Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees
axios.com
axios.com
Scrolling through the tweets, some people are saying it's likely a short spike in temperature due to foehn winds[0] and that this reading doesn't really mean much due to the source of the reading. Here's an interesting thread nitpicking things apart[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
[1] https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1425424519129407489
Doesn't change the fact that these high temps are really bad.
It does more harm than good to raise the climate change alarm for these events, and requires some statistical gymnastics to conclusively tie it to global warming.
The real alarms are more than sufficient.
That is why it got rebranded to climate change. Yes, it is about the global average temperature, but that is too abstract for people to understand, and exactly gets discussed when "they see a record low temperature somewhere in the world."
> Individual one-off high temperatures only gives ammunition to climate deniers when they see a record low temperature somewhere in the world.
Everything and anything gives climate change deniers ammunition. I think, it doesn't make sense to try to placate people, which are essentially inaccessible to decades of scientific reports, and more and more news like this one. No need to self-censure here.
> It does more harm than good to raise the climate change alarm for these events, and requires some statistical gymnastics to conclusively tie it to global warming
You do not have to conclusively tie individual events to global warming. The point here is, that those news come in more and more often. It is something people directly experience. And that is very much a real alarm.
Do they? Feels more like media frenzy, trying to connect every weather phenomenon to climate change. Every year around IPCC report release there is an uptick of everything weather related being attributed to climate change.
I wonder why it was not registered? In fact, the highest registered one is like 43ºC for that area, but I've been there other times with a "comfortable" 45 or more. Does it need the city hall to pursue registering? Can the city (a highly touristic one) ignore it to not scare away tourists? (there were like 2000 casualties just for two days, and "Death Valley but with humidity cranked up to 11" doesn't sound like a good slogan). That said, since that summer temperatures went back to below 30-ish in that region, it was clearly a freak occurrence, but I wonder why it's not officially acknowledged.
They don´t follow the procedures for record temps
> The intrigue: There are some questions about the validity of the temperature reading, however. Randy Cerveny, the World Meteorological Organization's rapporteur for weather records, told the Associated Press the reading is “suspicious, so we’re not going to make any immediate determination.”
> “It doesn’t sound terribly plausible,” Cerveny said. “But we’re not going to dismiss it.”
Large parts of MENA are already de facto lawless areas, where the official government doesn't exert any meaningful control, due to political factors.
Now throw in deadly year-round climates on top.
Every piece of land on this planet is claimed as sovereign territory by one state or another, except Antarctica.
What if millions of square miles of land become progressively climate no man's lands? Will local governments even bother claiming these lands for themselves?
And yeah, countries will claim and fight over useless pieces of land. There's plenty of people who can be sent to die defending or occupying it.
Don't like reality? Downvote and live in lalaland until a "sudden tragedy" happens "out of nowhere".
Install window fans, ceiling fans, attic fans, use evaporative coolers in dry climates, install H/ERVs. Change your AC and heating to a heat-pump model if you need both. Try to tap into geothermal where possible. If we continue treating home construction as copy-paste races to the bottom for cost then we'll see AC and heating usage climb through the room as extreme weather events become more frequent.
Insulating houses is balance between cost of insulating and cost of heating/cooling. It's no use spending more on insulation than you save in power use. So "as much as possible" is a wrong goal, as well as being obviously unachievable.
Emissions is the feedback loop. I'm not talking about spending money. Using more heavy AC/heating during extreme weather events means we use more energy which makes it even harder to bring renewables online because as it is renewables aren't cutting it. Of course with money it makes no sense to spend money on insulation if you're only going to spend a fraction of that on AC costs for extreme events, but that's because externalities are not being passed on to emissions costs.
Sure, let’s make it more efficient where possible, but let’s stop pretending air conditioning is some evil we should feel guilty over.
If you want to really save energy, focus on the heating side. It takes far more energy to heat a house in the Midwest from 10F to 70F in the winter than the trivial amount it takes to cool a home from 90F to 70F for a few weeks in the summer.
The number is higher in places like the South. I don't mean to demonize AC; I think AC should be a fundamental part of living in high-humidity climates. I just think we need to do everything we can to make its use more efficient.
> If you want to really save energy, focus on the heating side. It takes far more energy to heat a house in the Midwest from 10F to 70F in the winter than the trivial amount it takes to cool a home from 90F to 70F for a few weeks in the summer.
Definitely! Heat pumps should be mandatory for heating. In many newer building codes they are, but it's too expensive for residents of older buildings to upgrade.
The intrigue: There are some questions about the validity of the temperature reading, however. Randy Cerveny, the World Meteorological Organization's rapporteur for weather records, told the Associated Press the reading is “suspicious, so we’re not going to make any immediate determination.”
“It doesn’t sound terribly plausible,” Cerveny said. “But we’re not going to dismiss it.”
I remember being mocked by my professors at school as well when making a mistake. All it did was make me resent them for being assholes to me, it didn't teach me to use units more correctly.
If instead they simply had said "Celcius or Farenheit? You have to be explicit, because ...", I would have learned something and it would have stuck with me.
Professors being nice to students makes the students want to be nice in return, and want to learn as a result.
I still resent every single one of my high school professor that did this sort of shit. All they achieved was getting me to drop out. Joke's on them, I pursued the career they mocked and did better at it than they did at theirs.
And when I see other professors, coaches, teachers and mentors do this kind of shit to students today, I honestly want to slap them silly. This is why I'll continue mentoring whoever I can. Education is the single most important factor in our survival as a species, especially now.
120 degC = mass extinction. No one uses Reaumur and Kelvin is only used as a joke or by absolute pedants. Hence, it's Fahrenheit.
- Switching the world to nuclear power would require global cooperation, hundreds of billions of dollars, and 20+ years of construction
- Things are already quite bad
Now, I don't want to start messing with the earth's albedo all willy nilly. But if our climate models suggest that this could be a viable stopgap that can be deployed for less than we spend on corn subsidies, then we should do it.
Although for that reason temperature measurements should always include the type for reference.
Such as: the feedback mechanisms that may come into play here. Europe, broadly, hasn’t been big on AC. That may have to change, as 322 Kelvin is just not bearable. But that means more power use…which means more energy use…which probably comes from fossil fuels…which means more issues with climate change.
Now there's a readable headline.
Of course, TFA lists the Celsius measurement in the first sentence, but who reads articles these days?
It’s only, as you say, “shit”, if you don’t like that America uses Fahrenheit. Or if you’re looking for a reason to “shit” on American press for using the Fahrenheit scale.
You know, I think this makes good sense. A degree can be celsius, or fahrenheit, but only a Kelvin is a Kelvin. So this could be unambiguously simplified in the future if we standardized on K.
The answer is as about as arbitrary as basing it on human comfort levels - it's originally based on boiling and freezing a specific composition of water at a specific pressure, then adjusted so the zero point is at a universal constant. That last is really the only meaningful part about it.
And practically speaking, the 0 to 100 C range is no longer even based on the actions of water - just as f is no longer based on human comfort.
Well that's my point :). There are no degrees in K, there are just K. So at least we could remove that little bit of ambiguity.
Otherwise...
> about as arbitrary as basing it on human comfort levels
I agree. All scales are arbitrary.
I actually think F has one upside over both K and C -- more resolution means fractional degrees are rarely used. But that's just a nitpick.
The Celcius reading is in the first sentence. Any gripes about this are on the headline alone.
Of course, this is also dependent on regional factors, and the ability to properly manage refrigerants... like everything in climate science, the feedback mechanisms are complex and may have unintuitive results :)
It wasn't cheap, but a lot of HVAC companies are offering great financing deals (like 0% interest for 36 months) for the new systems.
With that said, I'm just waiting for articles coming out tomorrow about how mediterranean forest fires are being triggered by climate change and some shmuck objecting that fires have existed since forever. Meanwhile, Russia burns away with a fury of a million suns.
The entire article places Celcius first and Fahrenheit in brackets after it, but the title only gives Fahrenheit without saying that it is? It's quite obviously deliberate clickbait.
Apart from that; it's quite hard to find on this website that it is “U.S.A centric”, which certainly does not appear from the title or the u.r.i., and going to “About Axios” we find:
> We launched Axios in January 2017 based on this shared belief: The world needed smarter, more efficient coverage of the topics shaping the fast-changing world. We pledged to put our audience first, always.
Clearly they profile themselves as news for the world, not for the U.S.A., and so they use their units, but only inside of the article text.
Lest most of the comments continue to be by people demonstrating how smart they are to realize that the scale must be Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. (And I'm saying that as someone from Europe who grew up with Celsius.)
The real question I have is ... who really cares? I certainly don't complain when someone uses a celsius temperature, I just convert it to terms I'm more comfortable with.
Engineers, Scientists, Mechanics, Carpenters, etc.
I'm European, grew up with Celsius and am therefore more comfortable with it, so hardly any bias there.
meters are used too. On roads you have longer distance in miles, but width, weight and short distance in meters. Many rural areas in Wales have signs "120m to beach".
Sometimes we use those in the US, too. Context dependent.
UK is the same bad example of choosing using units of measure as US is.
> I certainly don't complain when someone uses a celsius temperature
because you shouldnt? it is a world standard.
The US at least tried to use the metric system.
Me, when the term “degrees” is used without further clarification.
"A weather station in Sicily may have set an all-time high temperature record for all of Europe on Wednesday, when the temperature climbed to a scorching 48.8°C (119.8°F) amid a regional heat wave that has shown few signs of relenting."
Miles per hour, no, that's not going anywhere, nor pints of beer, but it's hard to think of other imperial measurements in day to day use.
(and those are real pints, 26% larger than US 'pints'! So it just goes to show the imperial system isn't even consistent across countries. Yet another reason that the ISU/SI is superior...)
There's also abominations like the Energy Efficiency Ratio expressed in Btu/Wh, which yes, you are reading it correctly, is the ratio of energy in IP to energy in SI. I honestly don't understand why something so useless exists.
Units actually should mean something. I use them as a quick way of intuiting about physical relationships and something like EER completely removes that intuition and just makes all EER values a stupid number to be memorized.
But, our speed limits are miles per hours. More people weigh in stones and pounds than kg. Milk containers are going to litres, but we think in pints.
Just use a fking converter.
Would I except something based in Europe to covert their measurements when talking about an American state or city? No and most would not.
Why would a writer convert to something foreign that their audience wouldn’t understand?
When you go to the register to pay the price is recorded as $/kg.
:(
I'm not even sure if this is deliberate clickbait or not, but that the article puts Celcius before Fahrenheit elsewhere suggests it is.
I could hardly believe these temperatures; it's 49°C apparently.