QUESTION: Why is the entire US experiencing a heat wave in 2021?

ANSWER: Heat waves happen. It’s kind of like the “shit happens” phenomenon. We have been studying this phenomenon for a hundred years and our understanding of it is surely growing and maybe our understanding of it will someday reach the assumed level of understanding in this question. As things stand, however, we are still trying to figure it out. Kind of like the population bomb and the coming depletion of all natural resources and the end of fish and the dying ocean and the heating earth, and on and on.

We modern humans (homo sapiens) have made a lot of progress in our scientific investigations and in our understanding of natural phenomena and it has created the egotistical view that we know it all or that we ought to know it all but the sad truth is that we don’t really know it all. We know that heat waves happen and we are learning more and more as we go but the assumption that we know it all about heat waves is not true.

Once they happen we can rationalize them post hoc but that kind of science is a creation of the confirmation bias fallacy. We know how they form and we can explain that formation post hoc but It is only when we can predict them in terms of when and where and how severe and how long that we can claim to understand heat waves.

In the meantime our post hoc understanding of heat waves is likely to be the other known characteristic of humans called superstition.

HEAT WAVE HISTORY: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/06/29/usa-heat-wave-history/