California's Death Valley crosses 53° Celsius as blistering heat wave continues
hindustantimes.com
hindustantimes.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
That year, North Dakota hit a record high of 121 five months after its record low of -60.
How do people do it?! 'Tis cray cray. Next you're going to tell me there's a lava surfing competition.
The previous year, she had had to bail out one week before the race in order to donate the other kidney. Yes, later she did eventually run it and finish it.
They slowly work up to it. The Death Valley portion of the race is tough but it's largely about managing pace, hydration, and electrolyte intake.
Note that the record pace for the Badwater 135 is on the order of 11 minutes, compared to something like the Ironman where the running pace record is 6 minutes over 26 miles. It's definitely a slower race because of the desert and mountain portions.
Oh and many runners hallucinate. If it's a good trip, that probably helps.
Some people get strong and fit. It's a hobby.
Let's look at the data, and use this calculator: https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_rh
Death Valley: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=36.448&lon=-11...
Temperature = 117F.
Humidity = 11%.
Barometric pressure is broken but we'll use the Vegas Int'l airport value: 29.89in. (play with the value, it barely makes a dent).
Plug it in the calc and observe: Wet bulb is 73.69F.
Now we go to Miami: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=25.7748&lon=-8...
Temperature = 78F. Humidity = 79%. Barometric pressure: 30.07in
Plug it in the calc and observe: Wet bulb is 73.05F. Not even a degree less.
So yea, as long as I have water I prefer Death Valley.
Does make you wonder, being from Europe I haven't met many people who understand humidity.
Wet heat feels like it's going to wear me down until I collapse. It also feels disgusting to me - I remember leaving my hotel in Manhattan at 4 am when it was 85° and foggy. It felt bad through every one of my senses.
Dry, extreme heat feels like being burned to me. It never felt like it would wear me down as fast (maybe because I grew up with it?), but it felt like my skin might dry up and slough off. And my lungs might dry up as well. I always had nose bleeds because of the dryness.
I think which is worse is quite personal. But "feels like" temps or wet bulb temps don't tell the entire story. They feel completely different to me.
Oh, and I only drive white cars now, even though I no longer live in the desert. My first car was a dark navy blue and that car was brutal when it was 115+°F out. It had A/C, but it couldn't keep up at all. Keeping a white towel in the car was a must because on hot summer days I couldn't touch the steering wheel without the towel if it had been sitting in the sun for any length of time (and there isn't much shade around). When getting out of the car, spread the towel across the seat to keep the seat under 140°F when you return. I didn't get much sympathy from my future wife - neither her car nor her childhood home had A/C.
Now that I live in Phoenix I tell my friends in Belgium: Go bake a cake. Now open the oven when it's on its highest temperature. That's how it feels... for 3 months.
I love it.
It could toggle between "brr, I miss wildfires" and "so this is what it feels like to touch the sun". Who needs the in-between numbers anymore?
0 is where water freezes.
100 is where water boils.
50 is the temperature where healthy people outside will die if they stay out more than a hour or two.
Humidity and altitude affect these numbers, but handy for reference.
I get that there are a lot of places that are experiencing unprecedented temperatures for uncommon lengths of time.
But a lot of the headlines, like this one, are broadcasting pretty normal temps for their places. Phoenix is having a a pretty normal Phoenix summer. So is Death Valley.
Both may be hotter than they were 100 years ago, and both may be seeing consecutive 100F days for longer than they’d seen 30 years ago, but the current temps aren’t particularly comparable with respect to places like southern Europe which are seeing things they’re not used to seeing.
There a story there, but not the ones the MSM keep pushing.
EDIT: I’m not disputing that Phoenix is hot and getting hotter (I graduated high school and college there and visit family there every year), nor am I disputing climate change. But the focus on heat in Phoenix is a little misplaced relative to the extremes happening elsewhere. Phoenix is having an incremental increase to its norms, per:
“There are days when the mercury climbs to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) in the summer here. But over the past two weeks, the mercury has hit 110 degrees F (43 C) or higher every afternoon, a streak of extreme temperatures that could stretch into next week, breaking Phoenix's 1974 record of 18 consecutive days, forecasters say.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/summer-tested-phoenix-brave...
Phoenix set heat records a long time ago (even before adding millions of people and the houses, offices, roadways, and parking lots that were built for them).
There are places in the world right now seeing temperatures they’ve never seen before. I think there’s a difference between the phenomena.
This. And we're not even in the hottest part of the year yet. I'd like to see the wet bulb temperatures too, but I'm guessing they're in the low 70's because of their low humidity. So it's technically possible for humans to survive that level of heat there given enough water and shade, though we'd probably see deaths in the eldest and youngest populations regardless.
But should you move the location much in any direction, and you'd have conditions which would require artificial cooling for any human to survive.
Recycling. The answer is recycling.
> That's not something I worry about
Oh, we know. There are plenty of people thoughtlessly devouring irreplaceable things, consuming the habitat of life's creatures, and farting up a literal shit storm of carbon waste. Such people make lousy neighbors and their unsustainable habits are going away, one way or another. "Yeah I don't care about that" isn't nearly the burn you might think it is.
The difference with fossil fuels, overfishing the oceans, etc. is as was mentioned earlier, the huge reservoir of stored energy we've been consuming without replenishing, extending beyond fish populations' ability to reproduce and the system's ability to absorb excess CO2.
We can be sustainable on a finite planet as long as we find the balance, which means dramatically changing the way we interact with our world: dramatically less fossil fuels converted to greenhouse gases and sustainable fisheries that protect breeding grounds (for example).
This is the fundamental failure of capitalism: there is no market for global climate change, because humans have trouble en masse thinking in terms longer than a human lifetime. We're living on credit when the bill due will be paid by our children or grandchildren. It's not immediate and we mistake that for not being urgent. "Costs will shift around" falls down when large areas of the planet reach 150+ degrees and aquatic populations collapse. Then you're not simply paying in dollars. You're paying in refugees, water rights, food rationing, war, disease, etc.
"Disease? What?" Yep, just think of all of those cities at higher altitudes. Most were established at altitudes where biting insects that carry diseases don't propagate. Heat up the planet, and all of those disease vectors move up with the expanded heat envelope.
Compound interest is a real monster, and far too many of us refuse to look beyond the current balance sheet, expecting to pay just what they see today, not what the bill will look like a year from now.
Burning up trapped carbon that slowly accumulated underneath for millions of years in a hundred years is definitely not anything like the above.
Truthfully, as a species, most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive, which makes that artificial augmentation a poor benchmark for survivability.
And to be clear, no, I do not consider the use of fire, animal skins, etc. to be artificial augmentation. I do consider electricity and inter-continental supply lines to be artificial augmentation.
I can do 1/3 there, only because of years in boyscouts, and there's no way in hell I'd survive without artificial augmentation, regardless of where you put me, I'm simply not prepared for it, same as almost everyone else.
If you're not basically the primative technology guy from youtube, very slim odds you'd figure it out quickly enough.
Power outages are inevitable, and above a certain wet bulb temperature you can't hydrate or shade yourself out of overheating. It's a when you'll die, not if.
Basically habitability and stability isn't just a matter of "will this land burn you alive" but also access to cropland and rangeland, clean water, or avoiding negatives like increased hurricanes and wildfires, or simply floods and droughts. Migration out of increasingly harsh areas is expected to fuel global instability, across large regions of the world at a time, often in some of the most populous or contentious areas.
While the DoD's regional analyses aren't released to the public, there are similar studies in academia... https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://par.nsf.g... (that one does go into detailed definitions of habitability).
Basically the hot and humid areas of the world, like Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, are expected to spawn a lot of climate refugees.
I believe more detailed models are out there, but I haven't looked too deep.
This is hyperbole. Unaided? Sure. But few in the developed world bear these conditions without access to air conditioning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
Remember, solar can't keep up with that due to the solar constant and cell efficiency dropping with extreme heat. Even fossil fuels can't track as well because they're governed by Carnot efficiency where the cold sink is largely affected by ambient temperatures.
The world is heating up, and there only needs to be a few days at 160 to kill all the cows, goats, chickens, start fires, and overwhelm the power grid. In the past few years we've seen the old and vulnerable die in European summers. As it gets hotter, the threshold for "vulnerable" expands to include larger and larger portions of the population.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist or is not going to be serious will not help anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling?wprov=sfla1
Where it gets really problematic is places that used to have a moderate climate (vs always having been hot) so the people and structures have no adaptations for the sudden extreme heat.
- The simplest is just having thermal mass to average day and night temperature. As long as the night is cold enough you can just stay in a brick or clay building with thick walls, preferably painted white.
- If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use evaporative cooling, like Persian Yakhchāls [1].
- If you go high-tech, certain paints can cool surfaces down by a couple degrees (by radiating heat at frequencies that don't get absorbed by the atmosphere, thus breaking the equilibrium between heat absorption and heat emission).
Of course there is a point where those fail. Evaporative cooling is dependent on a low wet-bulb temperature and fails quickly in humid climate. Thermal mass needs temperature differences. Paints only buy you a couple degrees. In contrast an AC can be scaled to much higher temperatures.
It wouldn't take much humidity to turn those temperatures into wet-bulb of 100+ - fatal to humans. Expanding the area of this level of heat a couple of hundred miles in any direction would probably be enough.
I'm not sure who we is, and it wasn't clear anyone was talking about wet bulb temperatures. It's a comment on an article about Death Valley. At this point, you're just responding with things completely unrelated(behind paywalls).
Sure, it takes no technology to start a fire in an emergency, but that can't be done at a mass scale for non-emergency habitability without making the problem worse in the long run. AC can run from the very same energy that's heating up a dwelling, and power grids will need to be adjusted to incorporate more clean power sources.
...only in low humidity. Also, PV solar efficiency drops quite a bit as the temperature goes up. Carnot efficiency also drops noticeably as your cold sink, the ambient environment around you, heats up.
Are you going to provide AC to all the livestock and crops as well? Because they're kind of important in the long run too.
Temperature control for livestock applies to cold climates too, so kind of a moot point to mention one and not the other.
Running AC in hot areas does not necessitate making climate change worse. Heat pumps are very efficient in cold climates too, but it doesn't change the fact that much more energy is required due to the temperature deltas being dealt with.
The beginning was was cooler. Now it's way hotter than normal and breaking records for consecutive days.
The humidity is so high we should be in monsoon season, but it's so hot there is no cloud formation.
I don't watch the MSM, and I don't know what they are pushing, but it's absolutely no where near a normal Summer in Phoenix.
Edit: Evidence from NWS
The record longest number of days in a row with low temps in the 90s in Phoenix has been reached at 8 days! The low this morning at Sky Harbor was 95 degrees which breaks the previous record warm low of 93 degrees.
Another hot day (and week) ahead, with today expected to tie the record for Phoenix of most consecutive days of high temperatures reaching or exceeding 110 degrees at 18 days.
The thing I'm concerned about is that it is likely going to get even hotter.
What happens if - when - we see rolling power outages required to support the increased power demands is an open question.
Historical graph of sea temperatures (since energy in the sea goes into the atmosphere) for giggles: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
If you're not sure how it's in dispute, the fact it's records is the reason. Records dispute normal.
So we are at a stalemate it seems :P