Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, Earth’s highest temperature since 1931
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I had 125 F - 135 F in my memory. These articles imply that’s not possible. If a tree falls in the woods ... Or, rather, if the sun heats your day in Africa but nobody measures it, is it not hot?
In the surprisingly hot times, your home, at night, furniture was hot to the touch. Weirdest thing, so used to objects indoors at night being cooler to touch.
Too hot to sleep, so a trick was to get in shower in a top sheet then get back to bed and hope to fall asleep before very fast evaporation stopped cooling.
Everything I’ve researched says I’m mistaken, it wasn’t that hot. But then I wonder, how great are temperature records in obscure microclimates in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa?
// Records or it didn’t happen.
Now look, I don't mean to sound like I'm over exaggerating, because I'm not: It gets fucking hot there, and then it will start blowing 40 knots sustained (74kph / 45mph), straight down the centre of the country, and then something, typically a national park, will catch fire.
And that makes it even hotter. So hot houses spontaneously combust from the radiant heat before the fire front.
And then there's Adelaide, similar latitude, just 250k or so east, with the urban heat island effect. Quite unpleasant.
So yeah, we only know about the places the Bureau Of Meteorology keeps records for.
There's probably some rural Australian grazier reading this going "55 degrees C? Heh, that's mild."
I hear Baghdad is can get quite warm.
I agree with you that hot and dry conditions make wildfires much easier to start and spread, but that's been having an effect in residential parts of California over the last few weeks, where the temperature has at most been around 100-110°F (38°-43°C).
(And I do agree that, metres from a moving fire, the temperature is probably past the flash point of many substances, but I wouldn't call that climate, I think.)
Heat from the fire reached 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), with speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph)
I just meant material will catch fire from the radiant heat alone, well before the fire actually gets there.
These type of fires create their own weather.
I'm in Australia (Adelaide) too and the bushfire threat is real, but it's because when it's super hot any spark in dry eucalyptus leaves takes off extremely quickly.
Mumbai. Now that's hot and humid.
Lots of people claim that their region/country has had hotter weather than the records, but I doubt the temperatures were taken in these more precise conditions. It's not like there aren't scientists and meteorologists all over the world (including Africa) who are measuring these things constantly.
If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measur...
We have media commentators and even members of parliament (!) actively trying to discredit our Bureau of Meteorology, pulling up newspaper reports and people's anecdotes of slightly higher temperatures recorded decades ago than records that have been broken just recently. It doesn't seem to a lot of these people to be a good argument that 1) thermometers weren't as accurately calibrated then as they were today, and 2) an observed temperature at your grandfather's farm that was taken from a thermometer hanging under a tin roof that was radiating heat at it isn't up to the standard of the official figures!
Anyway, so at the end of the day it's extremely controversial that the official figures have been adjusted based on measured deviations between the technology used at the time and the more accurate measuring devices used today.
The adjustments to the historical temperature record are an under-discussed topic IMO. Most people don't know they occur. The justifications are by the way not that thermometers were inaccurately calibrated in the 1930s. Thermometer technology is very old. If there are datasets being adjusted that way, that's a new reason that I haven't seen when reviewing this controversy myself. The justifications are, at least for the USA, more like:
1. A claim that people before the 1980s didn't know how to use min/max thermometers and read them/reset them at the wrong time of day. So climatologists have a thing called time of observation bias adjustment, which supposedly corrects for this.
2. Thermometers got moved around over time, so they apply 'homogenization' algorithms to invent readings for thermometer locations that no longer exist
3. Thermometers often had gaps in their readings, so again, they interpolate readings that 'should' have happened from nearby thermometers. Because the thermometer network is getting older with time, the amount of interpolated data keeps going up. For instance the standard US thermometer network used for all American temperature timeseries now has >60% interpolated data generated by a model, they're not raw readings, because there's been so much movement over time.
The counter-arguments are:
1. It's unscientific to quietly alter your data to fit your theories. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the readings, you are meant to add error bars and incorporate that into your uncertainty, not just publish new versions of historical timeseries like climatologists do.
2. The historical justification for TOB existing is not very strong. There's an assumption that people back then didn't know how to use min/max thermometers correctly, but there's not much in the historical record to actually support this claim, which is an odd one because, again, thermometers are an old technology and people were making records of temperature for a long time. A min/max thermometer is not a complex device.
3. Putting aside the fact that again, supposedly raw scientific datasets aren't meant to have interpolated data points in them, homogenization might make sense in the USA where there was a large and well resourced thermometer network throughout the 20th century. But that's not true for the rest of the world, which was busy being wracked by multiple world wars, communist insurrections, 3rd world poverty and so on. Temperature data outside the USA for much of the 20th century is quite sparse and not very high quality, especially as people didn't really care about global warming until the 1970s/1980s.
4. Climatologists have continually adjusted raw temperature readings in new dataset versions even for very recent measurements, like measurements taken in the 21st century. These adjustments always strengthen the case for global warming, they never produce contradictory evidence. So there is a risk of a file-drawer problem, where now the precedent was set that adjusting historical data is accepted, people keep trying different adjustments with different explanations and end up discarding the ones that would reduce the perceived threat.
Would it be possible to include sources around what you are claiming?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-a...
And here's a more skeptical source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/bombshell-study-tempe...
Climate change denialism is a strawman position, designed specifically to sound extreme in order to stop people getting curious and investigating the real beliefs of these bloggers.
https://realclimatescience.com/no-excuse-for-data-tampering/
In this article he makes substantially similar points but goes into the interpolation process:
https://realclimatescience.com/understanding-noaa-us-tempera...
After I read this article, I downloaded the NOAA datasets to check that the claims were correct. It's easy to write a small Python script to select the measurements with "E" after them (meaning estimated) and check the proportions. They matched his graphs so I don't believe there are factual accuracy issues.
In this article he posts old news stories overlayed with recent temperature timeseries versions, showing how much they differ. It has a bunch of examples of old stories from the archives talking about global cooling, and shows why they thought that given the thermometer readings of the time:
https://realclimatescience.com/climate-scientists-rewriting-...
The second article shows with the moniker of "climate change skeptic" is problematic. Virtually nobody criticising climatologists believes the climate doesn't change. Tony Heller is an arch-sceptic, on the far end and willing to make strong accusations of fraud etc, but even his position is that the raw data shows the world getting warmer. As you can see if you read the second link, he argues the "real" data shows warming of 1 degree, rather than the 3 degrees reported by NOAA. So he isn't really a climate change skeptic in the literal sense of the term, even though he'd definitely be described that way by journalists. He just disagrees about the size of the trend.
Bad astronomical readings are just that. They do not invalidate special relativity. Believing otherwise is the hallmark of crackpot physicists. Just nod slowly and hand them an introductory book, and when an alternative theory can explain data outside of a few select readings, then is the time to continue the discussion.
In fact this has happened. After climatology skeptics made a big stink about the poor state of repair of the US weather station network, Congress commissioned a brand new one. Its construction took into account all the criticisms levelled by skeptics and basically put the matter to rest for newly collected US ground data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Climate_Reference_Network
Last I checked the US wasn't actually using data from the new network, but that didn't matter because it currently matches the old network pretty well. The adjustments that cause a fuss are for past recordings, not current data.
At any rate, I haven't claimed this falsifies an entire area of study (what would it mean to falsify an area of study anyway?). Climatologists do indeed use temperature data from various sources. However, conclusions based on edited data sets would need to be re-done, otherwise it's not really science is it? And can you blame people for being skeptical when basic temperature history is constantly being re-issued in new 'versions'? Reading thermometers really isn't that hard.
Not to side with either part, but it always takes two to tango...
"There's a virus that's killing people, based up on the current evidence we should all wear masks in an effort to stop it." "You're trampling on my freedoms by asking that I wear a mask."
The first is an objective statement of fact, the second is twisting the message - it can easily get politicized without needing two parties to sink to that level. Now the first has to either engage or try to ignore it, but either way it'll continue to be politicized.
Balancing safety and freedom is an ages old question.
No one complains when a school has a dress code and someone is sent home for wearing "inappropriate attire"
But there are an awful lot of complaints and concerns and discussions about freedom from people when asked to wear a mask, at least indoors.
The problem is pretty simple - the oft used phrase "it should't be a partisan or political issue" is irrelevant because when one side the argument bases their beliefs strictly on the fact that they don't like the other side and will oppose everything not based on the merits of arguments and information but rather that they hate the other side, then EVERYTHING becomes partisan.
This statement is factually wrong. Both students and parents do complain about it. A lot.
But getting back to masks question: should two consenting adults who are on the private property be allowed to take their masks off? What if one of them happens to be a business owner and the other one is a customer?
Should every person over 18 be required to carry a condom in their pocket? The costs are small, the benefits are obvious. The science and the facts both support this.
I say this with as much neutrality as I can muster - I don't know who to believe about anything. It seems that everyone has an axe to grind, or their livelihood depends on the truth going in one direction, or they just hate the "other side" so much that they'll say anything. Who can you trust? I don't want to become an expert in multiple disciplines just so I can evaluate the daily news. For me, it's an epistemic crisis, and I don't see the way out.
Maybe they now know better? But let’s approach this as neutral as we can, because health experts haven’t and still don’t agree globally.
But did countries that recommended and used mask early fare better than those who didn’t? It would seem so, as Korea, Vietnam, Japan and others did better than even us in Scandinavia who closed down and got through spring/summer better than most (excluding Sweden who did terrible). Maybe the early mask adopters did other great things, and maybe masks had no impact, but if you’re cautious, it would seem the neutral conclusion based simply on data is that masks are probably a good idea.
Even if it turns out that masks do in fact do nothing, then what’s the damage from having used them? More trash and some money spent on it (if you’re like us and the government uses money to enforce low prices for everyone and free masks for the poor). Isn’t that acceptable?
I personally feel the same way about global warming. Even if it should turn out not to be man made, are we really going to be worse off by having gotten off fossil fuels?
There were initial concerns that improper mask use might do more harm than good (via misuse and potential changes to behaviour of wearers). Statistical and observational evidence has not borne this out, so the advice has changed.
By the way, this was just for mask use by laypeople; masks were always recommended for trained medical staff (where there would be less concern about misuse).
"We should all wear masks" is not based on facts all all. Science tells us how masks work, and we can interpret those facts and learn when they should be used.
But from there to everyone wearing masks at all occasions is a leap from facts to opinion. Mandatory face masks because the costs are low and the risks are negligible is pure politics. Compare with "it was even warmer during the middle ages therefore global warming is not anthropogenic". It may be based on a fact, but the facts do not support the conclusion.
Bicycle helmets is perhaps the most well known example of this. It is clear how they protect, that they are effective, and when they should be used. That does not mean mandatory helmet laws are a good idea. In fact, the places in the world with the lowest accidents per kilometre are also the ones where helmet usage is lowest! This may be surprising at first.
Face masks may cause people to relax and enter crowded spaces they hadn't otherwise. Touching the mask is a very effective way to get virus material on your fingers. Kids playing with face masks is most certainly not a good idea. And so on. It is not unlikely that there are situations where face masks will worsen the outcome.
Mandatory helmets have been much more studied than mandatory face masks, even if this is likely to change. Until then, any policy made is necessarily politicized, not objective.
I apologise if I got it wrong. I think that's a very weak argument though. We have a lot of reasons to think a policy like that would be effective. It's cheap and low risk, so why not implement it?
I will humbly quote myself:
Should every person over 18 be required to carry a condom in their pocket? The costs are small, the benefits are obvious.
We know how condoms protect against STDs. Perhaps it should be mandatory for high risk avenues where young adults congregate, such as music festivals and campuses, to sell condoms?
The argument could easily be made that easy access to condoms would increase risky behaviour in young adults, thereby negating the obvious positive effecs. The parable to bicycle helmets and face masks should be clear.
Luckliy, this has been studied! Turns out, sex drive is dominated by other factors than accessibility of contraceptives.
So that's an example where multiple studies were conducted, under varying circumstances and in multiple countries, before anything was made mandatory by law. Sometimes public health policy works. Sometimes it's mostly posturing.
Not remotely similar. Freedom is a political construct. It makes a great purpose for policy, but "because freedom" is a lousy argument.
The fact that face masks work is a good argument to study what effects it has on the general population. It is not a good argument to base policy on, especially not out of context. By the precautionary principle, we should not make things mandatory where the outcome is not known.
There are numerous examples, for example on how to treat premature infants, where good ideas were made policy which actually worsened the outcome. The same low risk argument could have been made, but side effects were in fact unknown and babies died unnecessarily often.
> We have a lot of reasons to think a policy like that would be effective. It's cheap and low risk, so why not implement it?
The same is true for mandatory bike helmets. They're cheap and low risk. Turns out that doesn't make for good policy. The similarities are more than superficial.
Let me phrase that differently: The argument is bad because the risk is not low, it is unstudied. There are several easily identifiable side effects that might well increase the spread of the virus.
Why don't you become a vegan? Why don't you exercise every morning? Why don't you have children? Why don't you say a prayer before dinner? Why don't you wear a helmet when riding a bike? Why don't you rescue a cat from the shelter? All these things are good for you and carry little risk.
The only correct answer to these is "because I don't want to". And your ability to say this is called freedom.
We know how masks work, they protect other people very well. The problem is it doesn't help the wearer as much, so people don't want to use them and everyone suffers as a result. So make it mandatory. While perhaps there aren't the kind of large scale studies you want to see, yet, at least we have very good reason to think it will work and almost no risk. That's a logically sound policy.
The point of my comment wasn't to argue for policy however. It was to point out the inaccuracy of the statement that "we know masks work, therefore making masks mandatory is objectively good (for public health)". There are several examples where this reasoning have turned out to be not only empirically false, but actively detrimental. Bike helmets and infant mortality come to mind.
The comparison with bike helmets is apt. They are great, it is easy to understand why they work, but still enforced usage damages public health. One theory is that lesser people bike, and those that do take more risks. The facts are that areas with the least cycling risks have the least helmet usage.
Enforced masks everywhere all the time has the obvious risks of more people going outside even with slight symptoms, and taking more risks by not avoided crowded places.
These arguments are not mine, look at the meta studies WHO made. I simply parrot what little articles I can find, and compare with other similar public policy, including bike helmets.
The relevant question to ask before making masks mandatory by law is not whether they help reduce virus spread some of the time, or even most of the time, but rather if there instances where the enforcement actually increase spread. Judging from published literature, that is far from unlikely.
I'm sympathetic to your argument about unintended consequences, and you could even turn out to be right. But if I had to bet on which policy decision would be smarter, I'm still going to go for mandatory masks. I think in the end assuming that masks will work on that level is more likely given what we know, than assuming there is an unknown unintended consequence so powerful it negates the usefulness of masks completely.
So far, data does not agree with your feeling which decision is smarter. The cities with the harshest mask policies have been the ones with the more secondary outbreaks.
One only needs to take a stroll in Paris too see why. Outbreak worsened right after masks were made mandatory, no matter which indicator you look at.
However, it is also important to realize that does not mean face masks are inherently bad. We don't know that either. It means other factors are important, and sweeping policy decisions require data.
The WHO knows this, hence their recommendations. Public health is hard. So far it has mostly been a case of political posturing, along the classic "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it".
You said this with certainty. What's your best quality link to support this claim?
Propaganda is very real and is utilized by all sides.
I for one, am willing to suffer the discomfort of this minor piece of clothing for the sake of my neighbor. Will it benefit me? Not entirely sure. But the appreciation I get from my lesser-informed neighbor is good enough. It may be a placebo, sure. The subsequent peace between him and me is what makes all the difference in trying to keep a positive attitude in this most negative climate.
And besides, it really doesn't take me much effort to keep clean the plethora of masks I've accumulated. Use plastic baggies to store when mask is not use. Keep a second one handy when in doubt that the one in use has been compromised. Etc. Not that expensive, really.
Well, I just thought I'd contribute my hopeful 2¢. Stay safe, y'all!
Same with my south side office place directly behind a huge glass window, no AC [1]. Super nice too look out ... but 35+ °C on "normal" 25+ °C degree days.
[1] Other parts of the building reflect sun light back on our window front ... I actually got pictures of objects on my desk casting two shadows.
It's not comparable, though.
In all my recent cars, the sensor was on the underside of one of the side mirrors (and fairly precise as well).
* on top of grass or dirt soil.
* 1.5 m above the ground, shielded from sunlight and covered from the weather.
* normal air flow around the thermometer
edit: someone posted a wiki link for Stevenson screen below just after I asked.
This was in the Kazakh steppes, in 2012, about 100km NW of Aralsk - it was under 20% rh, and the heat was just unbearable - it took us tens of litres of water each per day to replenish sweat, just sitting on our asses in a car with no a/c. The dashboard melted. The glue in the headliner melted, and dripped down the walls. The grip on the steering wheel sloughed off, and the gear shift head glue melted, and that fell off too. At the end of the day, we had an uncomfortably hot shower with the remaining water that had been sat in the car with us.
54C, when measured as an accurate temperature, manifested as 60C on the thermometer in the car, which was its maximum, as it had shown that for several days before the LCD also melted.
So yes, take the apocryphal tales of high temperatures with a big pinch of salt, as most will be overreported, but I can vouch that this particular temperature isn’t entirely unprecedented on Earth - what is worrying is that it is now frequent enough that it is being observed, rather than just being a random nutter in the dust with a penchant for data.
And they use enclosure like this to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
> If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan."
I have a outdoor temperature sensor in one of those enclosures and one in my attic. On sunny days, the attic regularly reaches 140+ °F and is maybe 50+ °F hotter than the outside air. I'm sure if I put the sensor directly on the roof, it'd closer to the attic temp than the outdoor temp.
As the other comment said, you measure temperature a certain way. No doubt in the sun its hotter than 130 degrees, but that's not how temperature is measured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
In the south of Egypt (eg Aswan, Luxor), though, mid or high 40s would be much more typical in the summer and wouldn't be surprised at all if it hit or crossed 50.
Please, even the most simple minded people don't do this.
Or at least they did until very recently. There might now be some active-airflow alternatives.
Anyway, if it isn't measured with a (calibrated) standard apparatus, it isn't an official measurement.
https://www.nist.gov/traceability/supplementary-materials-re...
The US has records not broken stretching back to the very late 1880s and 1890s and of course there were a few hot years in the early part of the 1900s. Quite a few records are still standing from the 1930s.
Still in the end understand every generation has doom and gloom weather prophets and today we like to bludgeon people with "scientist say this" but that was the case a hundred years ago to.
record books are fascinating but better yet are finding archives of newspapers which are online for nearly every major metropolitan area.
We seem to be a society hell bent on declaring our generation as the worst off and the good old days are long gone.
and people wonder why they are are unhappy
It's the same with, say, the massive fires in Australia that were in the news late last year. People rightly point out that there have been large fires in the past too. That's correct, and no one is disputing this. People then conclude that, since there were massive fires in the past, there's nothing new about it and therefore the climate crisis is just pointless alarmism. That's totally incorrect. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with how dire the situation is.
The thing about climate change is that what were once extreme freak events are now becoming commonplace. Extreme temperatures are becoming normal temperatures. Massive wildfires are far more likely to occur. Warmer oceans means more heat energy available for the formation of tropical cyclones.
I mean, honestly, do you really think that the entire scientific community of the planet did not consider the fact there were extremely hot days in the past?
If you want to ridicule the basic science behind climate change, you'll need to understand it first, instead of assuming you've found a loophole that invalidates everything that everybody in the world missed.
The fact of the matter is that we're all in extreme trouble. So are you. So is everyone. It can not be overstated how bad the situation is. But rather than face that, people would rather choose to believe they're such geniuses that they can invalidate the entire scientific community's decades long work by a gotcha.
The reason why IR is felt as heat is because it has the right wavelength to excite atoms and molecules unions into resonance.
> IR light is not ionizing, but we associate it with heat because the black-body radiation of things we generally interact with (humans and stovetops, for example) is mostly in the infrared spectrum.
In particular, this relationship is backwards. We don't associate heat with those objects because they happen to emit in the infrared. Since they emit in the infrared, they are good at heating (i.e. exciting molecular unions into vibration modes that make most of the energy stored). This is related to the fact that most of the mass of an object is associated to the nucleus, instead of the electrons. If it was the contrary, exciting electrons into higher energy states would be a better way to transfer energy into an object.
On the other hand, UV protection is good to prevent high energy being transferred into electrons which then get excited into higher energy states messing up electronic bonds and potentially our DNA.
It literally feels like having your face over an open oven.
In this example, it's obviously Fahrenheit, since 130C makes no sense. From context, you can almost always tell whether it's C or F:
* < 50: C if it's warm, F if it's cold
* > 50: Mostly F, sometimes context-dependent
* And the closer to 0 the less it matters
For other values outside human range it doesn't make much of a difference. Humans can't appreciate the difference between 10000C and 10000F, it's just "really damn hot".
0F is really cold.
100F is really hot.
Something towards the middle feels pretty good (50F, 60F.. but really depends on preference in this region).
So, with that in mind, 130F is scorching off the charts, and I wouldn't want to be out there.
This doesn't change the fact that 130 is hot, but for many people 50 F is "freezing."
I've heard this several times, but I can tell you it really doesn't help me to get a good sense of Farenheit. My theory is Americans enjoy describing it this way (0 = really cold, 100 = really hot) because it seems pragmatic and humane, but it probably does little to help them get a feel for the scale. The main reason they have a good feel for the Farenheit scale is lots of experience with it, same as any other scale. Lots of internalised data points that create a frame of reference.
We Brits like to think our scale is easy because 0 = melting ice, 100 = boiling water. But when I estimate the outdoor temperature as 25 C, I think my brain is really just linking that to past experiences of similar temperatures, the ice/boiling water thing doesn't come into it.
It's not a matter of "getting a sense of the scale". That sense of the scale comes from lived experience of weather, not brief textual descriptions of the scale.
Rarely below -18°C ~ 0°F
and rarely above 38°C ~ 100°F
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_Opera_House_and_Hot...
Then, spending the night on the giant sand dunes. The deeper you'd put your hand in the sand, the warmer it would get.
Special people in Death Valley. Gorgeous landscape.
"Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return"
This article goes a long way towards discrediting that record though:
http://stormbruiser.com/chase/2013/08/29/death-valleys-134f-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118715
If the diameter of a coin is 19 mm, the circumference is not 59.6902604182 mm
If you round 327.55 K to 328K and convert that back to Celsius you end up with 54.85°C instead of the original 54.4°C. Increasing inaccuracy by half a degree for the sake of inaccuracy is bad science.
Digits omitted at the right mean we don't know them, not that they are zero.
> and convert that back to Celsius you end up with 54.85°C instead of the original 54.4°C.
Yes, inaccuracy accumulates when you convert back and forth. But it's common practice in physics not to increase the number of significant digits to not give the impression a measurement is more precise than it actually is.
In this specific case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_arithmetic#Multip...
And when precision really matters, then one should explicit the range (eg. +/- after the absolute unit)
You're bound to sometimes lose information doing round trip conversions no matter how many digits you have so don't do that if you care about keeping as much precision as possible.
The Guardian reported it as 129.9 °F because they converted twice!
No, that's wrong. If you convert 328K to Celsius, you get 55C. You can't add arbitrary precision to a number. The correct calculation for a whole degree is:
54C => (54 + 273)K => 327K
If you want a single decimal place of precision:
54.4C => (54.4 + 273.2)K => 327.6K
You can then subtract 273.2 to convert back, and you get the 54.4C you started with.
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrometrics#/media/File:Psy...
"Low 30s" wet bulb is a very big deal.
Sourcing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_...
Ref: ERA5 data & https://climate-explorer.oikolab.com
"Climate change" used to be more commonly referred to as "global warming", but my understanding now is that climate change is actually causing more volatility in the climate, meaning larger swings in temperatures, which has other impacts on things like tornadoes and blizzards.
Is this assessment accurate? I'd love to have a better understanding of the effects of climate change.
First time they'd been measured? Solar activity?
For those working with Celsius: its 54,4 degrees.
So literally everywhere except:
United States, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, The Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.
Remember water conducts way more heat than air.
Also egg whites don't set up until 150 or so, and yolks start firming at 158, so at 130 that's going to be a real runny egg unless you put it on say a black sheet of metal.
(Yes I know it's cheating a bit but it'd work. :)
Your solar oven would not work in the shade, which is where this 130 temp was taken.
Solar ovens are fun tho, the mcguyver of "well it's effing hot and sunny out I might as well make some good steak".
Eggs (especially the yolks) actually have an odd trait of setting at lower temps if held long enough. Try sous-vide eggs at 145 for 2-3 hours and compare to 45 minutes - completely different yolk.
My comment was in jest anyways, nothing wrong with the Death Valley ecosystem.
Spoiler alert: people put terrible contaminants in the water that are now dust-borne, and it smells terrible. These are unrelated phenomena.
I hope someday they connect it to the sea. The area below sea level, El Centro and such, is good for farming, but another inland port seems like a reasonable trade. I'm sure the residents would disagree though. Given enough time, nature will do it for us, as that is one of the rare places where a rift valley is forming on land.
"Metcalf & Eddy, a Massachusetts based firm with almost a century of experience in large scale water resources management, has proposed building two canals, the largest of which would be navigable for ocean going vessels. The cost for digging the U.S. section is estimated at $300 million, with the final pricetag for the completed canals approaching $3 billion. While this is indeed a considerable chunk of money, it is nonetheless a good bargain, considering the increased revenue in land and commerce taxes which local governments stand to gain."
You go there and the lake looks... concentrated.
I recall reading something Mark Twain wrote about it:
"The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen’s hands."
Look up the Los Angelas Aqueduct.
The 1930s were an extremely hot decade. The Dust Bowl happened in part because of the extreme heat and drought during this decade. It exacerbated the Great Depression.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wav...
https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/dust-bowl?mediatype=photo...
>Death Valley famously holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, which is 134 degrees. This record was set on July 10, 1913. However, that measurement is very much in question; an extensive analysis of that record conducted in 2016 by Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded it was “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.”
Sorry, but "of course" is like betteridges law of headlines to me: this begs questions. It goes to <citation needed>. You can't say "of course" without anyone asking "why of course"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
> First, the temperatures reported in Death Valley when the record was set were “not consistent” with weather observed in the same region at the same time
> Second, neighboring weather sites did not post temperatures that were unusually hot.
> Third, Reid and Burt assert the weather observer at the time, Oscar Denton, was inexperienced and may have even fudged the numbers. “The heat wave in July 1913 was the first such he was ‘in charge of’ as an official COOP observer..."
https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/weather-and-climate.ht...
In fact, the temp broke 125F for a stretch of 10 days in a row.
So there was a well documented, well published record of a heat wave going on in Death Valley at that time. It is not impossible just because someone wants to FUD 100 years later.
From Chris Stachelski on NOAA's website:
"Weather observations in the modern record at Death Valley began at the Greenland Ranch in 1911." So the observer had more than 2 years of consistent recordings before this record was hit. He was not "inexperienced".
https://vlab.ncep.noaa.gov/web/nws-heritage/-/one-hot-weathe...
Death Valley has extremely unique geography.
From Andrew Palmer, meteorologist, in Monthly Weather Review (1922)
"The temperature of 134° F. recorded on July 10, 1913 is believed by meteorologists to be the highest natural air temperature ever recorded with a tested standard thermometer exposed in the shade under approved conditions."
(Below copied from PDF, with link below which has excellent analysis of why Death Valley is so unique)
"The excessive heat of Death Valley is easily expldned. Situated \\-ell to the south of the summer storm tracks, there are no alternnting weather conditions such ns characterize the passage of HIQHS and LOWH. It is a typical solar climate, solar insolation being the c.hief control. During the long summer days the air is escan- sively heated by the high sun, as there is too little mois- ture in the air to permit the formation of clouds. Esc~s- sive heating causes a$cenrling currents, and nir sli s place of air rising over the valley iloor. The air w1iic.h slips down the IiiountrLin slopes is heated dynaniica.llp as it descends. The winds are local nnd convectional. The desert sand, gravel, rocks, nnd salt arc so highly heated durinw the lon days t1ia.t they do not have 01’ or- The cumulative effects of theso various agencies ro"
https://journals.ametsoc.org/mwr/article/50/1/10/87157/DEATH...
Article from 1922 even includes a photo of the weather station at Greenland Ranch.
ftp://ftp.library.noaa.gov/docs.lib/htdocs/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-01-0010.pdf
Sorry, not buying the FUD.
- “About September 1912, Oscar Denton replaced Thomas Osborne as the Greenland Ranch USWB COOP weather station observer. Denton, of San Diego, began signing the USWB COOP forms in September, but the first form with data in his handwriting was December 1912. Denton served as the observer, caretaker, and foreman of the ranch for the Pacific Coast Borax Company until mid-August, 1920. Thus, Denton’s first full summer as the weather observer was the summer of 1913.”
- “When rain fell at the ranch, recorded amounts were almost invariably in the amounts of 0.01”, 0.10”, 0.20”, and 0.30”.”
- “There were occasional periods when the daily maximum and minimum temperatures would take on a persistent and rather unnatural numerical pattern.”
- “These instances suggest that Denton may have been just ‘filling in the blanks’ for days when he missed taking the observations.”
The original article list many other issues.
All in all it seems Denton wasn’t the most professional observer. Obviously 100 years later anything is difficult to proof, but it seems very likely that not enough care was taken when recording the numbers.
one place has a temporary record: "definite proof of climate change!"
I know climate change is a real issue, but I can see how the media machine is helping in producing skeptics
oh, and the dogmatic aspect of it all as well, where even skirting on the _side_ of the _very real_ communication problem gets heavily downvoted
they're definitely making the connection.
did you read the article?
Astrology, homoeopathy, telepathy, seances, conspiracy theories; the world in awash in centuries old nonsense.
You can't produce evidence, proof, arguments, or rationalization to assuage these people of their beliefs, they are stubborn in them.
Same with climate change denialists.
The ONLY problem is we give them a voice. We don't say have a metrologist and a fortune teller on to hear both sides of a forecast but there's still an insistence on having some climatologist who knows what they are talking about and some random hothead who works at a PR firm for Exxon when talking about climate change for the viewer to "decide".
Nonsense! It takes years of specialized study, the viewer isn't qualified to decide, that's the media's job, to not put on PR spinster horseshit and claim it as potentially valid.
There will always be large pool of nonsense. We need to stop dipping our toes into it and amplifying those voices in critical urgent issues such as climate change. We don't have the time for the bullshit.
For all the talk we do about "bold disruptive innovation" it's all nonsense, we are propping up industries that are killing the planet through nonstop bullshit because we don't want to rock the boat too much on power and profit structures.
- All points that we know to be possible candidates for the hottest temperature should have been measured. Lets say any spot within 10% of 130 should be recorded. So all spots that had measured temperatures 115+ in the last two decades should have been continuously recorded since 1931. I doubt this is true.
- Are we are measuring all possible points on earth where highest temps are possible? This is an "All Swans are White" category of pronouncement. Given how much of the earth is still remote, war torn and just not probed out, I doubt this is true.
These pronouncements from journalists are infuriating. These journos typically have zero training in scientific rigor and very strong ideas of their own efficacy. Woe to the scientists who encourage these statements. Alarmism sells more copies (or clicks) than tempered scientifically accurate statements.