Pakistan hits 120°F as climate trends drive spring heatwave | Hacker News Reader

Pakistan hits 120°F as climate trends drive spring heatwave

arstechnica.com

23 pointsPaulHoule19 comments

It's a little past 1:00am where I am in India, the temperature reading on my desktop thermometer is 32.8C and the the humidity is 72%. I'm just about about start the A/C and begin my work(day?) It's essentially impossible to work (even mental work) during the day, outside of an air-conditioned room. I've taken to doing most of my work at night. Fortunately my clients are largely on the other side of the planet, and the timing works well for everyone. I know I'm in an extremely privileged group that can do this. I shudder to think of the vast majority of Indians who have to work duing the day. I have noticed, that traffic has declined significantly during the hot days. I'm guessing that people are starting to change their work timings even for manual labor (especially I hope for manual labor.) They work nights.

Not just Pakistan, but Delhi also recorded 49.2°C (120°F) a few days ago.

Source:

https://www.firstpost.com/india/delhi-burns-at-49-degrees-ce...

The official recommendation to hydrate recommends several drinks that sound refreshing, and also buttermilk.

Visited India this spring/summer. Kolkata was deadly hot at 39C. Mumbai was bearable at 33C. Inner/central cities at an elevation was cooler at 30C. And I haven't even traveled to North India where the heatwave reports are coming from. I dare not.

Nowhere was it liveable in the afternoon. One couldn't walk outside after 10 am without sweating. Dehydration was a real danger. The difference in temperatures between direct sunlight and under a shaded tree was significant. Shops closed in the afternoon and opened back at 5 pm, running until midnight. Older houses made of stone and with cross ventilation were much cooler than newer concrete units that did not account for cross ventilation. Malls are the go-to place for people instead of parks or beaches because of availability of air conditioning. Cars are quickly becoming more popular. People prefer Uber to autos (tuktuks) because of AC.

I'm afraid the subcontinent will have to transition to a evening/night economy in the summer forever.

Monsoon tracking

https://mausam.imd.gov.in/imd_latest/contents/monsoon.php

I don’t know if it’s a possibility but I am curious if there can be some artificial solution to this?

Could the need to solve this be the first step in developing terra forming technologies?

An airplane that flies at 70,000 feet near the equator could release a load of SO2 which would make an aerosol that reflects sunlight and gradually makes it way north until it precipitates over the arctic.

Alternately build a solar sail factory at a volatile-rich asteroid (say 24 Themis) that makes plastic films coated with aluminum that fly back on their own power and park near the Earth-Sun L1 point.

This one is almost practical: Use a boat to disperse iron sulfate at carefully selected spots in the ocean. Actually more than one boat because if you don't survey ocean conditions you might not deliver the iron efficiently. The iron causes an algae boom, some of the carbon is trapped in plankton that sinks to the deep ocean.

The UN Law of the Sea forbids this, but the United States is not a signatory from that treaty so nothing stops you from doing a Kickstarter and running the operation of the coast of the US.

How much iron sulfate and how careful does one have to select locations to dump it?

It's very nearly guaranteed that any artificial solution to this will have unintended consequences. Those might not be as bad as the original problem, or they might be worse! Plant-wide climate is a very complex system and complex systems often behave in non-obvious ways when parameters change.

Recommend Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson!

I'm not sure they even have Fahrenheit in Pakistan

Outside of US, seeing imperial units is pretty rare. Even UK uses metric for most purposes.

If I am not wrong, US is one of those very rare countries (probably just 2?) which doesn't have measurement units codified as a binding standard, allowing NIST to maintain/allow several different, coexisting measurement systems (for e.g. some measurements are reported traditionally in meters e.g. fabric, metals, rod lengths, but several commercial entities also use foot & yards in their product specifications, even if they are derivatives. This is not the norm usually)

We promised to adopt metric, if everyone else agreed to GMT.

They all adopted GMT offsets, yet we have been quite slow to adopt metric.

Still used in medical contexts

Really? maybe this is a thing that happens only in former British colonies?

Even in other contexts its still present as a secondary measure. For example you would measure area in sq foot for land but sq meters for everything else

At some point in the near future we are going to experience a wet bulb event and lots of people are going to die.

Delhi already has over 60 wet bulb days per year.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/stroke-of-bad...

That’s terrifying

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