 degrees?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh .. you mean 54 degrees .. like was mentioned in TFA
That's 327 K, you backwards Luddite. "Degrees" - what is this, the Dark Ages?
Re:129 degrees?? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? 327 KB or 327 KiB?
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This proves my belief that we Americans are tougher than the rest of the world. You guys have trouble if it gets above 40. We can take it up over 100.
Mesopotamia? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let me explain this. The myth of the flood was caused by a real fact, which was the breaking of the ice dam that contained the Agassiz Lake [see Wikipedia], in North America, in the final days of the last Ice Age. The lake was the size of today's Black Sea, and all the water was released at once. Sea level rose up very quickly. This event was the basis for the Flood myth and, as a matter of fact, created the already mentioned Black sea and the English Channel/La Manche, among other fetures.
It's easy when yo
Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
The hottest temperature recorded in Death Valley was 134 F on July 10, 1913, nearly 100 years ago, which is still modern times since people who were alive then are STILL alive. Good try, though.
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Except meteorologists now think that reading by a mining company employee was false and not possible. The record then is 129.2 degrees F
I grew up in a hole in the ground in the desert (Score:5, Interesting)
I have seen very close to that - my home town made it to 128 one summer.
The thing is it was such a shit-hole of a town there are no official weather stations there. All the official measurements were taken miles away in Odessa or other shit-hole towns they happened to put weather stations in or around. Pecos just was ignored, and was in a unique place geological being in a wide plane surrounded by mountain ranges and higher elevations, it created a type of hot-box effect. I was driving a 1983 GMC Sierra Classic at the time. The little orange needle that showed if you were in PRND1-2 melted in half and the spring pulled it to the left. My sisters walkman melted in it.
So, due to all of the locals reading their own thermometers and the local channel 6 (which was just a CGA graphics info readout) saying it got up to 128 I know it was there. Since Kermit Texas some miles to the North never made it that high we never officially made it there.
That was in 1994 I believe. As far as I know it hasn't passed 118 or so since. My dad tells me in 75 or so when he was working the feedlots it got up to about 132. I wasn't born yet so I certainly can't confirm that one.
At least in my little world both the hot and the cold extremes have tapered based on my own limited observations. The rains have become more erratic, but having moved away from that area my own observations are no longer current.
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I didn't even visit for a ten year stretch, not that I didn't want to go see my sister, life just stacked up and kept me from heading West.
Then for reasons unrelated to hitting on her I talked to a friends little sister. Well, now I'm married to a home-town girl and I visit several times a year - and I just have to live with the party foul of hooking up with a friends sister...
For people unfamiliar with the area - unless it's rodeo week or something there isn't much of a reason to visit Pecos unless there'
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Near highest ever? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's why they call it Iran (Score:2)
a dose of reality (Score:5, Informative)
Recorded high temperatures in Ahvaz in July are 129.2F, [wikipedia.org] so this isn't the highest on record even for that city. It's a record for June, but, hey, it's the end of June. Ahvaz also holds the record as the "world's most air-polluted city". Incidentally, they do get snow in the winter. What a place!
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That isn't even the hottest temperature on earth, death valley which is 300' below sea level has always had the highest temperature record for earth.
Scare-quotes for Celsius? (Score:2)
Why is the figure in Celsius given with scare-quotes? Both Iran and France, and 95% of the world, uses Celsius - not really anything scary about it.
Flaimbate! (Score:2)
Must be that global cooling!
Okay, I got that out of my system. Move along, nothing to see here.
It doesn't matter until upper midwest gets hot (Score:2)
Because that's who decides who's going to be US president, and consequently person who can do the most about the global warming
Fake news... (Score:3)
The record is currently 134 degrees F from July 10, 1913, in Death Valley...
But that doesn't fit the narrative of "modern AGW times"...
Even in more modern times, back in 2013, Death Valley reached 53.9C [wikipedia.org] (besting this latest temperature in Ahvaz by 0.2C)... Of course back in 2013, we weren't as modern as we are today...
Anything for click-bait these days, right?
It's not celsius, doesn't mean it's not a lot (Score:3)
If you just sit in a car without turning the AC on for half an hour the belt buckle can leave a mark on your arm for the rest of your life, talking 3rd degree burn here. The steering wheel can get stuck to your hand if you put your hand on it directly. my father's car has a LOT of his finger prints permanently molded into the plastic. You can cook omlets on the dashboard or on the roof.
If there is a fly still alive in that weather --this one is actually funny-- if it lands on a car or any other metalic surface, it can't take off again.
Only glass covered solar panels work, other types just melt. The wiring almost always melts too.
Car batteries die a lot.
Plastic bottles, sprays, cans, jars and anything with a lid exploding is just normal. One time, After few hours of leaving the car in sunlight I found it covered with a fine white powder as if it was painted, after hours of thinking, finding small pieces of metal and recalling who has been in the car with what items we figured out it was a deodorant spray left in the car under a tissue box in the sleeve behind the driver seat.
You just can't have cds in the car. they fuse together like slices of butter melting.
We don't have cement buildingi or cement park chairs. They just turn to dust REALLY fast.
and to those saying fix it with water, there isn't even enough water to drink.
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Nah. It's an isolated event. We might start to talk about global warming if this becomes somewhat frequent.
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I wrote to the president and he said the government will help poor people buy an Anonymous Coward to cool their home.
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Fuck yeah! Summer winter! Wait, that's just regular weather for Canada, because all americans know we live in fucking igloos.
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Bash on NASCAR all you want but a few dozen cars racing a few times every year is nowhere near as polluting as the millions of daily commutes being done by regular people.
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Phoenix, Arizona serves the same function for Christians.
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No, that's Trenton, NJ. Hell traditionally hasn't [wikipedia.org] been thought of as a hot place.
Maybe it's just Climate Change again.
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Re:wrong! (Score:5, Funny)
"Mother Nature is bleeding from her whatever."
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I'd say it rather makes it look HOT!
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