Thousands without power during record-breaking heat | Hacker News Reader

Thousands without power during record-breaking heat

koin.com

The Portland weather forecast shows a high of 114° F today and a high of 118°F tomorrow. Today was an all-time record high, by one degree, and tomorrow will be hotter.

Datlyum that's like 48c? Getting up on the peak of tolerable temperatures for work that is. Worst I've copped was around that with 53 measured in some areas on-site due to additional plant equipment radiated heat.

Toasty af, keep your hydration up. Don't be surprised if you go through a liter an hour and still don't piss.

That's highly dependent on humidity. If it's dry your body has means to cool itself through perspiration, but if the air is saturated in water vapor, temperatures as low as 35 or 36C can be deadly.

Fortunately, we are not on the east coast. I don't know about Portland but Seattle's humidity is < 50%, which means normal human cooling systems will be efficient assuming you drink prodigious amounts of water to replace the evaporative losses. Also some electrolytes.

It reminds me a bit of when I would go on expeditions in the southwest deserts. I am constantly drinking prodigious quantities of water throughout the day but rarely need to urinate. But with more sweat than the southwest deserts, which have extremely dry air (you mostly don't sweat at all because it has no liquid phase).

As long as people drink enough fluid, they should be fine.

I grew up on the east coast, and was always baffled by the notion that sweat kept you cool. In my experience, sweat just made you slimy. I knew the physics of it, but it just didn't seem to work.

Then I visited the southwest, and noticed that I was perfectly comfortable on 100F days. Then I noticed that I wasn't slimy, either. And then it all clicked into place: the basic physics explanation doesn't apply if the air is already saturated.

Almost 45c-48c! I already have trouble functioning at 35c with an A/C. I couldn't imagine +10c and no power, crazy.

Reminder that everything from power lines to levees is built to withstand "100-year events" and nothing more. Given the number of things designed this way, something will always be experiencing a 100-year event, at this moment. (Japan made the mistake of building Fukushima to withstand 100-year events and it bit them pretty much immediately)

Obviously not everything needs to be over-provisioned, but when life is on the line it's best to take dismissals as a "freak occurrence" with a grain of salt.

It doesn't help that we're having "100 year heat" every other year in the past decade.

Is it still the case that AC is a ridiculous option nobody ever buys in cars up there? I grew up near Seattle and lived in Portland and in both cases all that mattered was the working heater, and windows that could roll down maybe for a few weeks in the summer.

I can't imagine this plus the normal area humidity though. Hope it's a bit more of a dry heat.

I'm almost certain that you haven't been able to buy a car without AC for more than a decade, enthusiast cars not-withstanding. Homes, however, are often without AC. Seattle has the lowest per-capita AC installations for US metro areas, something like 40% last I checked.

We desperately need to invest in climate proofing all the states that might be materially affected by climate change.

Wouldn't that be all of them? Or is that your point?

All will be effected but some way more than others. The warm states should prepare for arctic blasts. The temperate states should prepare for more extremes. States that already deal with extremes will only need to prepare for degree not kind.

https://archive.is/bJ0jN

Dumb question but are heat waves like this caused by global warming or are they the result of local weather systems that just happen to line up in a way that results in especially high temps?

Heat waves are weather events, but a general trend of more/longer/warmer heat waves would be considered climate.

Global warming is a climate change. Single weather events like a heat wave may very well be the result of global warming, but it could also be a random event.

One good example are floods. We usually talk about 5-year, 20-year and 100-year floods. A 100-year flood could be triggered by unusually large snowfall during the winter followed by a particularly wet spring with a sudden heat wave that melts all the snow in mountains at the same time.

Global warming makes 100-year-floods 10-year-floods.

I don't think heat waves are caused by global warming - I think they happen more often as a result of global warming. For example, a heat wave that would normally happen every once in 100 years now happens once every 10 years.

The reality is that we don't actually have the answers people imagine we have. Temperature records have been kept since about the 1850s and data from before that time is based on proxies from which we make inferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record

First actual recording of temperature in Seattle, Washington dates to 16 February 1870.

https://mrcc.illinois.edu/FORTS/histories/WA_Seattle_Conner....

I am not readily finding a similar document for Portland, Oregon.

In the US, we sometimes have oral histories from Indigenous populations that help clue us. In Southern California, there were Native stories about their ancestors being aware of a lake in what is now the Salton Sea and was dry land when White settlers or explorers were first going into that area.

We have data models. We have oral histories. We think we know what the weather was like for thousands of years but actual recorded weather goes back less than two hundred years.

So the reality is that we know for certain less than our stories in popular media might lead you to believe. Please keep in mind that our awareness of a hole in the ozone was delayed due to an algorithm that dropped readings of "zero" from the data on the assumption that it was some kind of error.

If you think our data models are perfect and humans make no mistakes, you can believe what our news stories tell you. If you don't believe that, then the answer is that "We don't actually know as much as we like to pretend we do."

(insert references to The Incredibles and Edna asking "Do you know where he is?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqMxPw6MVzY)

Not a dumb question. It is hard to say. There was a similar spate of temperatures a century ago, though this appears to be topping those.

Even Seattle, which is robustly protected by its geography, is suffering anomalously high temperatures. Few people have air conditioning because most days rarely exceed 25°C. We are looking at 45°C on Monday, which is a once or twice per century occurrence.

I would love someone more knowledgeable to chime in, but my experience in Australia has taught me that we don't build for long term heat waves. My house can handle a day at 45c, but a week? Everything gets heat soaked, even the cold water tap is hot.

Australians rarely have basements, but I wonder if this could be part of the solution long term. I have seen homes in the desert with huge concrete slabs inteded to operate as heatsinks/regulators, perhaps a concrete basement could do the same thing.

The Pacific Northwest is not built for heatwaves at all. It has a very mild and stable climate as such things go due to the geography. There simply isn't a need to deal with much heat. A serious "heatwave" in Seattle is 30-35°C, and they pass as quickly as they come.

Even if homes had a lot of thermal ballast by construction, long runs of high temperatures like now require air conditioning. Something like 25% of homes, mostly newer ones, have air conditioning. It simply has not been needed historically. If there are a few days of 30°C temperatures, you opened a window. This current weather system is running much hotter and much longer than traditional Seattle summer weather.

It feels like global warming rotated the microclimate circle that loops around Seattle > Indiana > Arizona > NorCal, about ninety degrees clockwise as a side effect of adding energy into the system.

I suspect there’s a better way to say that in jetstream but I neither speak newscaster nor climatologist :( Instead I’ll try to describe what the arrows in that cycle look like to me:

The climate spikiness from NorCal wine country moved up to Seattle. The flooding rains moved to Indiana. The endless drought expanded from Arizona to California. And all the weather systems got a jolt of energy, widening the extremes in all locations.

There is a third question, which is mixture of both of your questions: are local weather systems impacted by global warming?

Local weather systems are a part of the globe, so yes

Here is a graphic that shows the number of days >30°C in Germany over the last few decades: https://twitter.com/DWD_klima/status/1407023635798319106/pho...

I think the trend is pretty clear.

Global warming brings more energy into the system so it's likely there will be more wild swings into extreme temperatures in the future and more energetic events like hurricanes etc. (not a climatologist).

Attribution of weather events is a nontrivial task due to the complexity of weather systems. This is one of the groups that does: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/

Tldr, climate change is making many (but not all) of recent extreme weather events more likely or more extreme.

It's hotter in Oregon than it's gotten all year in Texas. What a weird year.

Remember that in Palo Alto, CA, most homes were built without A/C like Portland too. The summers were sweltering in PA in recent memory (2012-2018).

Wichita Falls, TX used to be "the tornado capital of the world", but now it's Berkshire, Greater London, UK.

https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-city-tx-wichita_fall...

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/weird-news/tornado-capital-w...

France: 15k heatwave deaths in 2003 due its unexpected nature, 1.5k in 2019

The underlying issue is increasing weather variability. It is a symptom of a lack of latitudinal stability in jet-stream patterns. This is caused by the climate change warming (increased absorbed system energy) of the Arctic. There will be a blue ocean event there very soon since ice is already <5k km^3 in the summers. What this means is wilder weather (and storms) everywhere.

RIP recent memory (2012-2018)

This is a news website, right? What are they doing that makes them non-compliance with GDPR? Is it just the cookies?

They rather block all European visitors than ask for consent to track them. I am guessing that they used to have very few visitors from Europe so they couldn't justify the development cost of producing a website respectful to their visitors privacy.

this is pretty normal in the nevada regen the summer heat that is.

So is air conditioning.

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