The first ever Red Extreme heat warning issued in UK | Hacker News Reader

The first ever Red Extreme heat warning issued in UK

metoffice.gov.uk

55 pointsoumua_don1728 comments

I don’t want to diminish this in the slightest, but the current system was only introduced in 2021 so it’s not like it’s a “first time in centuries” kind of thing (though it’s entirely possible that long-standing records have been or will be exceeded).

Right. The more informative part is:

“This is the first time we have forecast 40°C in the UK. The current record high temperature in the UK is 38.7°C, which was reached at Cambridge Botanic Garden on 25 July in 2019. […] Some models are now producing a 50% chance of maximum temperatures in excess of 40°C in isolated parts of the UK for the start of next week. Mid, to high, 30s Celsius will be seen more widely with an 80% chance we will exceed the current record.”

That's great! Hopefully, domestic tourism will return. No more flying to Med for some sun.

The forecast for Death Valley this week has a range of 32-49. Being in the middle of Death Valley's diurnal range is not actually a good thing.

It's one day, and it hasn't happened yet. I'm sure we'll manage. Our Met Office are drama queens. They always have been [0], but they're getting worse.

[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books/content?id=CSvCYDh4KkMC&pg=...

Don't look up!

That argument — it’s one day and hasn’t happened yet — is incompatible with your own previous comment.

Also, the cover of the Daily Mirror shows how much the Daily Mirror likes drama, not anything about whoever they’re discussing. Even moreso given who appears to have written that particular story and who was supposed to be getting warned…

One comment was on the general trend, and the other on the specific, one day prediction. The old news article was quoting the Met Office. It was the Met that predicted 48C in the 90s.

> One comment was on the general trend, and the other on the specific, one day prediction.

To the extent that the general trend exists, it's not just one day. To the extent that it is just one day, it can't be called a general trend. And switching from one to the other the moment someone criticises you reeks of moving goalposts.

> The old news article was quoting the Met Office. It was the Met that predicted 48C in the 90s.

Newspapers are creative fiction sometimes inspired by reality. Normally at this point I would link to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, but in this case I'll quote from the same book you linked to ("Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future", which included a copy of the front page of the Daily Mirror on page 264), but specifically the paragraph that references the exact image you linked to:

"""Newspaper accounts of interesting weather events should always be taken with a large degree of caution (see Figure 13.1) - even those penned by well-known meteorological writers in the serious papers. This is not their fault; it is because newspaper articles are subject to the whim of a sub-editor. The newspaper sub-editor is a strange breed with two goals. The first is to force contributions to fit the space avail- able, which may necessitate removing text, no matter its importance, or creating new text without refer- ence to the original author. The second is to make these same contributions fit the style of the news paper, which may involve extensive re-writing, again without reference to the author. Furthermore, eye- witness reports of unusual weather are notoriously unreliable."""

In this case it's potentially even worse, as it was written by Alastair Campbell, who later worked for New Labour, criticising the leader of the Conservative Party.

But it's even worse than that. I couldn't read that text properly because it was too blurry so I looked for the original source, and the Met Office doesn't seem to be listed on that page. The headline "120 f is on the cards" actually says that Mrs Thatcher was at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, where climate change experts showed her a model that says if the world carries on increasing its rate of carbon dioxide production then "in extreme cases" it would reach 120… "The predictions were for the middle of the next century".

At least the UK has the luxury (and downsides) of the breeze from the seas and the ocean, since it's an island. Meanwhile, on continental Europe, most landlocked countries are being cooked alive.

Bonus since many countries don't have AC in residential buildings.

You're right, though the effect of that only seems to go about 20 miles inland (which is a fair bit of the UK, to be fair). The other downside to being surrounded by sea is almost guaranteed high humidity which makes the heat far harder work (a la Florida vs Arizona).

The effect of the ocean does not go far inland as you can see on the map included in the Met's tweet.

Forecast for England pretty much matches that for France.

Indeed. The weather in San Diego along the coast is amazing (lows in high teens, highs in the high twenties).

But go 10 miles inland and it’s a desert where 30C+ is typical for a good part of the year.

Many homes in UK are well insulated, at least compared to the wooden barns popular in the US. One day of extreme heat can be well tolerated, just by closing the windows in the morning. The problem is that it is very hard to expel the excess heat overnight, so a long series of merely moderately hot days can quickly render homes unbearable to live in.

You seem confused about U.S. building practices, the US is quite large and has varied climates and building codes on account of covering a good portion of a continent. The UK latitude would be most equivalent to US building code zone 6 or 7, which has building codes well exceeding the UK in terms of insulation and airtightness.

The UK latitude mostly doesn't overlap with the USA, with only Scotland just about lining up with the southern tip of Alaska and everything else only overlapping with Canada.

The UK climate is more like Seattle.

Is this map right? If so, that would be a zone 4? https://www.ecohome.net/guides/3521/climate-zones-map-usa-ca...

I have no idea if that makes any difference to your core point.

Here I was thinking, bad as 104 degree weather is in Texas, at least we all have AC, since life without it here is close to impossible. Huge problem in a place like Britain.

It was 37+C (about 99-100F) today where I am at the moment (Southern Europe) and no AC but a traditional house with thick stone walls + shade and good air flow = all fine. Of course it was also dry heat.

Yeah, it's more humid in central Texas, but also there is a lot of stupidly designed architecture that doesn't cool well without AC.

Scorchio!

RIP all those that need to take the deep tube lines.

They should honestly close it down for those days. It sounds like a torture method straight out of Guantanamo.

You can avoid deep tube lines for many journeys. Elizabeth line, Thameslink, overground, circle, district are all air conditioned. I've definitely taken slightly longer routes to avoid the deep tube lines when it's been hot before.

Something that is very cool (hah!) is that originally they used the coolness of the deep tube lines as a selling point in summer[1], but over the last century the surrounding clay has absorbed so much heat that the ambient temperature is something like 30° [1] https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engine...

That is very cool. So if the capacity of the under ground to extract heat from the underground, is something that can diminish on a decades level timescale, what does that say about the longevity of ground source heat pumps I wonder?

It depends on the composition of the ground and how heat pumps are used. In places like Canada with wild temperature variations over the course of the year heatpumps have the potential to be used as both a means to cool buildings in the summer, and then heat them in the winter with that stored heat.

Thinking about checking into a hotel for 3 nights and staying indoors with the AC on

I bought an air conditioner earlier this year because I anticipated this, but you'd have to consider if it's worth 300 for just one month.

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