Arctic Circle land temperature reaches 48°C during heatwave in Siberia | Hacker News Reader

Arctic Circle land temperature reaches 48°C during heatwave in Siberia

independent.co.uk

52 pointsNiceWayToDoIT23 comments

Note that these are surface temperatures, while weather is usually reported as air temperatures. The air temperatures were around 30C, per the article.

Surface temperatures vary a great deal, asphalt in the sun for instance can be 30C+ hotter than the surrounding air.

Climate change is real, and human-caused. The Arctic is in crisis, and land temperatures matter. But it is not 48C up there in the same sense that it was 46C/115F in the Pacific Northwest this week.

Yeah, I kind of hate all these articles spouting off ground temp.

The ground temp at furnace creek, NV, which the world record air temp is held (53C), is 94C. It's not really fair to conflate the two ideas.

In a competition to report the highest, most sensational number, expect these misleading media comparisons to continue.

BTW, today's high at my house was 350F for 11-13 mins.

Reporting surface temps makes just about as much sense.

Does Furnace Creek has permanent permafrost? If so, an historically high surface temperature is very significant.

Not saying it ain't. I'm saying that should be clarified because people will assume air temperature unless its specified.

The title was clarified so now there will not be confusion.

Issue with such high ground temperature is that most of Siberian ground is a thick permafrost, which is rich in Methane clathrate, which if melts quickly can release huge amount of Methane really quickly, which is comparatively more dangerous than CO2 emission.

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

> Saskylakh, an Arctic town, recorded 31.9C on 20 June, according to the EU’s Copernicus programme, who said it was the small community’s hottest temperature since 1936 before the summer solstice.

Why was it so hot in 1936?

A lot of the times its hard to tell when they quote weather records whether "hottest since X" means it was hotter on date X, or that's just as far back as records go.

So hot then? I’m not sure. There will be outlier weather conditions. However, the difference between 90 degrees F (32C) and 118 F (48C) is extreme,IMHO. Are they really comparable?

It doesnt really matter. Temperature and weather variance exist, there will always be extreme weather events on record, but wildly temporally disparately. A million locations, a million draws from a random distributuon, a few of them are going to have far tail events.

What we're seeing today is breaking records everywhere, at the same time.

I would argue that we still need to cautiously analyze each event and understand them for their specific circumstances. For example there was a heat wave recently in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Casual journalists and politicians have been pulling it into the global warming narrative, with our state's governor going so far as hinting at a "permanent climate emergency".

Meanwhile, actual climate scientists are being more cautious, since this event also looks a lot like a rare perfect storm of coinciding factors. That is, it may have been that rare "1 in 100 years" event that would occur with or without climate change. For instance, Cliff Mass, a Professor of Atmospheric Science at UW, said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.

It wasn't- this appears to have been mistranslated into English. Measurements started in 1936.

https://twitter.com/EKMeteo/status/1406612294075830286

You will find historical records of high temperature spikes. What matters as signal are clusters of high temperatures, and all-time highs.

We're going into high temperature thresholds beyond what is normal for the past 10K years. Almost every year from this point onwards are probably going to bring novelty about high temperatures.

However, we also DON'T want normalization of temperatures, back towards Ice Age levels. So humanity is in a tough squeeze now, preferably wanting stable levels somehow (if science can conclude that to be optimal).

It will be interesting if we can discover links between sun activity and climate as well: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/0...

So as usual, this should prove tough to conclude.

These things really make me afraid of the Clathrate Gun going off

Is that described here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Yes. There's also permafrost methane release [0]. Both involve positive feedback loops, and despite that terminology sounding like a good thing to the public, engineers know that positive feedback loops often mean something very, very bad has happened.

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

Presumably it is not a truly unbounded feedback loop, since some process led to ice and permafrost forming in the first place. But I haven't studied that extensively - this is just my intuition.

Sure, on a geological timescale, it's possible for very hot planets to cool down.

However, geologicial timescales might as well be infinite compared to human timescales.

https://xkcd.com/1732 is a good visualization of this.

Hopefully we'll get some good data on how much methane was released during this event.

https://archive.is/qIVJj

35C is 95F, and 48C is 118F.

Those temp peaks are hotter than what it reached in the Pacific Northwest a few days ago, and in an area with permafrost.

Correction: Surface temps in the Pacific Northwest reached 63C (145F), which is higher than in Siberia [1].

1. https://gizmodo.com/ground-temperatures-reached-an-astoundin...

So many of these articles every week, I wonder if we are actually making any progress…?

If you mean in terms of stopping climate change, then it doesn't look like it...

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