And here's a little extra for those that are about to walk away thinking a meaningful record was set:
1. "But before we get ahead of ourselves, it hasn’t quite been confirmed yet. These claims of record-breaking heat are based on preliminary readings that will soon be subject to further analysis."
2. "That being said, it’s also important to remember that statistics on maximum nighttime temperature simply aren’t kept, and hourly temperature data has only been kept for about a decade or so. The record may still stand, but it also may not have much to be compared to."
Kerala had 50 degrees C a few years ago. Kerala! the state they call "God's own country" in tourism ads. It is anyway a hot state, being right down south in India, but 50 was crazy. Then what will hell be like, I wonder.
Edit: And Kerala also had abnormally disastrous floods around the same period, +/- a few years.
>It is estimated that one million severe cases of leptospirosis in humans occur every year, causing about 58,900 deaths.[11] The disease is most common in tropical areas of the world but may occur anywhere.[7] Outbreaks may arise after heavy rainfall.[7]
The highest temperature ever recorded was in Death Valley, in 1913. [1] Hence the reason for this weird 'at midnight' metric. It also holds another pretty neat record of having 43 days with temperature over 120 each day. That was in 1917. The planet's definitely warming up, but seeing every single freak weather occurrence, let alone in an area uniquely geographically situated for such, as a 'sign' of the end times isn't going to serve much purpose.
The purpose is people are swayed by compelling anecdotes, not data. These types of anecdotes will continue to get pubished for the foreseeable future partially for political purposes, partly because data is dry and these types of things are compelling.
>> The purpose is people are swayed by compelling anecdotes, not data.
The purpose is people are swayed by fear and these anecdotes create fear. As much as I want us to do much more to tackle climate change, scaring ordinary people whose individual actions don't count for much is simply the media trying to make money. It's getting tired and annoying.
But it's those same ordinary people who have to change their voting patterns to do something against climate change. What if creating fear is the only way to sway them towards saving most of humanity?
> A higher reading of 134F, or 56.6C a century earlier, also in Death Valley, is disputed. It is believed by some modern weather experts to have been erroneous, along with several other searing temperatures recorded that summer.
> According to a 2016 analysis from weather historian Christopher Burt, other temperatures in the region recorded in 1913 do not corroborate the Death Valley reading
Of more interest is how high the daily low. Being in a desert area, there are large temperature swings between the lows and highs. Midnight shouldn't be the low -- that would be about the hours before dawn. Basically, we're looking at a situation where the temperature had not cooled off enough during the night before the sun starts baking things again.
Metro Phoenix where I live, has been having lows in the mid-90s these past couple weeks. Part of that is the heat island effect from all the asphalt, concrete, but it means even after the sun is down, we are having 100+ degree temperatures here during the evenings.
There was a Radiolab podcast two weeks ago that covered how tree ring width patterns could be decoded to match hurricane season intensity and this was matched to sun spot activity. They pinpoint a lull that allowed sugar to become a cash crop in Caribbean, allow chattel slavery and later piracy to flourish and noted that right now is a similar inflection point for an end to a lull and start of worse weather via the sun’s cyclical activities. We’ve only just begun.
Sorry, I meant that the implication is human induced changes causing bigger swings in extremes will be pushed a little further by the natural cycles of the sun that is the baseline perturbing the weather - we are exiting a relative lull and like a pendulum that is pushed a little bit further, the swings in weather will be even more extreme than predicted.
ah I think even that is a bit pessimistic. I'm optimistic that we can figure out carbon sequestration and transition to renewables in the next few decades and prevent any catastrophic sea level rise. I fully admit that the global North will not give a shit if some peripheral nations are destroyed by climate change, but I think this summer is starting to show people living in Vegas and Phoenix that their days there are numbered if we don't do something. Maybe I'm being optimistic though.
yeah I think it's becoming clear that stopping emissions isn't enough and we will have to do carbon capture but Iceland has a functional carbon removal plant up and running and Exxon apparently sees it as part of their economic future. Lots of bad news out there and we need to accelerate the pace but optimism gives us energy for pushing the political front.
The Iceland plant will pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 / year, so my toilet-paper math says we're going to need at least 9 million more of these plants to achieve net zero.
Sorry for the misplaced optimism , if it makes you feel more bleak, building all those DAC facilities, transporting them and running them will require millions more of DAC facilities.
I just mean that it seems like actually a somewhat possible number for humans to build, though obviously it's more like infeasible than impossible. I pretty well realized how fucked humanity is around a decade ago, so it has been interesting to watch the realization spreading.
oh ya I'm saying we need to achieve net zero plus have carbon removal. We need to be net negative, we are already in catastrophe territory as far as much carbon is in the atmosphere (I am not a scientist to be clear).
To be clear, Net Zero requires massive direct-air carbon removal, i.e. the only way to achieve it 'net zero' is the permanent removal of billions and billions tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere.
Depends on who you mean by “we”. Air conditioning and insulation can protect you from high temperatures when you’re inside. Solar and storage can provide the electricity to power it.
The problem is it’s going to take decades at best to get that tech into the hands of everyone who needs it in many parts of the world. And that’s assuming economic development and international cooperation go the right way to make that happen (which seems doubtful).
Realistically, the world will contain many millions of people whose lives are improving dramatically even as millions of others are suffering in new ways. Same as it ever was.
Human beings are just one species in the many ecosystems that make up the planet's biosphere. We cannot exist without those other species. Our understanding of the interconnections is extremely poor (see: "Half Earth" by E.O. Wilson). We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.
Let me reiterate: If these other forms of life go extinct, homo sapiens will go extinct. What point is there in air conditioning if agricultural yields plummet over a huge portion of the earth's surface?
Consider birds for a moment, because they are familiar to most people and widespread. Bird populations have decline by a third during my father's lifetime. This is a multi-factor problem, but we know climate change and sea level rise leads to excess migratory bird mortality.
> We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.
The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.
I don't say that to discredit concerns about environmental change, its impact on future populations, or its near term impact on existing individuals. All I'm saying is that arguments based on existential threats are not persuasive to me and they tend to be used to assert power over others than to mitigate risk or improve the lives of people on the earth today.
It's not humans that need to adapt, right? It's all the other species we depend on. Their adaptation will not necessarily make our adaptation easier. We cannot manufacture a habitable environment for ourselves ex nihilo.
For example, fungal infections are on the rise because fungi prefer warmer temperatures. Mammalian species like bats, that hibernate, are the canaries in the coal-mine, succumbing to these infections before other mammalian species. We are engendering countless such changes in the adaptive strategies of other species. It will not end well for us if we can't get greenhouse gas emissions down quickly.
> The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.
But throughout all of human history, there hasn't been a change in climate as drastic as what is starting now. So why does our ancestors surviving in a variety of climates make it likely that we'll adapt to the destruction of our environment due to rapid climate change?
> Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates
The sad truth is that we are even unable to stop a fucking war created by a handful of beyond repair insane people. War that has been releasing huge amounts of heath and energy in the northern hemisphere for more than 500 days of bombing everything at sight. 500 days that curiously came with top temperatures never registered before
Climate is just a direct representation of energy movements on the atmosphere. If we add a lot of energy to the system, the logical expectations would be that, at some point, the weather will lose its buffer function and start including this fact somehow. I'm still expecting somebody addressing this issue seriously.
I think you're making the mistake of equating 'humanity' with 'the vast majority of people' rather than 'human survivors in a specific geographic zone', as well as underestimating the speed of change relative to historical fluctuations.
If there were only 1 million people alive in 2030, you could reasonably say humanity had "survived", but also say that most people today in 2023 are "doomed". The prognosis is certainly much better than that, but "humanity survived" is a very low bar.
Yes, but the good news is that the majority of people reading this are both old enough and rich enough to be insulated from the worst effects during their lifetimes.
This makes it very easy for them to say, “No we’re not doomed, the smartest people are working on this and will figure it out.” Once they do that they can go on living their lives without really caring about whether we are doomed or not.
I've never understood this argument. Please explain to me how it makes sense. Do you really think these elites care about the long-term value of their properties enough that they wouldn't invest because of climate change? If they get 10, 20, 30 good years out of their properties, why would they have problems with losing them at some point?
A quote I heard just today: "I see better than I hear." That is, show me by your actions. If the words don't match the actions, I'll believe the actions.
If you use this logic to "disprove the elites", could you answer the question I posed to GP? Why do you think the elites care about their properties? Why wouldn't they buy them to get another good 10, 20, 30 years out of them before it's too late?
I think they're pointing out the disconnect between espousing the idea that we're on the verge of rapid, irrevocable, global calamity on one hand, and both directly contributing to that and buying beachfront property. It's easy to see why someone already predisposed to believe misinformation around science might look at that assume that it's all a scam of one form or another.
How close is this to the max wet bulb temperature? I remember reading about temperatures hitting close to or beyond that in Pakistan a while back but that accounts for humidity and so it may not be as close given how arid Death Valley is.
> From 12 a.m. to 1 a.m. on July 17, Death Valley hit a record 120°F.
The advertisements to buy a new car are a nice touch.