In a first, Phoenix hits 100 straight days of 100-degree heat
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The key to enjoying Phoenix is understanding that from October to May or so, it's basically San Diego. That's when you do all your outside stuff, you walk places, you have a great time. Then from May to October it's the surface of the sun.
But if we take metro areas (MSA) -- which is somewhat more representative of size -- it falls off to 10th place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area#...
It's still quite high. I'm surprised so many people like to live in hot places. I'm told it's a "dry heat" though, so it's not as bad. You can use swamp coolers to cool down.
Hot and humid places are more uncomfortable. Houston in August is 110 F with 80+ % humidity. It's oppressively hot.
Drier than the south still isn't dry enough when it's 117°F with a dewpoint of 65°F. You'll end up with output temps in the high 80s (or higher), and the output air will be extremely wet.
These things have to be a choice for people
A lot of people choose sun
Many of the people moving to Arizona come from the midwest where they know all about living for a summer at a hot place.
Highest dew point ever recorded in the US comes from Minnesota in the summer. The people moving from the midwest to Arizona are choosing somewhere more arid.
What they are giving up is shoveling snow, which is a heart attack waiting to happen for anyone over 50.
The fact that the heat doesn't go away even at night is another issue. If the power ever fails for vulnerable populations, they're immediately in danger. There's no reprieve of night or insulation you can use to fully mitigate those conditions.
> The combination of a heat wave and power outages “is the most deadly climate-related event we can imagine,” said Stone.
> He and a team of scientists explored the potential impacts of a heat wave coinciding with a multi-day outage caused by extreme weather or a cyberattack. Focusing on Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix, they looked at exposure inside people’s homes, a major driver of heat-related illness during a power outage.
> The figures were particularly stark for Phoenix. During a three to four-day heat event and outage, half the city’s population — nearly 800,000 people — would require hospital treatment for heat-related illnesses, according to the findings. More than 13,000 would die.
> A power outage in Phoenix causes a “very dramatic shift in heat illness,” Stone said, because the city’s climate is so extreme and people struggle to adapt. In an unfortunate irony, widespread air conditioning may actually make residents less resilient because they are so acclimatized to cooling in their homes and workplaces, Stone said.
I don't know whether you know this or not, but you don't actually have to be out in the 100F heat all day if you live in Arizona.
Somebody has to shovel the snow, though, if you live in the places people move to Arizona from. Otherwise your car can't get out of the garage. Sometimes you can't even get out of the front door.
No robots do that snow shoveling thing yet, when they do, sign me up.
That's still not going to stop the drain of people from Michigan or say upstate New York to Arizona.
No robots, but you don’t really need to exert yourself to get rid of snow. Self-propelled snow throwers with heated grips and a cab are a thing. For example: https://snowfallblowers.com/2020/09/09/ariens-11528-snow-thr...
I have a setup similar to this, using it about as much effort as walking a small dog.
> That's still not going to stop the drain of people from Michigan or say upstate New York to Arizona.
Good, more fresh water, natural splendor, cheap housing, mild winters[0], and beautiful fall colors for us.
[0] To be honest I’ve only even used that snow thrower maybe thrice in the past 2 years in southeast Michigan, winters are getting warmer and warmer every year it seems. The river barely even freezes any more, we had enough snow to cover the grass for maybe 2 total weeks last year.
Spoken like someone who's never lived in a prime snowbelt region.
They don't shovel snow, they use snowblowers.
Not if you are healthy.
Source? A quick google search indicates different info.
Not advice everyone can take, but if you are just getting old and otherwise healthy, then use it or lose it is pretty sound advice.
Is there evidence of migration from Phoenix by people who moved there on account of the heat?
Like the Gulf, most of Phoenix—certainly the neighbourhoods someone out of state would be moving to—is air conditioned to a fault. Solar power is plentiful and cheap. Hell, there are tanning salons everywhere because people avoid the sun in the summer.
I figured if I could handle it then, the rest of the year would be great. It is, it’s basically vacation weather 7 months out of the year with multiple biomes within a 2 hour driving radius. You can literally drive an hour into a snow fall in the winter.
I grew up in humidity & constant allergies. AZ is heaven by comparison. The dry heat really is amazing for health and sinuses.
Adults at least. Somehow my friends and I played basketball all day. Youth is something else.
A whole new level of alienation from nature... I'd go insane in a month
I also lived in the Cayman Islands for three years. 88F 88% humidity is far more uncomfortable than 110F 15% in Arizona.
The most uncomfortable places I've been are Southeast Asia and India. 95F 90% and I could barely breathe and came close to heat stroke a number of times.
Arizona summers are more tolerable to me than the tropics or the Gulf coast state summers.
I agree with you there, but I'd also mention that in Phoenix, it's not the heat that will kill you, it's the sun. The deserts in Arizona and eastern California have the most intense sun in the US. If you can't find shade, for example while hiking in the desert, the climate in Phoenix is brutal.
It's also very easy to get dehydration and low blood sodium, because sweat evaporates so fast you don't even realize you're sweating.
This all makes the climate very dangerous - it's not as uncomfortable as heat with high humidity, but it will sneak up and kill you. One third of all heat related deaths in the US happen in Arizona.[1]
1: https://apnews.com/article/record-heat-deadly-climate-change...
He worked during the day, and said coming home and sitting around his pool in the evening was wonderful.
don't know if that's true with this heat wave?
If you watch the radar during monsoon season, you'll see the city's heat island cuts through large storm systems like a knife through butter, so the monsoon rains rarely make it here now. With the population growth, the ozone has gotten worse in the summer and the temperature inversions trapping PM2.5 worse in the winter.
Exposure to particulates and ozone are bad for your health. I do not recommend Phoenix for these reasons.
EDIT: I wanted to add, every day I saw our poor USPS postal worker practically melting in that old contraption they call a vehicle. I hope they find a way to keep them cool soon.
I sometimes wonder how much the city could do to help itself by drastically changing its urban planning process.
Add trees (mesquite does well in Tucson) where possible. Cover any blacktop with solar. Use highly reflective/white paints or rock for exposed surfaces. Implement reasonable public transit… except it’s notoriously hard to design for such sprawl.
Another fun idea would be to dig deep and create large subsurface buildings to reduce AC usage.
There are so many buildings in the southwest that are built to withstand the temperature differences 100 years ago. Seems like a new standard needs to be adopted.
I agree this is the right idea, but you may have seen other commenters in this thread talking about how Phoenix is fine because you can just go from your AC car to your AC garage without having to walk in the heat. Imagine how people like this will react when you tell them they'll have to walk to a train stop!
We also get the weather alerts basically saying to not breathe outside.
China generally has permanent APEC blue now. Hope the US catches up!
PSA: 100 F is 37.7778C. Here is a relatively simple way to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in your head. You just need to remember three simple facts:
1. 32 F is exactly 0 C. 32 F is a nice round number that most people here probably come across a lot.
2. 50 F is exactly 10 C. Again, a nice and round number.
3. It's a linear relationship.
So every 18 F the temperature goes up by 10 C.
10C is cool
20C is nice
30C is warm
40C is hot
10C cold
15C cool
20C nice
25C warm
30C hot
0C is cold
10C is not
20C is warm
30C is hot
which rhymes
30 is hot
20 is nice
10 is cold
0 is ice
It's pretty common for English poetry and songs to only rhyme every other line
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme_scheme
A more notable version of the same idea, which includes more unrhymed lines, is double dactyl (XXXA XXXA). Though this is more for poetry/limerick, and not for mnemonics.
-20°C is uncomfortably cold
-10°C is cold
Around 0°C, temperature is not the issue. Water, snow, and ice are.
+5°C is cool
+10°C is nice and cool
+15°C is nice
+20°C is nice and warm
+25°C is warm
+30°C is hot
+35°C is uncomfortably hot
+40°C is too hot
10c = very cold
15c = cold
20c = cool
25c = nice
30c = i want air blown at me
35c = need more air (roughly the same for 37)
40c = its hot, need cool air
45c+ = very hot, do something
Some people live in places that are sub-freezing for 100 days in a row.
If you're just quickly doing it in your head, "F = C * 2 + 30" and "C = (F - 30) / 2" are pretty close.
fahrenheit to celcius: ((F-32)/2)+10%
So: 100F = 100-32=68/2=34+3.4=37.4 (actual 37.7) 32F = 0/2=0 50F = 50-32=18/2=9+10%=9.9 (actual 10)
I prefer this heuristic, since after taking the 32 difference, it’s just halving and adding 10%, which is very easily and quickly done mentally (as compared to (5/9)
> Heatwaves loom as a growing threat to humanity in a warming climate. This summer alone, in the northern hemisphere, thousands have died during extreme heat events. It's driving researchers to find out more about the point when heat turns deadly.
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-07-15-saharan...
But supposedly this ended in early August:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-05/atlantic-...
> So despite the perception that this season has been slow to start, it actually has not been. In fact, 2024 is in rarefied air in terms of ACE to date. This perception might have to do with storm inflation, or the idea that we are naming more storms today than we did, say, 20 or 30 years ago. In 2020, basically the benchmark for recent historically active seasons, today marked the formation date for Hurricane Laura, the 12th named storm of the season. Here we are in 2024 sitting at five, and it’s no wonder the perception is skewed. Despite having more than twice as many storms to this point in 2020, we only had half the ACE (26 vs. 55 this year).
> We’ve had a “bang for our buck” season so far with quality storms over quantity as, say, in 2020. And while we are in a lull now, the setup is probably going to change in 7 to 10 days to allow things to crank up in September. Never call it a bust. If it is one, we can discuss why in November.
Check the date. This was written more than 7 to 10 days ago. It's already wrong.
We're 4 days into September and activity has already cranked up. If you're counting the number of cyclones, you're counting something different.
If someone predicts "X will happen in the next 7 to 10 days" and 7 to 10 days later (or 15 days later, in this case), X does not happen, their prediction is not "still relevant", it's wrong.
The sources you are reading made predictions that turned out not to be true. Do you update your confidence in the sources you are reading in that case? Or do something else...
You're grading a weather forecaster pass/fail on a prediction that didn't make. Which, I guess is your prerogative...
If a forecaster says that there's a 90% chance of rain and it doesn't rain, that doesn't mean they were wrong and doesn't mean that the forecast was useless.
I guess some people are never happy. /s
The hysteria about 'climate change' - when almost all frames of reference are less than 1% of mankind's existence, a time span representing .0017% of the history of the planet - really tends to reflect badly on the progenitors of said hysteria.
Spoiler alert: the micro-climate everywhere is constantly changing and has been doing so for billions of years. Places get hotter, colder, drier, wetter, more arid, more humid, and any combination of those; some places become ocean, others desert. The earth's macro-climate is also constantly changing, with or without human inputs. A few billion years ago the planet was a ball of molten lava without an atmosphere. Humans were neither the cause of that, nor the reason the earth is no longer that way.
This sort of temporally short sighted thinking and the screeching that accompanies it really is peak collective narcissism.
Nobody denies the climate has always changed. The issue is with human induced climate change is the rate of change.
It’s the difference between bringing a car from 100mph to a gentle stop and slamming it into a brick wall. The rate of change we’ve introduced doesn’t give ecosystems or species the time they need to adapt.
Even if one concedes that the climate is 'rapidly changing' solely or primarily because of man-made action, it doesn't follow that those changes will lead to catastrophe for people everywhere, particularly those in the first world.
Having said that, Phoenix hitting 100 degrees for 100 days in a row doesn't support 'rapid climate' change occurring when the reference is the past 150 years. To put it another way, suppose the planet is warming (for whatever reason) - eventually we would get 100 days of 100 degrees in Phoenix, right? Who are you to say that it's rapid or unnatural? Cycles happen - neither of us can say this didn't also happen 500/1000/2000/10,000 years ago. I live in Melbourne and the winter we just had (here in the southern hemisphere) was the coldest I can remember. The year before was mild. Variance happens, in both the short term and the long term. Hysteria is laughable.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take care to pollute as little as is reasonably possible, but promulgating wholesale societal change is never going to get the Green left (or whatever they prefer to be called) what they want.
lmao, the irony of talking about narcissism in your previous post
You can do it.
There are methods to do just this: https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-an...
Also about the rapidity of change:
And if you're thinking, hey it's probably not that bad after 2016:
http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/c...
Because screw those who do not live in the first world, right?
I'm all for trying to minimise pollution and greenhouse gases and for using renewables where it's reasonable and economically feasible. I'm not in favour of dismantling a system because of something that won't really affect my society all that much.
The cure has to be worth the cost.
So pretty much "screw all those societies who will be affected".
Thanks for coughing up something most people have heard before, perhaps work on why that particular screed is irrelevant.
Do better.
It literally screams I can't be bothered making an anti-AGW case and reeks of laziness.
You do better.
Try "the urban heat island corrupt the data" or "it's the clouds, man" (a favourite of old nobel prize in semiconductor technologists that struggle to stay relevant).
Your position is boring, it's the "why worry about immigration, billions of years ago the earth was molten and there weren't even Mexicans, let alone borders or humans" of insouciance.
It's the one hand clap of the dullard too busy with their other hand.
I run my own weather monitoring equipment as a hobby and throw it in a time series database and see completely different results in air temperature, +/- a few degrees based on what side of the yard the measurement is taken on.
In a world where we are splitting hairs over 1-2c the microclimates present in an urban area matter. Things like reflections, landscaping, buildings, the presence or reduction of haze from local pollution and a million other factors make this data super dirty. And not only is the problem collecting reliable data in the present, but correcting data that was taken 30, 40, or 50 years ago with less sophisticated technology.
It was absolutely a fair point 30 odd years ago when it was first seriously raised and hammered in a number of sponsered AGW denialists blogs.
It was a serious enough point that an American climate skeptic physicists looked very hard and seriously at the data to determine if this was a valid argument against the claims of rising tempreture some 16+ years ago (IIRC). *
The result of that, and many other such studies, was that climate scientists were handling geospatial tempreture data correctly and not overweighting the tempreture of large non urban areas with readings from small constrained urban areas.
Today we are more certain given the constellation of MODIS and other satellites that continuously orbit the planet every hour and a half in precessing paths that cover the globe and return both ground level and atmosphereic depth tempreture measurements.
> I run my own weather monitoring equipment as a hobby
Good on you. I recall the instructions given to us in 1980 when setting official Bureau Met weather stations all across Australia and how to standardise and normalise instrument placement. In high school and university mathematics we also looked at the central limit theorem and the differences between single readings and pooled readings, etc.
* This was a particularly famous and well documented bit of climate debate history in the USofA theatre, I leave you to look up the details. FWiW it was "debunked" multiple earlier times, eg in Geophys Letter 1999 [1] and ranks as a standing oft repeated "climate myth" [2]
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/urban-heat-island-de...
[2] https://skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm
Another example is where you say we know about 0.17% (or something, no tabs here) percent of Earth's history. Well, history begins about 5000yrs ago. I believe we know quite a bit about the last 5k years. We also know quite a lot about prehistoric climates - before history. We have reliable estimates of rates of change of global temperature, and of CO2 concentrations, and we have no evidence of greater rates of global warming than now.
'the fact or quality of being different, divergent, or inconsistent: her light tone was at variance with her sudden trembling.'
That is the first entry for variance; I was not referring to its technical statistical meaning (this should have been obvious).
Recorded history and history are also two very different things - surely this is also obvious. The thermometer was invented in the 1700s. It's entirely possible that the area we now call Phoenix had 100+ days of 100 degree heat multiple times over the past millennium but we wouldn't necessarily know about it.
Even by the most pessimistic projections 'climate change' (to the extent it exists) isn't going to result in catastrophe for the first world, and certainly nothing approaching an extinction event globally.
I feel like in your mind climate change is +3 degrees on your local thermometer and you skip all the other side effects like literal billions of people migrating north because their environment literally can't support human life anymore
You went from "it doesn't exist" to "maybe it exists but it won't impact me", you took a big step already
All history is recorded history BY DEFINITION.
You shouldn't be waving your degree around, you plainly are not a scientist.
As to your understanding of this, consider tossing a coin, and getting heads. For one coin it's a 1/2 chance. For 2 in a row it's 1/4. For 100 the chance is 1/(2^100) which is about 10^-30, a vanishingly small chance.
Now let's take the last 100 years of climate data from phoenix, we can estimate the chance of any day being over 100F from the data, and from that the chance of 100 days straight of over 100F.
Given that less than half of the time it's over 100F in Phoenix, the odds of having 100 days in a row over 100F is less than 10^-30.
This is 1st year science. Your very first data analysis course.
Less pedantically, the problem with your example is that you have (really rather hilariously) taken the past century as your reference point, and that’s exactly (no really, EXACTLY) the problem. For all you know 1900-2000 was atypical. The fact that you couldn’t see the irony in what you were thinking before you typed it all out is telling.
Not sure what else to tell you.
You are correct that I’m not a scientist by profession, though - I have a BSc and an LLB from a G8 school. I don’t use my BSc professionally. That fact has no bearing on my ability to use words for their plain meaning, though, or to understand basic scoentific concepts.
Have a good day, mate.
It really isn't rocket science: nature exists and influences climate, but we also exist and influence nature, hence we also influence climate, natural climate change AND human made climate change can both exist simultaneously.
Just look at the cause of regular climate change, if we influence the same variables we will get the same results ... but faster