Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records | Hacker News Reader

Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records

bbc.com

286 pointsbelter302 comments

Over 10 years ago, James Hansen called future extreme events "Rolling a Thirteen". You were suspecting the two dice you were rolling were not regular anymore, because the average had crept upwards, but after rolling a thirteen, you know.

EDIT: It seems to actually have been Steven Sherwood in 2010. https://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/tumblin-dice/

There is that and then there is the fact that measuring for increasingly longer time periods will give you more and more extremes.

With two dice you usually start by rolling some 7's, a 10, etc. Then after many tries you will have rolled a 2 and a 12.

Edit: Note that this is not me saying I don't believe in climate change people!

This is only true if the set of possible outcomes has remained static and if the probabilities of each outcome has remained static. With climate change the probabilities have shifted and the possible outcomes may have shifted too.

They may have, but the question is whether or not the assumption that we have been rolling 2 6-sided die is correct in the first place. For all we know we could have been rolling 3.

I truly don't understand what your point is. If, in your parlance, we have been rolling 3 dice all along then this means our previous 1000 years of climate data is truly extraordinary since this is the first time seeing a number greater than 12. So extraordinary that it is not plausible to think that we have been rolling 3 dice all along. Of course this is possible in a similar way that it is possible that an unseen intelligence has been controlling things all along.

The point about seeing 13 is that the set of outcomes have changed. We are beyond the realm of thinking that nothing has changed. It's not the we have always been rolling 3 dice; it's that we are now rolling 3 dice.

Yes, but we have an awful lot of new high points in recent times.

The earth is quite a big place and we are recording temperatures quite detailed since the 1850ies, so if we are accepting the null hypotheses of there not being a rise in averages, stochastic is rearing it's ugly head quite a bit since the early two-thousands...

It is not like that: it is not about how long you look at it, it is about "one in a century" events are happening once in ten years, or even once a year now.

Yes, but, we have been measuring (and at increasing accuracy and with a changing landscape) for not so very long.

Trees have been measuring far longer. Other indicators of climate go back a very long way and we have a pretty good idea of major shifts in the past. It’s not like we just create data from nowhere…

The longer time goes on, the more rare records should become. But record highs are becoming more common

In Canada most temperature extrema are still from the first half of the 20th century:

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

Any very large deviation dating from the 20s or 30s is probably a measurement error

I think you have it backwards. For a stationary process, the probability of getting a new "all-time high" actually goes down as your record-keeping time increases.

One thing I've noticed when coping with severe heat, and often get laughed at, is to wear a wet t-shirt. It's incredible how instantaneous the relief is. I just take an ordinary cotton shirt, fold it neatly into a small packet and run it under the tap. Press it a few times so the water runs through the folded package and then unfold. Don't wring it as it will stretch the cloth beyond repair, and put it on. Initially it will feel weird and uncomfortable, but once it's on I feel my head getting more relaxed by the instant. You can even take a comfortable jog outside in 35C in the blasting sun for up to 10 minutes. The shirt will be near dry by than and it will get uncomfortable very quickly, but think of the possibilities! On extreme days I just wetten the shirt for 4-5 times a day and put a fan on me. No sweat when facing >35 degrees inside.

I tried it with pants as well but if you do so, don't wetten it above the pockets as the multi-layer will make it damp without much of the adiabatic cooling perks.

Similarly, run your head under cold water

I find that drinking near-freezing-temperature water also helps, although it's somewhat limited by your stomach's ability to transfer heat. I think the cold constricts blood vessels in the stomach and limits the total amount of heat-transfer-per-second pretty quickly, resulting in a "water baby" that takes 20-30 minutes to come up to temperature and leave the stomach.

It's great the first couple minutes, though.

Bingo... when I was a kid, we lived south of Miami and were part of a cult (different story for a different time, lol). We spent a lot of the summer time on intersections handing out miscellaneous religious texts to commuters in their cars. In any case, the wet t-shirt concept was too uncomfortable and chaffed.

Instead, we ended up taking our baseball caps, dipping them in freezing cold water coolers, and putting them on our head. You'd get like, 20 minutes of relief before returning to dunk the hat again. Having the soaking hat drip on your face and neck provides a similar experience to running your head under cold water without needing an accessible spigot.

The effectiveness of this technique depends on the humidity being low. If you tried this when it's 80+% humidity it probably wouldn't do much.

Was it in fact that high of humidity in BC during this event? I think it wasn't, right? When I looked at Portland's weather on the day it was really hot there, the humidity was around 20%.

In the interior of BC it’s typically quite dry during the summer. It’s basically high desert at least in the south.

At 49C you need a dewpoint of almost 70 (!!) to get 20% relative humidity. thats nasty -- during the heatwave in portland the dewpoint was between 63-68 most days. Usually its ~55. For context, the dewpoint on the east coast during the storm season usually is between 70-75.

Or when it's over 52 degrees outside, when "wet bulb" temperature (= a thermometer in a wet cloth) goes over 35, which is what they've been having in Pakistan. At that temperature, the evaporative cooling effect of water (like sweat) is no longer enough to manage temperature, and even fully healthy and hydrated people can die from heat exposure.

I mean I watched people in Canada in the news this morning and thought, why are they still outside in the sun even?

Just to elaborate on the "thermometer in a wet cloth" explanation...

If you have water at the wet bulb temperature exposed to ambient air, then evaporation and condensation are in equilibrium. Above the wet bulb temperature, there is more evaporation, transferring heat from the water to ambient air. Below it, there is more condensation, transferring heat from ambient air to the water.

Except at 100% humidity, this is higher than the dew point, which is the temperature where water spontaneously condenses out of the air.

> I mean I watched people in Canada in the news this morning and thought, why are they still outside in the sun even?

"Mad Dogs And Englishmen" by Noël Coward (1932)

  In tropical climes there are certain times of day
  When all the citizens retire
  To take their clothes off and perspire
  It's one of those rules the greatest fools obey
  Because the sun is far too sultry
  And one must avoid its ultry-violet ray

  The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts
  Because they're obviously, definitely nuts!

  Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPnJM3zWfUo

https://genius.com/Noel-coward-mad-dogs-and-englishmen-lyric...

This gave me a chuckle

it's funny the note of colonialist superiority at the end of this poem when I live in the tropics and we regularly call burnt as fuck tourists 'cocido como un camaron' which means cooked like a shrimp. then they get to spend the next day moaning in bed while we take their hotel money and hit the beach with proper sun protection early in the morning when there's way fewer tourists getting skin cancer for no good reason other than operating at times they're used to. Haha!

> I mean I watched people in Canada in the news this morning and thought, why are they still outside in the sun even?

Dunno about being in the sun, but if you don’t have AC and the house is at ambient temp you might as well be outside (normally in the shade) as you’ll at least get some air.

If you're outside you also need to content with the affects of the sun shining on you.

If you don't have AC there are things you can do to your home keep the temp low through the day. You essentially trap the cooler evening air and keep the sun out.

Agreed. In the weeks of no electricity after TS Ike I regretted taking my window plywood off. I had waited a few days and during those days the house was reasonably not cool thru the day but comfy. Without the plywood things got stuffy quickly (old original uninsulated windows).

That works great until it doesn't. A lot of Canadians depended on this mechanism instead of air conditioning, especially on the prairies which is semi-desert: high days, low nights and low humidity. But when your nighttime low is 27...

A side thought... it's quite incredible how we in "the west" have managed to make our lives flow with little impact from seasons, weather, and stuff like that. Just in general. Thinking about how people had it 200 years ago... it was so different.

> If you don't have AC there are things you can do to your home keep the temp low through the day. You essentially trap the cooler evening air and keep the sun out.

That's the normal way to do it, but it doesn't work when there's no wind and air temp doesn't cool down significantly at night. Even fans throughout the dwelling don't end up cooling that much overall, because they really only move the air that's in their path (unless you already have ceiling fans to create larger turbulences and better mix the air).

> Dunno about being in the sun, but if you dom’t have AC and the house is at ambient temp

Depending on design, houses can be above ambient outdoor temperature without AC

Now is there a way to do architecture to passively remove moisture from the air...?

Yes, dozens of ways to do this honed over millennia in hot humid climates, but put in use only by the fringe minority off grid types in modern societies now. God how I yearn to be a fringe minority off grid type. My time will come.

It often makes me wonder why weather reports dont mention the wet bulb temperatures, is it that these measurements are not usually available from monitoring stations?

Don't most weather reports mention the "feels like" temperature, which is essentially the same thing (temperature adjusted for humidity)?

The NWS has a map with experimental wet bulb data here: https://digital.mdl.nws.noaa.gov/

80% humidity with 35C+ heat means death within 15 minutes.

this is so common in coastal places in Southern India. no death in 15mins here.

I read stuff like this on HN and think that many of you must be living in a different physical reality.

I live in Greece where currently we're in the middle of a heatwave (temperatures above 38C for more than a week). I don't recall a single time in my life where we had high temperatures and high humidity levels. But I've read once that if the temperature is higher than 35C and the humidity above 60% you can't live outside because the body can't expel heat fast enough.

> But I've read once

It's best not to assume what you read on the internet is always true. Some people post things that turn out to be utter nonsense. Easily checkable nonsense to boot.

It's explained further down in the comments. It's the so called wet bulb temperature. I was wrong about the 15 minutes limit though, turns out it's about two hours.

You'll be shocked to learn about steam rooms.

I believe that steam rooms are incompatible with human life in the sense that you will overheat and eventually in a hot steam room. Most people are sensible and exit before this happens.

And, like, the entire American south

In fairness it was air conditioning that turned Florida into useless swamp to tourist paradise/trap.

I really hate it because I know it will only make things worse long term but my North European country is rapidly installing AC everywhere now thanks to increasing heatwaves.

A great positive feedback loop, no? Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) creates a need for more AC which in turn creates more ACC which furthers the need for more AC. Yeah I don't see this going well for the next few decades.

I've been in steam rooms. You're strongly advised to stay no longer than twenty minutes inside.

Here's the science behind this claim: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838

> While some heat-humidity impacts can be avoided through acclimation and behavioral adaptation (12), there exists an upper limit for survivability under sustained exposure, even with idealized conditions of perfect health, total inactivity, full shade, absence of clothing, and unlimited drinking water (9, 10). A normal internal human body temperature of 36.8° ± 0.5°C requires skin temperatures of around 35°C to maintain a gradient directing heat outward from the core (10, 13). Once the air (dry-bulb) temperature (T) rises above this threshold, metabolic heat can only be shed via sweat-based latent cooling, and at TW exceeding about 35°C, this cooling mechanism loses its effectiveness altogether. Because the ideal physiological and behavioral assumptions are almost never met, severe mortality and morbidity impacts typically occur at much lower values—for example, regions affected by the deadly 2003 European and 2010 Russian heat waves experienced TW values no greater than 28°C (fig. S1). In the literature to date, there have been no observational reports of TW exceeding 35°C and few reports exceeding 33°C (9, 11, 14, 15). The awareness of a physiological limit has prompted modeling studies to ask how soon it may be crossed. Results suggest that, under the business-as-usual RCP8.5 emissions scenario, TW could regularly exceed 35°C in parts of South Asia and the Middle East by the third quarter of the 21st century (14–16).

It is when people who don't have any real understanding of physics or biology make absurd comments.

Reminds me of the comment that a 40 MPH car crash isn't potentially deadly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26470848

Why? 15 min is a bit of an artistic stretch, but otherwise the statement above is correct. 35C at 80% humidity means wet bulb temperature of 32 degrees, which is not survivable by most humans. 38C at 80% humidity means TW of 35 degrees, which is not survivable by anyone.

I totally agree that's correct except for key qualifying statement.

Do you have a source on this please?

It's the wet bulb thermometer reading (temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth over which air is passed). At 35°C it is considered lethal for humans after a couple of hours.

> Wet bulb thermometer readings are significantly lower than the more familiar dry bulb readings, which do not take humidity into account. Researchers say that at a wet bulb reading of 35C, the body can no longer cool itself by sweating and such a temperature can be fatal in a few hours, even to the fittest people.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

They're confusing it with a 35 C wet bulb temperature. 35 C dry bulb temperature would only equal 35 C wet bulb temperature at 100% RH.

You can convert with a psychrometric chart [1] or with a calculator [2]. At sea level, 35 C dry bulb, 80% humidity is about 32 C wet bulb. Dangerously hot, yes, but it won't kill you in 15 minutes.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Psychrom...

[2] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb

95F at 80% humidity is typical summer weather in the southeastern US (though it's been much cooler this year). Is it comfortable? No, but it's also not death in 15 minutes.

Where does it get 95° F and 80% humidity in the southeastern US? I grew up in Miami, and it was rare to have a day above 90° F in the summer, but the humidity made it unbearable.

I can’t even imagine how hot it would have felt at 95° F or higher with the same humidity—I wouldn’t be surprised if it was deadly.

Houston.

Just as the OP said, these temperatures are deadly.

From https://www.houstontx.gov/health/Epidemiology/e-heat-illness....:

> In the summer of 2000, 26 deaths involving Houston residents were reported. In 2001, 13 deaths were due to heat.

From https://environmenttexas.org/news/txe/global-warming-increas...:

> Thursday, September 6, 2007, HOUSTON – The death toll from extreme heat in Houston each summer will increase from about 24 to nearly 32, resulting in 192 additional heat-related deaths by mid-century

> Just as the OP said, these temperatures are deadly.

> > Thursday, September 6, 2007, HOUSTON – The death toll from extreme heat in Houston each summer will increase from about 24 to nearly 32

The actual number of heat deaths in Houston and Harris County in 2018 was 15; Houston itself sees 4–6 per year. Maybe air conditioning is more common a decade later than was originally predicted, or perhaps medical intervention arrives more quickly or is more effective.

Sources: https://nihhis.cpo.noaa.gov/Urban-Heat-Island-Mapping/Campai... and https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-depth/20...

I think the problem with the OP is they said it 'means death'. Can be deadly would be better phrasing, particularly to those who are susceptible.

The reason why I think this distinction is important is because there is some level of heat + humidity where it really does mean death to anyone in some short amount of time.

Which part? I think it gets grosser near the Redlands since you get the mugginess of the glades + less cooling from the ocean. Late July through early August can stabilize around 95, maybe 20% of the days were like that when I lived in Homestead, FL. The other days around that time like 85-92 F w/ 80% humidity.

But I guess you're right -- I've had friends heat stroke after 2-3 hrs of unshaded exposure when it hits ~92+ i.e. soccer pickup games. Shade will carry you a long way, even without AC though -- I have extended family in La Guajira that still lives like this.

Ah, yeah, I can totally see that. I grew up in the South Miami / Coral Gables / Coconut Grove areas...divorced parents so I was all over the place. I did always consider Homestead to be a sweltering swamp with desert heat. Going out there in the summer was always a nice way to get dripping with sweat. :P

> But I guess you're right -- I've had friends heat stroke after 2-3 hrs of unshaded exposure when it hits ~92+ i.e. soccer pickup games. Shade will carry you a long way, even without AC though -- I have extended family in La Guajira that still lives like this.

Oof...yep, same experience, especially when the sun isn't occluded by clouds. It's gnarly.

Atlanta?

Tampa dude... Tampa... east coast FL is typically nicer in climate compared to Gulf Coast. I grew up Gulf Coast, I live on the east coast now. Sooooooooooooo much nicer.

That's surprising to me! I always thought Tampa was more temperature than the east coast.

Cities near the coast are usually more moderate. New Orleans is a counter example that I've been to though. But, look at cities like Columbia, SC or Atlanta, GA. Very high humidity and very high day time temps in July and August.

No it doesn’t, that was pretty much the weather in Boston on Monday. It was pretty dreadful being out in it, but not deadly.

Crazy that steam rooms exist then…

Who knew that saunas are actually death chambers...

A sauna has extremely low humidity. A steam room, on the other hand..

Not quite. There are dry saunas. And wet saunas. And everything in between. And then there are steam rooms. They are different things.

Sauna are dry. The wet ones are hammam.

Completely false. Traditional authentic Finnish (where sauna was invented) sauna is wet. Dry sauna is some weird American concoction.

Laughs in slavic banya.

You soft western babies with your dry saunas. Over there the banya is kept at 110% humidity, and old men beat you with sticks the whole time.

This is not in line with the traditional sauna definition.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877543/

They are, but not in 15 mintues - it's more like a few hours. But a human being can't survive for extended periods of time in a sauna.

4 million people in Houston would beg to differ.

I’m sure there are many other places as well.

My family and I were outside in above 35C and 80% humidity for over 8 hours two weeks ago and everyone was fine. Lots of walking etc with no issues.

I can easily stay 15 minutes in a hammam. That is > 40°C and > 95% humidity. I think I have sometimes reached 30 minutes

Then as a Basque I would die on some heat waves in August happening every decade or so.

No it does not. You wet your shirt with unheated tap water, wring it out, and wear it. Repeat as necessary every 15 minutes to 1 hour in extreme heat, no matter how humid it is.

In high humidity by wearing a shirt doused in tap water you cool down by heating up your t-shirt. This method does not work if water comes out of your tap already hot. This only happens rarely. In dry environments evaporative cooling helps but it is not necessary to be effective.

I recommend using shirts made of elastic breathable material such as under armor shirts for comfort. Cotton tends to stick to your skin extra and feel really nasty.

Elastic breathable material in my experience take less water in, so you have to repeat wettin them more often.

If that is the effect you are going for, would wearing a camelback water bladder have a similar effect? It has slightly less surface area to interface with your body, but you can carry a much larger amount of water.

And put it in the freezer intermittently...

Tap water is colder than the inside of the house. Bringing it into the house reduces the heat inside. Putting it into the freezer heats the room that the freezer is in. You're better off replacing the water when it gets warm. Kinda fucked in a drought, though.

How lasting is this effect though compared to evaporative cooling (which lasts for as long as you stay hydrated due to the replenishment of moisture from sweat)? The volume of liquid you're adding to your garment can't be all that much, and if you combine your body heat with a high ambient temperature it seems like the water should reach equilibrium rather quickly.

I don't doubt it helps in the short term - I live in the southeast and I've done this when hiking many times (once my shirt's already soaked from sweat and I can find a cool stream) - but it only provides a temporary respite.

Here are some numbers: the evaporation enthalpy of water is 2,260 kJ/kg at room temperature. The specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/(kg*K). So for a given amount of water, the evaporation is "worth" about 500 Kelvin of cooling in terms of energy absorbed.

Luckily Lytton is in a semi-desert area - very dry there.

Even here on the coast of BC where humidity is higher (and temps slightly lower), it's reasonably dry right now. Beach towels we put out to dry in the sun are dry in a few minutes.

Seattle is the same, the humidity is high on paper but it didn’t feel like the same 106 in the south, east, or Midwest. It felt…dry hot…like Arizona.

Not as dry as Spokane, however.

You can also sleep under a wet towel.

Yeah your T-shirt is basically doing the sweating for you then. It's the same mechanism.

You can do this with a wet sock to cool down water bottles in the desert. Maybe that helps someone at burning man one day.

What is the humidity when you try this? I am guessing dry and arid.

That tends to be case in the northwestern US this time of year, so I’m guessing that’s true for BC as well. So, it seems like good advice to me.

If you're in Florida, you don't even have to use the tap. Just put on a dry t-shirt and stand outside for a short while.

Also works like that in Britain half the time :/

Different mechanism in Britain though.

Works this way in TX too. Better yet, just go grab the mail and you'll be set. :D

That actually sounds like a better idea than me dousing myself during a run. But then again, I wouldn't jog in this heat. My cap for outside running is about 95*F here in the midwest. If anyone wanted to know my cold temp it's about -25*F including wind chill.

At 49.6C air must be as dry as possible and people likely need a source of colder water as well in order to have a chance of survival because that's obviously extremely hot (body must somehow be able to be 12-13 cooler than air!)

See [1]

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/billions-face-deadly-threshold-h...

You can find cheap (~$5) neck wraps made of PVA fabric that do really well at this evaporative cooling effect.

Another tip I’ve seen, if you have heat over 100 you’re not supposed to use a fan. The moving air removes the cooler air slightly above the skin and replaces it with warmer air. Under 100 it’s good to use a fan.

Running water (such as a stream) is going to likely be better as you rarely have 100 degree water, but I’m assuming the same applies.

My reasoning is that the cooling actually comes from adiabatic cooling, so using a fan to speed up the evaporation will improve the cooling effect. Mileage may vary though considering the humidity and temperatures.

I think you mean evaporative, not adiabatic.

I've already done that, the t shirt will have a bad smell, and I'm not sure it's very good for the skin. 10min is not very long. Also, gravity will make the water drip down, and the t shirt will not retain a lot of water. Maybe use a thicker cotton.

It feels good at the beginning because the water is cold, but your body will heat the water and it won't be that good. There are special small tower make of platic fiber that will retain more water.

The best way is to drink a lot of water, to use an small pump atomizer that you can refill.

Wetting your hair as it can retain water is also a good solution.

The smell will come later. I'd recommend washing the shirt after a day to remove the bad smell. The 10 min is in the full sun while exercising. Sitting behind a desk in a closed environment I'm able to wear it for ±1-2 hours with effective cooling. If the shirt is dripping water, it's too wet and you should press out the water more. Also a thicker cotton feels less comfortable in my opinion, I prefer to wear a thin one and wetten it more frequently!

If I jogged for ten minutes in 35c my shirt would be wetter than it was when I pulled it out of the sink.

No sweat when facing >35 degrees inside. Why in the world would you have to deal with >35c inside? Do you do construction? Frequent power failures?

I love that you simply cannot imagine that houses without air conditioning could exist. In a thread about the weather in Canada, even.

Having no AC because it rarely gets hot is like having no roof on your house because it never rains. It's a silly risk to take, especially when heat pump systems cool and heat the house equally well and much more efficiently than furnaces or resistive heaters.

I live in a developed country where, I estimate, less than 1% of houses have AC.

35°C inside can totally happen in a house or an apartment without AC and window shutters.

Not sure about BC, buy here in Quebec, not everyone has AC. I mean, it's not that uncommon, but off the top of my head I'd head estimate that roughly a third of people have AC?

Of course, when a heat wave comes, everyone wants to buy one of those windows or floor units, but then they sell out at every store in a few days.

I don't have AC in our house, but we do ga e a basement that stays cool even in extreme heat. Not that fun living in a basement, but realistically the AC would only get used a few days a year in average.

The answer to climate change is to wet a t-shirt and sit next to a fan in your damp armchair while watching the world burn. Talk about frog in a pot.

At least it's something that can be done.

Why equate a clever tactic for instant relief for an individual stuck in a potentially fatal heat wave with "the answer to climate change"? Does the inexorable rise in atmospheric CO2 somehow make it unacceptable for a person to seek relief from heat?

It was really a flippant comment on the state of the world today. I think it's still relevant. We are dealing with the affects very well, but not the cause. This is typical of how humans function and worth pointing out if only for gallows/morbid humour.

According to Lancet, extreme cold kills 20x more people than extreme heat every year. As summers get hotter and winters become milder, fewer humans will die on account of extreme temperatures.

Got a link to the source for that ratio? Also, your conclusion definitely doesn't follow from that ratio alone. A simple example:

Before: cold kills 20 people, heat kills 1 person. Cold kills 20x more, for a total of 21 deaths.

After: cold kills 15 people, heat kills 15 people. Cold kills the same number of people as heat, for a total of 30 deaths.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Thanks!

"However, if—as the data seem to show—extreme cold is relatively unimportant, then a few degrees of warming will not yield a large reduction in cold-related mortality. Moreover, if extreme heat is important, then the same few additional degrees might cause a substantial increase in heat-related mortality."

The study warns that global warming won't appreciably reduce deaths due to cold, but might substantially increase deaths due to heat. Again, the current 20-fold factor between deaths due to cold and heat says nothing about future mortality.

Why not wet a kiffeya or a scarf and wrap it around your neck? Cools you faster

You could do both =). Make all your clothes wet and let adiabatic cooling do it's work for you

You can also buy ice packs that you wear draped around your neck. It cools the blood flowing to your cartoid artery, along with the general area. Works really well.

I have to deal with this problem living in a room with no AC/central air and I have some tips that may be useful for others in the same situation.

1. Put a frozen water bottle under your shirt. Keep backups in the freezer to cycle from. It seriously feels amazing and sucks the heat out of your body.

2. Use two or more fans, one good one to blow air at yourself and another one that is redirecting hot air away from you (so it's facing somewhere away from you). It's just like how airflow in a computer works I guess lol

3. Have ice always available, drink a ton of ice water and stay hydrated.

The difference between doing these things and not doing these things for me is having a somewhat productive day vs spending the whole day doing nothing.

This works extremely well on a motorcycle at any speed above 20 km/h, even under protective gear (the only way I've tested). So well that I actually feel a bit cold at first when it's hot but not extreme (below 30°C).

Exact. And a similar trick can be used with a bed sheet hanging extended in rope for cooling your bedroom in very hot nights.

I live in the mountains of Central Arizona, and I do something similar. On really hot summer days, I will take a 45 second cold shower ever few hours. Probably not so healthy to shock the body, but it helps with the heat.

About ten years ago we installed solar panels so now air conditioning is basically free during the day, but I still like the ice cold showers.

Can someone help me understand how we aren’t totally screwed?

We’re on track to pass the limits set by the Paris agreement so why shouldn’t we expect to see record temps near 150-175F by the end of the century?

Climate is a complex system of feedback loops, you shouldn't expect to see arbitrary, linear increases in temperature.

Why would a rise of 2-4F on average increase record temps by 30-65F? I don't understand the leap you're making there.

Edit: to all repliers: I understand that the distribution is widening, but 150F is a far more extreme widening than I have seen contemplated by any experts. That is what I am reacting to. I do not dispute that heat waves will get somewhat worse.

Climate is a complex system, and averages are just averages. Feedback loops and all that.

Ok, that still doesn't answer the question of why a small average rise in temperature would lead someone to expect a large rise in peak temperature. Is it possible to make the statistics work? Yes. Is it likely to happen this way? Not as far as I can tell.

We expect a larger variance in regional temperatures and a higher global average.

Have you read much about climate science? The IPCC Summary for Policymakers report is a really great introduction to what's happening: https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/ Relatively easy and quick read, with references back to the full report if you'd like to go deeper on some topic.

I've read a bit about it. I'm aware that there will be more heat waves, but I have seen no expert claim anything remotely like 150F. There are concerns that some parts of the world will begin to exceed a wet bulb temperature of 98 degrees more regularly, which would be very bad, but still a far cry from actual oven temperature heatwaves.

As shown in this article, we're seeing heatwaves in the 120F range now, with "only" 1C increase in warming. While I can't find any specific estimates in the IPCC reports (section 2.2 in the full report seems the most relevant section), the report frequently mentions more extreme heatwaves. It doesn't seem radical to me as an uneducated observer to extrapolate that out to 150F with another 2-3C increase, especially in the context of a casual conversation like we're having here.

Heatwaves up to 120F aren't exactly unheard of -- they're just unheard of in northwestern North America.

It's worth remembering it's also an unfolding situation, and what I mean to say by that is if you think a 65c peak is unlikely then unfortunately there's no-one you can ask that can give you a totally verified answer. Even still only 5c above current peaks in some places puts us at 55c which is pretty bloody spicy. At that temperature you need to be actively protecting yourself, even a healthy adult might not survive a wave without some kind of proactive protection.

Given that I live in a very hot climate, which already hits 45-50c each year, I'm sitting in the "Better safe than sorry" camp and I am thinking about precautions I can take to make sure me and my family stay healthy long term. One of the longer term thoughts is making sure it's possible to move if it looks like the climate will become particularly challenging.

Yes. Possibly the most devastating effect of climate change is going to be the social/political impacts of the upcoming climate refugee crisis. If you think your right-leaning neighbors are unhappy about immigrants now...

How much has the temperature increased so far? Lytton broke the previous record by 4.6 degrees Celsius(!). Clearly the world hasn't increased by 4.6 Degrees so the peaks are much larger than the average increase.

As more energy enters the system is gets more turbulent, leading to wild swings up and down with greater extremes at both ends. Normally stable systems are becoming wildly disrupted.

"The North Atlantic Jet Stream fluctuates between the Balkans to the south and Scotland to the north. Some 300 years of tree ring samples taken in both places show that the jet stream has become far more variable in the last six decades and more extreme in its positions, which results in more severe climate events and a more rapid shifting between extremes on yearly, monthly, and weekly timescales."[1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/wild-swings-in-extreme-weather-a...

This is just weather. Zoom out to chunks of thirty years to say anything about climate. It's akin to saying warming is overblown because there was a big deep freeze this winter. We saw -38C which was a record low since my thirty years in Alberta.

This is an expected effect of climate change. It's not evidence of climate change, and I wasn't claiming it as such, but it is a possible result of climate change.

One way to think about it is that the global average temperature is the average of winter and summer times in the whole earth. So an increase of a few degrees is not what you will experience, which is the local weather.

The rise of 2 C is the difference between a global annual mean of local daily median temperatures over a 30-year period and an adjusted global annual mean of local daily median temperatures over a 30-year period at the end of last century. It says nothing about variance and does not include precision or accuracy.

It could very well be that everywhere will be 20 or 30 C above the 20th century climatology and the average will still be only 2 C if you truly believe and have faith in the message.

Ever wiggle a tiny bit back and forth in a bathtub to make giant waves as a kid?

As a kid? Was I supposed to stop when I grew up?

If you take one bath a week with water at 10°C, but on the last week you take a 90°C bath, your average over the year is only 1.5°C rise, but you're still dead.

Average is just that. We have a lot of water that is much harder to drastically change the temperatures over, but the land can have wild swings. 2°C of average change is about 10°C swings in temperate climates.

Its complex, for instance one scenario for Europe in the long time is actually a drastic cool down, incl. Something like a possible ice age due to global warming.

The gulf stream (of Mexico) is what keeps parts of Europe warm. With melting ice, oceans are diluted which will cause the flow of gulf stream to slow down and not be able to reach Europe which will have "interesting" effects.

Climate changes shifts the average by a couple of degrees C (in the short term; more than a couple in the longer term). It also destabilises the weather patterns, which results in more extreme events. Basically, it both shifts and widen the distribution of temperatures.

The systems that determine local temps and weather are greatly dependent on small changes over very very massive areas so if you mess those up with small changes local climates will change drastically.

Average vs standard deviation, basically.

Honestly that's what we should be emphasizing to climate doubters more than anything else. The average temperature going up here in Canada may not sound terrifying to people. But if the 95th or 99th percentile is 10-15C higher than they are used to or than the local ecology or population can handle... maybe they'll finally listen?

But I'm not optimistic.

Yeah, even if these are still freak events on the edge of the bell curve - they only need to happen once to kill huge numbers of people.

And we are shifting and broadening that bell curve.

That increase in variance and the instability that comes with it is going to be super fun. We've already been having record cold winters due to the "polar vortex" (caused by weakening of the northern jet stream), now we get a "heat dome" on the other end of the extreme.

One of the most annoying and ignorant dismissals of climate change you can hear from denialists in Canada is "oh it won't be so bad for us, we could really use the warmer weather up here in Canada lol". Maybe these events will get them to understand that no, it won't be beneficial for us at all, but I've already seen comments elsewhere on the internet that are questioning the accuracy of the reports. Stating things like that weather station has been having "problems" in the past. It sounded so much like the covid and election conspiracies I wanted to scream. If people can't or won't trust in scientists or the institutions that are the foundation for our countries, how will we make any progress addressing climate change?

> One of the most annoying and ignorant dismissals of climate change you can hear from denialists in Canada is "oh it won't be so bad for us, we could really use the warmer weather up here in Canada lol".

You can always ask them if they're also looking forward to dozens of millions of climate migrants from South East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, once those places become warmer. Emphasize that those migrants would move into their province or town.

Canada is a sovereign nation, it has no obligation to accept any of those migrants. Under current agreements it would accept asylum seekers from the US, but it could easily withdraw. You could have winged UAVs with small arms paroling constantly at very low time increments at any possible land entrance point, and dropping demolition satchels from helicopters is a very easy method to handle attempted landings. Or you could use the UAVs again if that gets too costly in resources. The current government would probably not try this, but a lot can change over the coming decades. I don't find this position very novel, as MAD, The Samson Option, and the Korean DMZ were considered and at least implemented in a posturing way, even if the first two are quite overblown.

We are. Grab a chair.

This is still "just" a weather phenomenon, not a change in the local climate.

Events like this happen every so often and it's really hard to get some actual statistics on this, because reliable measurements only started about 150 years ago.

This means that extreme weather with occurrence rates of say once every 500 years and below are incredibly hard to classify and evaluate for statistical relevance.

Whether this is just a fluke or a recurring pattern with increasing frequency cannot be ascertained from a singular event like this.

> so why shouldn’t we expect to see record temps near 150-175F by the end of the century?

There are certain limits and differences in where and how temperature is measured (air vs ground, shade vs unshaded, etc.) so it could be argued that such temperatures have already been recorded in the past (see [0]).

Such isolated phenomena, while being great at scaring the crap out of people, aren't the most dangerous or impactful consequences of climate change and ruthless exploitation of natural resources, though.

The loss of drinking water and arable soil is far more critical than a few days of unbearable heat...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...

One of the things I noticed with global warming (still prefer this term) is that local extremes that are supposed to be super rare are not so rare anymore.

Back home, a freak storm + strong wind damaged large parts of the forest around highest mountains around. Pine trees literally broken some 5-10 meters above ground in a wide area.

It was supposed to be once-in-a-century event. Few years after that another one came. And then another.

I think of global warming more like general equilibrium being broken by heating things up. Overall higher temperature with local changes in every direction (even cooling), and more frequent extremes.

Is there hard data on it though? I want to see what the hard data shows and how we know what will happen in the future. With what level of confidence, too.

I’m not denying the problem, I want to know if we should all start planning to live in a war-torn hellscape or if that’s just corrosive negativity from doomsayers. For example you can see other people in the comments saying we’re all screwed, to pull up a chair and watch, etc.

No there isn't. The period in the 1920's to 1940's had more heat extremes. See USGCRP Climate Science Special Assessment: Volume 1: Chapter 6: Temperature Changes in the United States https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/6/ Scroll down to figure 6.3. You can see that the 1920's to 1940's had more extreme heat events than any time since. Figure 6.4 is also useful to look at.

Maybe also refer to figure 6.5, very interesting. Although that wont fit the narrative

That's a misleading chart. What it means is we are seeing more warm records in relation to cold records. It doesn't say anything about the total number of warm records. North America has been seeing milder winters these past thirty years. It doesn't mean we've been seeing more record highs than other periods.

They explain this here: "By extension, there has been an increase in the ratio of the number of record highs to record lows (Figure 6.5). Over the past two decades, the average of this ratio exceeds two (meaning that twice as many high-temperature records have been set as low-temperature records)."

> a singular event like this.

It's quite a stretch at this point to call these events "singular".

Unique weather events around the world get _a lot_ of attention, and almost always make the front page. A harsh weather event that happens nearly anywhere in the world is seen nearly everywhere in the world.

> It's quite a stretch at this point to call these events "singular".

How so? What else would you call an all-time record set since the beginning of data recording? Especially when the new record exceeds all previous ones by several degrees instead of fractions of a degree as is commonly the case.

Because these all-time recording-setting events keep happening. Every time, people try to say "well you can't judge anything from this SINGULAR event", as if none of the other ones had happened.

The data here doesn't seem to align with your claim, at least in the US. Perhaps its happening in other places?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...

Um so it's not just this event that everyone is freaking out about (but they are a little) its the fact that this a harbinger of what is to come due to global warming which is hotter days in cities, infrastructure challenges, crop failure, forest fires, arable land etc. Faster than we thought it would happen.

You can hold on to your theory thats its a 1 in 500 event (you could also hold on to any theory your heart desires) but the recent data and global warming trends point to anthropogenic global warming being the source cause.

I'm not a climate change denier at all, but you've correlated unrelated problems.

Most infrastructure issues are not coming from climate change. They're coming from poorly maintained 50+ year old structures that were engineered to only last for 50 years. What people dont understand, structures have to be checked and lightly repaired every 5 to 10 years. That is normal. Most are not because the last and current gen of politicians are absolute career politicians who thought diverting funds from repair was a good idea.

Crop failure... eh, we haven't seen abnormal crop failures yet. Technically, 2012 and 2013 was far far worse compared to the last 5 years. A few other issues. Crop failure is tracked by insurance claims. Insurance pays out best due to "weather/climate related failure" not so much do to "I fucked up". Claiming weather caused failure, especially in this political climate, is super easy. When it comes to futures and current spot prices, we haven't seen significant crop failures. If you did, food staples would be a lot higher.

That being said, the western states is going to experience a long time of water issues. However, there is good research, that's popped up on HN often, that the west is going back to normal in climate regards. It's less greenhouse gas caused climate change is drying the western states. The last 200 years have been abnormally wet. It going back to normal, which is dry. Just because it doesn't benefit us, doesnt mean we can claim something bad is happening to the climate. Those states are supposed to be drier than they have been.

Hotter days in cities... yea... but New Yorkers die every year due to heat waves. They always have. City folk are typically stupid when it comes to how nature and weather can kill them. I remember as a kid in the 90s, if it's summer, New Yorkers are going to steal window AC units and die en masse. Clockwork. Every single year. Nothing has changed there. A lot of other cities see the same stats, but no one has cared to wide report on it. Now they do because of the clickbait bump in ratings for "climate change caused heat deaths".

Yes, we need to drop greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, the climate is changing and for the worse. No, you shouldn't blame stubbing your toe on climate change. No, the shadow you cant explain wasn't climate change. Blaming everything on climate change gives deniers fodder.

Unfortunately I think it is you who misunderstands the scope of the problem. It's a massive systemic issue that touches pretty much all elements of our systems. Too difficult to explain to people over a comment thread on HN but if you are a systemic thinker then you likely understand this.

Fast counter examples:

Our infrastructure isn't prepared for the changing climates (examples: electricity Texas, ocean barriers many places across planet, increased flooding).

Crop failures: (non California example: Monsoon's in India are becoming increasingly erratic.). California - continuous droughts and killing off crops due to lack of water. Yes it is going back to drier times, however the climate is changed - our forests can't manage (See redwoods in distress - FWIW they been around throughout the drier times > 1000s of years). I'm not saying that were going to lose all our crops right now (insurance models the climate heavily right now - example see climatecorp) - over time its going to get worse. Likelihood will be worse in countries that have limited ability to handle this stuff (i.e. india, china, etc).

Wether or not either of us are right or wrong about this one incident doesn't matter. The world is becoming a hotter and harder place to live for humans and the frequency of adverse events keeps increasing and as humans we are not doing enough to manage our future.

You want to talk systemic... the first problem with California water supply is not drought. It's the people. The most populated areas of California inherently cannot support that level of "human civilization" without diverting large amounts of water from other, far distant areas in a sustainable manner. This comes from people who imagined an area that sees about 35 rainy days a year as "paradise". You are fundamentally and irreparably stupid to imagine that kind of location can house large amounts of people without massive resource diversion. Research the last hundred years, literally, of scandals due to LA's build up. Cali would be far more sustainable if it was more agrarian like Nebraska or Oklahoma. Probably would be an even bigger food powerhouse if the rivers weren't getting siphoned so bad as to do permanent damage to local ecosystems. What I find funny too, how much the Cali types love to play the "holy than thou" game when it comes to environmentalism, yet they're responsible for devastating a whole hell of a lot of terrain. I bring this up because I find the business of climate change to be a farce. It's all finger wagging and pointing that sums up to, "They shouldn't be in power... I should have ultimate power." Hell, let's take your Texas example. You know whose grid is in even worse shape? Cali. They've been mandatory power shut offs as well and way more often. Yet, hey, look at them stupid Texans and their "shitty" grid. If people actually gave a shit, they would say, "it looks like our first target for repair with max gains is... insert failing infrastructure here". No, it turns into a tribe political war. Mostly again, these infrastructure problems are not climate change based. They're based on policy from roughly the 90s that defunded maintenance and upgrade programs. Now we reap those short sighted policies. Pointing at climate change for these problems will not fix them because it's not the inherent cause. The same way pointing out the sky is blue will fix the infrastructure structure policy either. This isnt a new issue either. Engineers have been screaming about this since the late 90s (that I know of), but again, it's not a sexy problem.

I have lived around the Great lakes all my life and I see the research of natural History of these Great lakes as an indicator of long-term climate. That climate ranges quite widely. Right now we think that within the last 14,000 year time period the lakes are about the lowest average they usually get rn. They have before fluctuated about 200 ft in several hundred years. But they've been much much lower before. The average is about 100 ft higher. Just think of the millions of people that's going to affect when the lakes go back to normal. They're already starting to show signs of coming up massive amounts of flooding on both sides.

It’s starting to look like the end mate. The only people who will be left are the ones who can survive.

You need to better define "we" and "screwed"

People without access to clean water and cool shelter (air conditioning) have and will continue to die. People with access to it will survive for awhile, until their access is denied or breaks from the intense stress of novel weather. Other life on the Earth will adapt, just as it adapted when the dinosaurs went away 60+ million years ago.

It's not just the temperatures to be worried about. Our species has distributed itself around the globe and built infrastructure dependent on the climate effecting certain predictable weather patterns. Those patterns have ostensibly been breaking down, and this is just one the results.

The hard cap on temperature is placed by solar irradiation and Earth thermal radiation. To make a place hotter, a location solar irradiation for the day need to exceed the combined thermal radiation for both day and night.

CO2 helps capture some of that thermal radiation but even at 500ppm it's not doing that much. And all of this is not considering the movement of air and the effect of ocean which tends to act as a huge circulating heat sink.

The hottest place achieve those temperature by: not being next to water/plants, having no air movement, and sun directly above. The only param that changed with time is small amount of CO2 concentration, the effect on the maximum temperature on Earth should be minimal.

It's the wild swings in random location, change in weather pattern that will be more trouble. That and the rising sea level.

It is more complex, and worse than that due to heat domes. Air, when it descends, heats up. And a high pressure heat dome results in air descending, so the amount of heat is higher than the amount of solar heat input - earth heat output.

Because we're living now. It's our descendants who are screwed. Just don't have kids.

We've been screwed since 1997 and the lack of political will power to do anything effectively. I've worked in climate tech since 2005 and it has been an emotional slog. Most of the people who work in the space end up burnt out and move into other industries.

I think the best we can hope for at this point is try to dent the upcoming damage. We could ostensibly reverse some of the worst impacts but there just isn't any political will power to really do what is necessary.

I sometimes have a dream where I check my weather app to see that 80°C (175F) is expected for the week to come and that everyone around me is living their lives like everything is ok. Yeah I'm a little anxious.

If you look at the hottest temperatures in Canada, you will see that many records are from the first half of the 20th century. What would people have thought at that time about their future? Maybe there was a guy who asked how we are not all totally screwed?

Almost one hundred years later, we are still here, enjoying life whenever governments don't lock us up. Outside my window it is pissing all day and it's let than 20°C at the end of June, so maybe we are not as screwed as you are thinking.

Here is a list with extreme temparatures from Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...

Local records are normal. There is variation in weather, and there are many "local" spots on earth. There are also coldness records every year, but there is less reporting on it.

There are many more record highs recorded since the 1980's than record lows. That's climate change.

Climate always changes, the question then is, is it extraordinary change because of CO2. I don't think merely counting record events is a good way to determine that 40 years is also not a very long time span..

Also it seems likely that more measurements are being taken (at more locations). And cities are expanding, changing local weather.

Just a reminder for commenters: please don't use only Fahrenheit when you are writing to an international audience. Either Celsius or both.

Thanks!

Or at least indicate what you mean by 'degrees'.

Yeah because interpreting Fahrenheit degrees as Celsius in a topic about warming can create short bursts of stress.

Fort McMurray, latitude 56.7° N and a subarctic climate, is forecast to be 106F / 41C today.

The combination of heat waves and fragile power grids (e.g., Texas' ERCOT) seems to make it inevitable that a heat-induced large-scale power outage will produce a mass causality event.

Authorities reported over 130 heat related deaths in the Vancouver area yesterday. Mostly seniors living alone without air conditioning (aircon isn't common here). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-heat-wave...

Fort Mac is the coldest place I've ever been to, by far. I saw the wrong side of minus 40 there ("F or C?" "Both!").

Crazy to think of it that hot.

Alberta is weird.

I experienced both temps in Calgary—it's notoriously volatile because of the Chinook winds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_wind) that come down from the Rockies.

Middle of summer could see a swing from -15°C to +15°C inside of hours. Calgary would frequently be -30 to -40 in the winter and easily a dry heat of +30 in the summers, but usually not for extended periods because the winds would inevitably change.

It's not weird (other than the fact that the current temps are a record). Wild temp swings over short periods and a huge diff between winter and summer is par for the course in continental interiors where you're var away from the temperature stabilizer that is the ocean.

It's just that nearly everyone on HN is from the coastal plain(s) of North America or Europe so this isn't something people think about unless they need to make a "it gets cold in the desert at night" quip for easy points.

It's a wind phenomenon of a particular kind specific to that region. That's weird. It's weird to have a swing of 20-50 degrees within a single day. It's regular in those specific regions, but it's weird on whole. If you don't like the word weird, you can use the word strange or unique. Weird is more fun. I like fun.

Apparently, it's a dry heat which should help reduce the danger to human life.

But equally, I suppose low humidity might increase the chance of forest fires etc. It seems some have already broken out in the area[1]

[1] https://governmentofbc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/ind...

Only if you have access to enough water and have decent heat regulatory systems; there's plenty of people with dysautonomia.

Not Canada but Central Europe. It wouldn't be that bad if the humidity wasn't so high. I remember visiting Acropolis of Athens some years ago and it was 38C in shadows. Yet the salty wind from the sea + the low humidity made it much more bearable than this.

This. London is a hellhole when it’s bloody 33. OTOH, the Mediterranean is much more bearable at the same temperature.

>, the Mediterranean is much more bearable at the same temperature.

I am not so sure about that. I live in the Atlantic part of Spain (Basque Country), and once I reached Barcelona the mix of humidity and heat was far worse than the Bay of Biscay, if not more, even if the Atlantic Spain has almost the same weather as London with even more rain on average.

If you meant "Continental Mediterran climate" such as Madrid or the Castilles (the furthest place in Spain from the coast, thus, a really dry climate, think about the Castilles as a plateau with farms, wheat fields, villages and so on over kms and kms except Madrid being a megapolis), then you are right.

43C in a village/hamlet on Salamanca surrounded by what fields and no "modern" civ in 40kms can be much more bearable than 33C in Bilbao where the combo of humidity, being placed near the coast, a really rainy weather (more than London, I am not kidding) and the rest being surrundead by mountain peaks gives you a free sauna over 30C; or Barcelona/Valencia, these are cities built by the Mediterranean sea with really high humidity.

I am more familiar with Provence and the West coast of Italy. My experience there is that the weather is quite dry. Particularly compared to London. Now that I think about it there might be something akin to katabatic winds because of the mountains nearby, bringing in drier air from the land.

I’ve been to Barcelona and Madrid a couple of time but not enough to get an opinion (though I vividly remember being roasted to death in Granada).

Humidity being lower in central Spain makes sense though, as it is higher in altitude and further from the sea.

> more than London, I am not kidding

I can believe that. It actually does not rain that much in London. But humidity is a still a problem, because the sea is very close and there is no continental mass from where dry air could come from.

Lytton is basically a deep canyon with steep hillsides, it's usually the hottest spot in all of British Columbia.

I was wondering about that. It seems odd that it managed to be warmer by at least a few degrees than all of Washington and Oregon.

I live in the Fraser Valley near Vancouver and it got up to 45C yesterday. It was an extreme heat, nothing like I've ever experienced.

For those interested in Canadian weather and temperature data there is a website https://www.weatherstats.ca/

And all the while, a certain political party can't agree amongst themselves that climate change is actually happening.

A freak heat wave doesn’t prove global warming any more than a freak blizzard disproves it. I hate that people do this every time. You might be right, but trying to claim this type of “proof by one data point” is just asking for a “certain political party” to do the same with a different single data point.

Here (20000km from Canada) on the radio climate specialist says "we don't know for sure if it's climate change at work, models don't agree".

My gut feeling is that if it is exceptionally high then model will hardly predict it.

Anyone here knows ?

The proximal cause of this heatwave is an omega block in the jet stream. Atmospheric models predict that these types of events should be less common as the world warms. At least that is what I was able to read about it a couple of days ago when I was worrying about this same question.

The problem is that for now, it's still a statistical anomaly, like the snow in Brazil is; it's uncommon, but if it's only a few days, it's going to be a blip on the radar and only a few tenths of a degree in annual statistics.

The temperature at the moment is weather; annual and multi-year statistics is climate.

Another commenter posted https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1410157638109872134?s=19, which shows this is a statistical anomaly; only when this kind of weather happens year on year, and when the averages go up, can you speak of climate change.

(disclaimer: just being devil's advocate, climate change is real and "freak weather events" are becoming so common now that you can't deny it being a trend and the direct effect of global climate change)

Except when these "freak heat waves" start becoming common place.

In recent years many places around the would appear to be setting new temperature records on a rather regular basis.

Are they more common? Summers and winters don't feel any different to me than what they were when I was a child, they just get talked about a LOT more (my specific geographic location is probably a factor).

Take any region, country or city, look up heat highs or averages.

You will inadvertently find that around half a dozen extreme events happened in the last two decades.

Since a giant political movement seems to be based on the unwillingness to read more than ~24 characters at a time, here is a beautiful chart that really shows this: [0]. It does not even have text!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warming_stripes#/media/File:20...

This is false. USGCRP Climate Science Special Assessment: Volume 1: Chapter 6: Temperature Changes in the United States https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/6/ Scroll down to figure 6.3. You can see that the 1920's to 1940's had more extreme heat events than any time since. Figure 6.4 is also useful to look at.

This page lists the highest temperatures from around the world:

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

The nice thing about that page is when you scroll down to the continent/country table data there is an option to sort by date column.

Sorting by date shows most of these records were set in the 21 century.

More worryingly many of those records were set in the last half decade.

While this might be coincidence, it could also be a trend and if it is the later then things are starting to look rather ominous. Time will tell.

> my specific geographic location is probably a factor

A substantial one too, here's a very very rough map (which only measures one aspect, and has terrible resolution)

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

...except, really, when people use this argument, they're often not using that one data point in isolation. This is just one data point, true, but it's one _more_ data point on top of an increasingly long list of "freak" weather events.

500-year floods, 100-year storms, 100-year heat waves, etc. are becoming almost annual / decennial events. We absolutely should be willing to change our prior probability that global warming is A Real Thing from "very high" to "very, very high" for one more data point; that's how Bayesian inference works.

500-year floods happening twice in a lifespan, or the same with 100-year storms or heat waves doesn't actually prove or disprove anthropocentric climate change either.

It's entirely plausible that it's related, but the fact that these things are happening more often in a 5 or 10 year period is not sufficient evidence alone.

Your comment reads like a hammer looking for a nail, like freak weather is obviously a natural consequence of rising global temperatures. I'm not sure that it is.

You should probably examine your assumptions a little bit more closely, and look for a testable link rather than a confirmation of an existing belief.

Unfortunately we don't have a control Earth to use.

Given your take, what kind of evidence would you envision seeing that would give you certainty that anthro cc is going on? Would the evidence arrive before it was too late to do anything?

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I believe that anthropocentric climate change is real.

I just don't have anything to suggest that all this recent freak weather is related to it. It's entirely possible that it is! It's also entirely possible that it isn't.

Freak weather is not, itself, some irrefutable proof of anthropocentric climate change. (We have plenty of that already.)

It could be that all the warming and sea ice loss that humans have caused (which no doubt has a bunch of cataclysmic stuff waiting in the wings for us, likely related to oceans and centered on plankton and other such planet-scale bio processes) is unrelated to the fact that we've had a bunch of bad weather lately, and that we've just been somewhat unlucky.

calculating expected extreme events isn't really that much different in principle than testing if a die is fair. if it's slightly loaded, you'll likely not notice for quite some time and might never be sure.

now the problem with climate change is that emissions now will yield indisputable evidence 20-30-50 years from now - a blink of an eye in climatology and likely point of no return for humanity.

note we do not lack evidence of global warming. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/22/memorial...

They don't prove anything, but they are evidence in the baysiaan sense of the word. You should be (substantially) more surprised to see freak weather events if climate change isn't real than if climate change is.

>500-year floods, 100-year storms, 100-year heat waves, etc. are becoming almost annual / decennial events.

Are you sure?

In the IPCC report, the authors have high confidence in more hot days and nights, but they are less sure about other forms of extreme weather increasing due to climate change. In fact, they mention that, globally, hurricane activity might decrease. Snowfall, forest fires seem to hanging steady.

That's why we use the term "Climate Change". A freak heat wave and a freak blizzard both show that climate is changing, and not for the best.

Two sides of the same coin, we're fucking up our climate.

I think part of what makes people skeptical is that even if there was no anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, there would still be these so-called "freak events". There were big hurricanes in the US's Revolutionary War era, for example, that had huge impacts on naval forces in the Caribbean. If climate change truly was a total hoax, believers could still point at a myriad of extreme weather events and say "look, climate change is real".

>A freak heat wave and a freak blizzard both show that climate is changing, and not for the best.

Freak events don't show anything, that's why they are freak events.

Yes, they do show things. When freak events happen over and over, year after year, that's a bad sign, and shows that things are changing.

One six on a dice is chance. Two sixes in a row are a fluke. Nine sixes are a loaded dice.

The trends are clear for anyone interested in discussing facts rather than ideology.

This is exactly the type of thinking that allows people to deny the reality of climate change. Dismissing "one data point", but doing it to all the thousands of data points. At some point, you have to look at all the data points and acknowledge that there is a distinct trend.

What percent of political parties worldwide agree on climate change? Also consider countries that are autocratic.

The vast majority, including most of the autocratic ones - most notably, the Chinese ruling party does believe in climate change, and did sign the Paris agreement.

There is an anecdote that describes the Chine governments attitude towards climate change.

In anticipation of some international event, like the Olypmics, the city government put in new streetlights with integrated solar panels but the solar panels were never hooked up. It is important that they look like they are doing something without regard to it having any actual effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

https://news.trust.org/item/20210630113113-dvenb

U.S. climate ads by conservatives, for conservatives, shift views

And members of all political parties, even the ones who supposedly are in "agreement" on climate change take private jets to fly all over the world.

They take private jets to fly all over the world while shaming the rest of us for flying commercial.

I disagree - most Republicans I know agree climate change is occurring. The issue is the other party vilifying/putting at risk thousands of jobs currently in the legacy fossil fuel industries, not to mention essentially raising prices on everything for the regular person. It'd work to everyone's favor if a sound transition plan is agreed on, which gives the folks in the legacy industries preference to clean energy jobs/businesses.

That's what the green new deal is. A sound transition plan.

Did it ever occur to you, in your US-centricity, that parent was talking about a canadian party, since this all started because of a weather event in Canada? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/20/canada-conserv...

> The issue is the other party vilifying/putting at risk thousands of jobs currently in the legacy fossil fuel industries

That’s propaganda. The industry is vilified, for good reasons as well as bad ones. The people working in this industry are just pawns in a politics game. There aren’t that many of them in the first place, and there are just as many jobs to be had in non-fossil fuel energy production.

> not to mention essentially raising prices on everything for the regular person.

What do you think will happen to the prices of everything once climate change seriously perturbs agriculture, and once you need either heating or cooling all year round just to live in most of the world? Where will the money come from when we’ll need to build flood walls and levees, and all the infrastructure near the coasts will need to be overhauled. Or when water runs out in the American West? Climate change is coming to cost orders of magnitude more than preventing it.

> It'd work to everyone's favor if a sound transition plan is agreed on, …

Assuming you’re American, that’s not going to happen, because

> … which gives the folks in the legacy industries preference to clean energy jobs/businesses.

This was part of the platform of one party and the other still was not interested. Instead they whined about guns and abortion. Well, enjoy the future.

That's where Police Quest 1 was set if I recall correctly.

But this is pretty crazy, so far up north. Though Canada has a strong land climate so big differences between summer and winter.

> Though Canada has a strong land climate so big differences between summer and winter

Parts of Canada do, but normally BC stays much cooler than this..

Indeed, but it still seems more of a land climate even for cities at the coast, somehow.

I live in Barcelona and we rarely see snow here (if we do it's a slight layer one morning and gone an hour later), while in summer it gets up to 30 degrees roughly. The temperature range is about 10-30 average and 5-35 if you count the extremes. The weather is really mellow here.

When I see North American cities like New York on TV I'm surprised they have snowy winters and sweltering heat in summer, considering they're right at the coast. I heard Seattle is similar. But I'm not a climate scientist :) I've also never visited any of the Americas.

But this sure sounds extreme yes! I hope it will pass soon.

Interior B.C. gets very hot and dry. Not like this extreme but close (upper 30s C), and this area is quite arid and has hot dry summers and cold winters.

There are parts of interior B.C. not super far from there that are classified as Canada's only desert (Osoyoos area).

As is often the case people are picking up on the "Canada" word in the headline and imagining a big cold land "up north." When thinking about this area it's best to think of interior Washington and Orgeon if you're familiar with them. It's neither very far north nor particularly cold.

What I find more concerning is that this insane heat seems to have extended over the coastal region, where, yes, as you say it's usually fairly cool. Every time I've been to Vancouver island and the coastal region it's been fairly cool and it is notorious for ... rain. But I also haven't been there in 20 years...

As I recall Police Quest was set in fictional Lytton, California, not Lytton, British Columbia.

https://policequest.fandom.com/wiki/Lytton

It's further south than all of the UK (except the tip of Corwall), the Low Countries, half of Germany, almost all of Poland. Then again, I guess those places are frozen wastelands.

Europe is very dependent on the gulf stream blowing moderate-temperature air from over the sea, which reduces the extremity of winters and summers we see. The further inland, the worse it gets; hence the notorious Russian winter.

Once the wet bulb temperature crosses 35C sweating is not enough to cool the human body. Even healthy people die within few hours.

In some places that temp has been crossed for short time already. When people are poor and there are blackouts the situation can become catastrophic.

In Jacobabad (Pakistan) wet bulb temp recently crossed 35C. "Hotter than the human body can handle: Pakistan city broils in world’s highest temperatures" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

Civilisation was born in the Indus Valley and now it is starting to die there.

In a nice graph:

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1410157638109872134?s=19

Yeah, the graph shows measures, not averages. So it's quite worrying.

> This heatwave has reached further above historical means than any other summer heatwave previously recorded anywhere in North America.

That right there is a pretty powerful point.

That's a hell of an outlier.

Something I noticed while experiencing heatwaves in Netherlands in 2019 and 2020 was how the infrastructure was optimised only for the cold climate.

No air cooler in bus, no fans in houses and office buildings etc., I'm not a civil engineer but I felt as if our house was not breathing out heat so we had to run a standing fan 24X7 for a week.

It was funny to see workers continuously water the tram lines over hundreds of bridges in Amsterdam.

Yes, Dutch houses and infrastructure are phenomenal with dealing with rain (and water in general), since that's what was needed.

Lot's of houses and office are rushing to install air conditioning now, though.

Better invest in some solar panels and AC. You can heat your home using AC in the winter, saving a lot of money in winter.

My electric+gas bill dropped from 280€ to €130. I pay 56€ a month for the loan on the solar panels (loan by “stimulingsfonds”, which is a 1,6% annual interest loan you can use for stuff like solar panels)

The ACs did cost me 8000€ but they cover most of the house. Only a few weeks in winter I need fire up my central heating because the AC can’t heat enough.

Given the investment needed for the ACs, it’s not actually cheaper (the ROI is about the same as the 10 year expected lifespan) but… I have AC in most of the house

I once worked one summer as a laborer in a pipe epoxy powder-coating facility. The building was bigger than a football field. 40-60 foot long pipes were off-loaded from trucks and manually sequestered through a series of ramps to an epoxy-powder oven. From there the painted (and very hot) pipe was manually moved to cooling racks to be cooled, tested, and was thence loaded onto trucks and shipped out.

Moving the pipe required that we use a ~4-foot-long lever with two pegs at the end to manually roll the pipe from ramp to ramp. We had to stand right next to the hot pipe. The work required strength and endurance.

The factory was located in riverside lowlands near the border of Louisiana and Texas. The daytime temperature varied from 80-100 degrees Fahrenheit with very high humidity. We sometimes were lucky enough to have a breeze blowing through the largely-open metal building structure. Nonetheless the heat from the oven and hot pipe was relentless.

Most of us were uneducated laborers: I was the only one who had completed high school or attended college. They were a very funny group and my remembrance of their personal stories, ramblings and jokes still makes me smile.

A week into the routine, a shift of us found ourselves in our morning break sitting under the stairs of the only AC-cooled room in the facility (where a small group of managers toiled) commiserating about our lives after working hours. To a man we were completely exhausted by evening and would go home, eat dinner, take a bath, collapse into bed and sleep until dawn. We weren't even watching TV!

Slumped against the stairwell beams, I looked up to my right and suddenly noticed (for I must have seen it many times before) a salt table dispenser. It was full of salt tablets and had explicit instructions on it. It was like a "Hail Mary!" pass from the previous inhabitants of the factory telling us what to do. It described the symptoms we were displaying, how many salt tablets to take, and warned and gave explicit instructions of overdose. I read the instructions to them and said "this may be what we're missing." We all took two tablets and went back to work.

What a dramatic shift followed! The next day when we got together again we compared notes. For the first time we had a normal evening, slept well, and woke refreshed and ready to work again. The difference in our energy level was like night and day.

Today, decades later, people worry a great deal about getting too much salt. But let us remember that sometimes, in extreme heat and humidity, we may need extra salt.

I used to want to move away from the Midwest to warmer climates such as the Southwest or Florida, but these extreme weather events are making me appreciate the relatively normal weather and abundance of water here!

I do wonder if this weather is part of a longer term trend that will slow down or reverse the population trends moving West - the climate there seems to be more sensitive at least right now.

Isn't there an old saying? A young, healthy adult dies in weeks without food, in days without water and in minutes without air.

To that we should add: a young, healthy adult dies in hours of 35°C wet bulb:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_...

"A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.[9] In practice, such ideal conditions for humans to cool themselves will not always exist – hence the high fatality levels in the 2003 European and 2010 Russian heat waves, which saw wet-bulb temperatures no greater than 28°C. [10]"

Lytton, British Columbia reached 33°C wet bulb yesterday, 29-June-2021.

British...Columbia. In Canada.

Like a lightning bold from the gods, this kind of event can happen virtually anywhere. And it will, more and more frequently.

PS: I'm pretty shaken up by the recent heat event, where it reached 112°F at my home near Olympia, Washington, right on the Puget sound. Prior all time high temperature, in August, was 104°F some years back.

If 33°C wet bulb had hit over Seattle/Portland, it's quite possible that thousands could have died.

We're in for a very rocky road.

It's not surprising, and Canada is directly contributing it by exploiting some of the dirtiest oil on earth.

Of course, the current regime will deny any connection between forest fires, heatwaves and dirty oil. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/05/04/news/fort-mcmurr...

[1] https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/why-didnt-justin-tru...

oh man. I remember apartment hunting in Vancouver, not a single place I saw had an air-condition

Never in five years living there did I have any need for air conditioning. This is truly unusual.

That is what I thought too, and then we were hit with smog from forest fires. But you are right a few hot days a year do not warrant getting air conditioning, I just found absence of it unusual

I am amazed the power grid hasn't failed yet. Might also be that not everyone has AC in BC?

Most people don't because it normally doesn't get that hot in vancouver. It's similar to San Francisco - when it gets hot no oone has AC because they rely on the natural air conditioning of the ocean.

More that we have a well-regulated, well-constructed power grid.

Our collective global response to climate change is going to be the same as our collective global response to COVID-19: wealthy people will help themselves and leave the rest of us to die in the lurch. I've lost hope in our species to solve global problems, we're just too selfish to survive.

What are typical stats for heatwave fatalities in BC?

Dozens meaning over 100 people

Not like 30

Are they not spraying up there to help mitigate this?

Also record breaking cold in South America right now:

https://electroverse.net/record-breaking-cold-and-snow-sweep...

This sort of thing happens with lower solar activity.

I've been fascinated in the effects of the solar cycle on our atmosphere and climate, but electroverse is a fringe source and, from my understanding, a denier of man-made climate change. Half of the article you linked to is talking about the elites and mainstream media suppressing/ignoring information.

If you think the elites and mainstream media are telling the truth about man-made climate change, then be my guest. Based on solar activity, we're heading for a mini Ice Age with peak cold around 2035, much like the mini Ice Age that peaked in the early 1800s says the graph from NASA.

May I ask you which of the > 1700 peer-reviewed papers with measured data, and models that are freely available in English on the IPCC website [1] have you

a) read

b) found errors in?

There is a Nobel Prize there for you if you can show its all wrong.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/

My guess is absolutely zero.

Ah young grasshopper, I went to school in the 70s when the big boogeyman was global _cooling_: a new ice age, vast sheets of ice sweeping across the American continent, mammoths roaming the frigid wastes, Time Magazine covers and so on. Turns out, they were correct: the earth has been gently cooling down since the 1930s, a period so hot in this country that my grandparents were forced to move west because of the heat. So I know climate scientists are full of shit today. Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming. It's the other way around: warmer weather causes more carbon dioxide outgassing by the oceans. Colder water holds CO2 better as anyone who's had a warm beer knows all too well. Which is awesome since carbon is the building block of all life.

Yes, you can have both both cold and hot extremes. No, this has fuck all to do with solar activity.

The mini Ice Age in the early 1800s would disagree.

That’s a lot of nonsense in quite a few words.

1) The notable event climate-wise in the early 19th century was the year without a summer, which, whilst breaking records of low temperatures, was caused by a volcanic eruption. Other than that, this period was quite similar to the 4 centuries before, so there is nothing special about “the early 1800s”.

2) Solar activity just does not add up. We haven’t seen anything like an increase that would explain a change by even +0.5°C (we’re on our way to 2°C).

3) Solar cycles are ~10 years, not 4 centuries, which is how long the little ice age lasted.

4) There is no indication that the Milankovich cycle has changed, which means that we would still be in that little ice age without greenhouse gases. Global warming cannot be explained by orbital mechanics either.

5) The average global temperature during that period decreased by ~0.2°C, or about -0.05°C per century; again we’re on our way to +2°C in ~1 century. The rates of change have nothing in common.

TL;DR: yeah, fuck all to do with solar activity.

>we’re on our way to +2°C in ~1 century.

Strange then that the number of hot days and average maximum temperature in the US has dropped sharply in the last century. But I'm sure you're right and the sun has fuck all to do with earth's temperature.

> the number of hot days and average maximum temperature in the US has dropped sharply in the last century

A reference would increase confidence in these assertions. But even so, it’s irrelevant because:

> But I'm sure you're right and the sun has fuck all to do with earth's temperature.

Solar activity hasn’t been increasing massively over the last century, whilst average temperatures did.

And: “the US” is not “the world”.

>A reference would increase confidence in these assertions.

The one and only Tony Heller: https://realclimatescience.com/2021/06/yes-climate-change-ma...

>Solar activity hasn’t been increasing massively over the last century, whilst average temperatures did.

Not really. The earth has been gently cooling down since the 1930s. The US has the best temperature records which is why it's the most useful to study.

Damn. I did not realise we had to discuss the colour of the sky. If you want anyone to believe that the average temperature of the Earth is not actually increasing, then you'd better have very solid references. As it is there really is no point discussing.

Also, are your fantastically accurate American satellites affected by the sub-par, inaccurate technology the rest of the world uses when they look outside the borders of the US? Because these also show a global warming.

To make a counterpoint against “we’re all gonna die”, this is the estimated temperature history of the earth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum#/...

The earth has been fluctuating in a 10C range for most of the last 2M years (glacial cycles). Climate related mass extinctions will certainly occur (although we’ve already killed off so much of the megafauna that they might actually be somewhat limited), but humans will probably be fine.

> but humans will probably be fine.

I wouldn't be so sure about that given the propensity for war when things get rough.

Imagine what droughts, famine and loss of land due to flooding will bring.

Flooding will take a while because melting is slow. Eventually it’ll be extra-bad because of isostatic rebound of Antarctic continent, but that will take thousands of years.

Which is my broader point, people are thinking imprecisely about climate change in favor of catastrophizing.

I understand why, and emotional impact is maybe(?) needed for action- but it isn’t helpful for actually thinking about what to do.

The temperature in Canada is 50°C. People are dying.

It's not catastrophizing to point at a catastrophe that is embedded in a long row of other recent catastrophes and saying "That's a catastrophe".

I really don't think I'm catastrophizing.

Case in point, this is what I said:

> Imagine what droughts, famine and loss of land due to flooding will bring.

This is what is happening right now:

- droughts -> see Canada and whole North America / Europe right now. Large chunks of Australia and California 'burnt' down last year. Crops will be devastated, people will die.

- Famine -> the droughts above are going to cause massive issues with crop yields. Desertification is already happening in most of the world also...

- Loss of land (due to flooding). We are already losing arable land to desertification. Localized flooding happens in a lot of places now due to erratic weather. (massive rainfalls where not expected -> dykes fail -> flood with loss of life and crops).

Sure, Generalized flooding like what you say with Antartica won't be here for 20-30 years... but I hope I will still be alive by then as my children...

Now. Take all those, and imagine them happening to China/US/Russia. Will they sit idly or invade/take neighboring states resources?

Probably going to be fine seems a strange sentiment when today already a lot of people are adversely affected and whole nations are threatened. Seems to be the line of reasoning similar to that half a million covid deaths in the US are "fine".

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