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Comment by zerkten | Hacker News Reader

Have Yuma temperatures actually changed that much? A quick check suggests that the level of change is much smaller than that in the UK. Climate change has increased the extremes in the UK quite significantly in the last 40 years. It's a case that the changes in extremes are not accounted for in UK planning whereas Yuma is known to be consistently very hot.

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I buy the 71 C ground temperature; ground temperatures can be 25-35 C hotter than the ambient air temperature, which is what gets recorded. This is also why rails buckle more than you'd expect: on a 40 C day, you're likely to see the rails heating up to 60-65 (as in, if you touch them, your finger will burn).

> ground temperatures can be 25-35 C hotter than the ambient air temperature, which is what gets recorded

Ground temperatures are almost entirely responsible for the majority of the thermal energy/temperature put into the air, down at the surface.

Also I'm sorry but the UK bloody loves a bit of weather melodrama. Climate change is a big problem but the specific effect of it on the UK in particular has honestly not been very bad at all yet. Tarmac has been melting in the heat here longer than I've been alive, which makes me suspect we use weak, crappy British tarmac. This was a little bit hotter than previous heatwaves, which is bad, but felt about the same and has also been really short - not sure what to make of that. However we scarcely get a weekend here without some "most (x) ever in (y)" fuss and haven't in 40 years which is really getting quite tiresome and making it harder to respect the real problems. I'll worry about it when I'm done drinking gin in the rain.

>most (x) ever in (y)

The hottest temperature ever recorded here isn't some niche thing like most rainy April for 5 years. Also maybe the fact that there's constantly new unusual weather should tell us something.

Not just the UK. It's been over 100º a lot of days here in Texas, and people from other places in the U.S. keep asking me how it feels, like it's a brand new and shocking experience. But from a perceptual perspective, it's normal. My perceiving brain doesn't do sophisticated statistics. It isn't a scientist. My brain's reaction to 100º+ weather is, well, this sucks but it's a familiar, age-old kind of suck. I spent time outdoors in 100+º weather every summer growing up, so I just don't make a gut connection between a string of hot days and my sense of fear and urgency about global warming.

> really getting quite tiresome and making it harder to respect the real problems

I agree that it trivializes and undermines the real problem of global warming. People have this false implicit assumption that if global warming is real it must be possible to immediately perceive it, and instead of challenging that, we keep trying to inject drama and danger into familiar experiences, and it just rings false. On a subconscious level, I suspect we all know it's silly. Also, what happens if it's not this hot next year? After spending 2022 essentially telling people that they can directly perceive global climate trends by walking outside, what will they think if the summer of 2023 is relatively cool?

I'm probably wrong, I'm not an expert in public opinion, it just feels false.

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