18 ms·
Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, Earth’s highest temperature since 1931
- shmerl 6y agoThat's 54.4°C for the context.
- booi 6y agoWhat about in kelvin!
- arp242 6y agoCelsius to Kelvin is easy: just add 273.
- timack 6y ago327.55 K
- lopmotr 6y agoOh no, not this again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118715 If the diameter of a coin is 19 mm, the circumference is not 59.6902604182 mm
- imtringued 6y agoI doubt your coin's diameter is exactly 19mm. By omitting digits after the decimal you are misleading people into believing that your number is more accurate than it really is. If you round 327.55 K to 328K and convert that back to Celsius you end up with 54.85°C instead of the original 54.4°C. Increasing inaccuracy by half a degree for the sake of inaccuracy is bad science.
- progval 6y ago> By omitting digits after the decimal you are misleading people into believing that your number is more accurate than it really is. Digits omitted at the right mean we don't know them, not that they are zero. > and convert that back to Celsius you end up with 54.85°C instead of the original 54.4°C. Yes, inaccuracy accumulates when you convert back and forth. But it's common practice in physics not to increase the number of significant digits to not give the impression a measurement is more precise than it actually is. In this specific case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_arithmetic#Multiplication_and_division_using_significance_arithmetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_arithmetic#Multip... And when precision really matters, then one should explicit the range (eg. +/- after the absolute unit)
- lopmotr 6y agoIt wasn't 54.4°C though! The original value was only 130 °F which is probably between about 54.2 and 54.7 °C but somebody made it look more accurate during that first conversion which fooled you with the very thing you're saying is OK. You're bound to sometimes lose information doing round trip conversions no matter how many digits you have so don't do that if you care about keeping as much precision as possible. The Guardian reported it as 129.9 °F because they converted twice!
- phaemon 6y ago> 328K and convert that back to Celsius you end up with 54.85°C No, that's wrong. If you convert 328K to Celsius, you get 55C. You can't add arbitrary precision to a number. The correct calculation for a whole degree is: 54C => (54 + 273)K => 327K If you want a single decimal place of precision: 54.4C => (54.4 + 273.2)K => 327.6K You can then subtract 273.2 to convert back, and you get the 54.4C you started with.
- hansvm 6y agoI find it a bit amusing that we treat as gospel the use of in-band signaling to try to cram a half-assed error propagation into the value we're trying to convey. It's not a terrible system, but there's nothing inherently better about throwing away a modest amount of information about both a value and its error than throwing away a negligible amount of information about a value and a majority of what we know about its error.
- lopmotr 6y agoYea it's not nature's way, just a convention. But it's an intuitive convention because it's easy to assume that digits which are shown are correct and digits which aren't shown are unknown. The alternative - throwing away the majority of information about the error would make lots of numbers pretty useless. Is 130 F really 100 F with too many digits?
- mattoxic 6y agoand in British Thermal Units?
- mkl 6y agoBTUs are energy, not temperature.
- __sy__ 6y agowhat about wet-bulb temperature?
- axaxs 6y agoReally, we should be measuring max temp by wet bulb. There are places that are literally fatal to sit outside in, but Death Valley ain't one of them.
- mirimir 6y agoIf the relative humidity is low enough, it might be 25°C or less.[0] 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrometrics#/media/File:PsychrometricChart.SeaLevel.SI.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrometrics#/media/File:Psy...
- ars 6y agoIt's an EXTREMELY dry place (around 5%), so the web-bulb temperature is not especially high, an online calculator estimates numbers in the low 30s Celsius.
- bleepblorp 6y agoA wet bulb temperature of 35 Centigrade is fatal within hours even with shade and fan cooling. "Low 30s" wet bulb is a very big deal. Sourcing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_temperature_and_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_...
- adrianN 6y agoWell, it's not called "Death Valley" because of the landscape.
- a_square_peg 6y agoBased on reanalysis data, it looks like wetbulb temperature never goes above 25C around Death Valley. Average temperature seems to have gone up by about 2 degrees Celsius since 1980 though, from ~19.5 degC to ~21.5 degC. Ref: ERA5 data & https://climate-explorer.oikolab.com https://climate-explorer.oikolab.com
- bamboozled 6y agoThanks!
- Seb-C 6y agoThe title should be edited by a moderator to at least add the unit, this feels like a clickbait otherwise.
- iso1631 6y agoI saw 130 and assumed from the context it wasn't in the order of 40 degrees hotter than the highest temperature ever claimed to have been recorded
- TwoBit 6y agoActually probably the highest temperature legitimately recorded, as the 1931 temp was probably wrong.
- adamhearn 6y agoWhy do you say that?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 6y agohttps://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/an-investigation-of-death-valleys-134f-world-temperature-record.html https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/an-invest...
- chrisco255 6y agoWhat kind of comment is this? Sorry, we had more than mastered the thermometer and proper record keeping by 1931. Some weather stations in the US have had their highs and lows continuously recorded since 1870, which is when the National Weather Service was established. Of course, the history of record keeping for temps and predicting weather was extremely important for farmers and the Farmers Almanac has been published since Ben Franklin's time. The 1930s were an extremely hot decade. The Dust Bowl happened in part because of the extreme heat and drought during this decade. It exacerbated the Great Depression. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wav... https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/dust-bowl?mediatype=photography&phrase=dust%20bowl&sort=mostpopular https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/dust-bowl?mediatype=photo...
- dx87 6y agoSince it looks like you didn't read the article before going on a rant, I'll paste the relevant portion for you. >Death Valley famously holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, which is 134 degrees. This record was set on July 10, 1913. However, that measurement is very much in question; an extensive analysis of that record conducted in 2016 by Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded it was “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.”
- zelly 6y agoWe should flood it with seawater.
- nsnick 6y agoIt would evaporate leaving salt.
- zelly 6y agoDon't stop, just keep flooding it. Aren't the ice caps melting? Eventually an ecosystem will form.
- redisman 6y agoLike the Dead Sea?
- alicemaz 6y agocould call it the death sea
- anigbrowl 6y agoThere's an ecosystem there now, people just don't want to learn about it.
- refurb 6y agoOk, a better ecosystem?
- AlotOfReading 6y agoLike the Salton Sea not too far away? F that, give me the clean desert over that mud pit.
- refurb 6y ago
- danans 6y agoHopefully someone cooked an egg on the sidewalk.
- mixologic 6y ago130 degrees is hot enough to leave a steak outside and let it sous vide in the air.
- grogenaut 6y agoactually depending on the steak it might not be. I just did a nice roast today for 11 hours at 180f... it was a nice solid 131 in the middle at the end. Now I can't be sure the inside of the smoker was actually 180 but it takes 11 hours at "180" to get to 131 temp, doing 11 hours at 130 isn't really going to get you there. Also thats in a humidified smoker. That steak gonna get realllly dry just being out in 130 degrees in death valley at 5% humidity. Remember water conducts way more heat than air. Also egg whites don't set up until 150 or so, and yolks start firming at 158, so at 130 that's going to be a real runny egg unless you put it on say a black sheet of metal.
- taneq 6y agoSet up a couple of cardboard sheets covered in alfoil to modestly concentrate the sun's rays and it would be plenty. Some simple solar cookers are nothing more than an open box covered in something shiny with the food inside it. (Yes I know it's cheating a bit but it'd work. :)
- grogenaut 6y agoNote: The GP said "Air Sousvide" not "build a solar oven". And note I did mention using a surface that would raise the temp. Your solar oven would not work in the shade, which is where this 130 temp was taken. Solar ovens are fun tho, the mcguyver of "well it's effing hot and sunny out I might as well make some good steak".
- djrogers 6y ago
- Terretta 6y agoThere’s something puzzling about these “Earth’s highest”, as back in the 80’s near Lake Chad, it seems we used to see above 40 C often enough it was notable but not at all unusual, and sometimes hotter, 45 C or occasionally 50 C. Past 50 C, the French and German thermometers didn’t have marks. I had 125 F - 135 F in my memory. These articles imply that’s not possible. If a tree falls in the woods ... Or, rather, if the sun heats your day in Africa but nobody measures it, is it not hot? In the surprisingly hot times, your home, at night, furniture was hot to the touch. Weirdest thing, so used to objects indoors at night being cooler to touch. Too hot to sleep, so a trick was to get in shower in a top sheet then get back to bed and hope to fall asleep before very fast evaporation stopped cooling. Everything I’ve researched says I’m mistaken, it wasn’t that hot. But then I wonder, how great are temperature records in obscure microclimates in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa? // Records or it didn’t happen.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI'm from South Australia, more specifically: Port Lincoln. Now look, I don't mean to sound like I'm over exaggerating, because I'm not: It gets fucking hot there, and then it will start blowing 40 knots sustained (74kph / 45mph), straight down the centre of the country, and then something, typically a national park, will catch fire. And that makes it even hotter. So hot houses spontaneously combust from the radiant heat before the fire front. And then there's Adelaide, similar latitude, just 250k or so east, with the urban heat island effect. Quite unpleasant. So yeah, we only know about the places the Bureau Of Meteorology keeps records for. There's probably some rural Australian grazier reading this going "55 degrees C? Heh, that's mild." I hear Baghdad is can get quite warm.
- geofft 6y agoDoesn't it need to get up to 300°C (the flash point of wood) for things to spontaneously combust from the ambient temperature? I agree with you that hot and dry conditions make wildfires much easier to start and spread, but that's been having an effect in residential parts of California over the last few weeks, where the temperature has at most been around 100-110°F (38°-43°C). (And I do agree that, metres from a moving fire, the temperature is probably past the flash point of many substances, but I wouldn't call that climate, I think.)
- dx87 6y agoI was in Kuwait at the end of July back around 2010, and the temperature was in the 120s. I remember getting off the airplane and thinking that we were walking through the exhaust of the jet engine, until I realized that's just how the air feels for a big chunk of the year. You get used to it, but it feels like someone is pointing a blow dryer in your face any time the wind blows.
- mikkelam 6y agoI used to live in Dubai.. The summers there were spent indoor in AC as much as possible. 5 minutes outside going to the supermarket and I was drenched in sweat.. It literally feels like having your face over an open oven.
- perl4ever 6y agoDriving through Texas in the summer a long time ago, I got out of my car briefly and was struck by how my long pants were palpably trapping cooler air and shielding me, when I'm used to thinking of less clothing as being suited to hot weather.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoThere's a reason why traditional clothing in many very hot regions is loose, long and light (in both color and weight). Air is an insulator and clothes provide good UV protection.
- pa7x1 6y agoFor temperature you want IR protection.
- Valgrim 6y agoAll frequencies of light will transfer heat. UV light can cause damage to DNA because it's energetic enough to be ionizing (it can detach electrons). IR light is not ionizing, but we associate it with heat because the black-body radiation of things we generally interact with (humans and stovetops, for example) is mostly in the infrared spectrum. The sun is much hotter and emits light in IR, visible and UV spectrum.
- paxys 6y agoMy apartment (in San Francisco) feels about the same right now without AC.
- haltingproblem 6y agoLets put this to the test from first principles. For this to be truly the hottest temperature: - All points that we know to be possible candidates for the hottest temperature should have been measured. Lets say any spot within 10% of 130 should be recorded. So all spots that had measured temperatures 115+ in the last two decades should have been continuously recorded since 1931. I doubt this is true. - Are we are measuring all possible points on earth where highest temps are possible? This is an "All Swans are White" category of pronouncement. Given how much of the earth is still remote, war torn and just not probed out, I doubt this is true. These pronouncements from journalists are infuriating. These journos typically have zero training in scientific rigor and very strong ideas of their own efficacy. Woe to the scientists who encourage these statements. Alarmism sells more copies (or clicks) than tempered scientifically accurate statements.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoThe headline is where the problem is. The article itself is careful to use qualifiers like observed and measured.
- idlewords 6y agoIt's always a joy to see posts that derive stuff from first principles in order to call out journalists for lacking scientific rigor.
- haltingproblem 6y agoThank you. Appreciate your comment even more since my comment was down voted :)
- Lorin 6y agoSince when has the Washington Post messed with the URL bar? When you visit the link, it removes the path from the browser history, so if you attempt returning to it you end up on the WP front page instead.
- vaxman 6y agoPlaces you can’t use a (consumer grade) smartphone (because they will self power off) or even an outdoor WiFi hotspot (because the transceivers distort). If your car breaks down...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blueblisters 6y agoDeath Valley is an underrated park. It's an amazing place to visit in the winter, when it's more pleasant / cooler.
- athms 6y agoShh, don't ruin it. It is like all the yahoos that recently discovered Joshua Tree and decided to trash the place.
- berbec 6y agoI thought your comment was going to end with "and buy the album"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- YourMatt 6y agoI loved it in July as well. I describe it as otherworldly. Just bring a lot of water. I'm from Phoenix though, and I'm well used to heat.
- Proven 6y agoso, not a precedent nothing alarming
- dr_dshiv 6y agoI'm so happy I got to see Marta Beckett's show in the Death Valley Opera House. It was a fantastic experience I'll never forget. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_Opera_House_and_Hotel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_Opera_House_and_Hot... Then, spending the night on the giant sand dunes. The deeper you'd put your hand in the sand, the warmer it would get. Special people in Death Valley. Gorgeous landscape.
- selimthegrim 6y agoJacobabad, in Sindh province of Pakistan is not so far from where my mom grew up in Guddu. I am certain they have recorded temperatures this high and USAF used to fly drones to Afghanistan out of the Air Force base there.
- tzvsi 6y agoMy car registered 114 as I passed through Stockton, CA today.
- ur-whale 6y agohttp://archive.is/7sZNp http://archive.is/7sZNp
- LoSboccacc 6y agocoldest july in many places around the world: "local temperature is not climate!" one place has a temporary record: "definite proof of climate change!" I know climate change is a real issue, but I can see how the media machine is helping in producing skeptics oh, and the dogmatic aspect of it all as well, where even skirting on the _side_ of the _very real_ communication problem gets heavily downvoted
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 6y agoThat's a strawman of the article, nowhere does it claim this reading is proof of climate change.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago> Scientists have found that the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves worldwide are increasing due to human-caused climate change. A 2019 study found the planet has entered a “new climate regime” with “extraordinary” heat waves that global warming is worsening. they're definitely making the connection. did you read the article?
- icebraining 6y agoThey not saying "this reading show climate change is true", they're saying "climate change (which is an accepted theory in the field) predicts readings like these will become more common".
- LoSboccacc 6y agothat's just bog standard plausible deniability, when a journalist put two things in a single page you know damn well they want the reader to make the connection and fill in the dot for them, and apparently it works since there's people white knighting for them, which circles me back to the initial topic: it's so damn easy to manipulate people to defend opinions not theirs, it's a wonder society can still function under this constant siege.
- tobyhinloopen 6y agoCelcius of american degrees?
- baaym 6y agoThe image in the article shows it's measured in Fahrenheit. For those working with Celsius: its 54,4 degrees.
- richrichardsson 6y ago> For those working with Celsius So literally everywhere except: United States, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, The Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.
- pikzel 6y agoArcher: 'cause you never think of those other two as having their shit together.
- iso1631 6y agoIf a temperature above boiling point of water had been recorded it would have been headline news about the end of the world. Normal high temperatures are in the 30-50 range, I could believe 70 or 80 could be recorded, but 130 is so far above the realms of possibility that it's clearly not Celsius
- Tempest1981 6y agoReminded me of this recent news: "Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return" https://phys.org/news/2020-08-greenland-ice-sheet.html https://phys.org/news/2020-08-greenland-ice-sheet.html
- bashwizard 6y agoAnd here I am in Sweden where we've had the coldest july since the 60's.
- take_a_breath 6y agoThis article is about temperatures in August.
- bashwizard 6y agoAnd my comment was about temperatures in July.
- eps 6y ago54.4 °C
- arendtio 6y ago@HN: If you use the word 'degrees' please add F or C to indicate which scale you are referring to. Many here are from the US and would interpret it as degrees Fahrenheit while many others read it as degrees Celsius.
- lecunn 6y agoIn this case it is pretty obvious what was meant, isn't it?
- classified 6y agoFor all we know it might even have been Réaumur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réaumur_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réaumur_scale
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoPeople say this a lot, but when is it actually a problem? In this example, it's obviously Fahrenheit, since 130C makes no sense. From context, you can almost always tell whether it's C or F: * < 50: C if it's warm, F if it's cold * > 50: Mostly F, sometimes context-dependent * And the closer to 0 the less it matters For other values outside human range it doesn't make much of a difference. Humans can't appreciate the difference between 10000C and 10000F, it's just "really damn hot".
- wittyreference 6y agoI don’t know... an American newspaper describing an American locale as either “really hot by American measure” or “well above boiling by global measure”... seems very ambiguous to me.
- Izkata 6y agoSee comment that's currently just above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24187188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24187188
- madeofpalk 6y agoI only know Celsius, but it's pretty clear here from context that it's Fahrenheit. It's annoying, because I still don't know what the measured temperature actually was, but I feel pretty safe assuming that the air temperature was not above the boiling point of water where I guess there would be spontaneous combustion
- pacamara619 6y agoThat's 55° Celsius for all of you using intelligent units.
- huffmsa 6y agoWhy were there so many heat records in the 30s and 40s? First time they'd been measured? Solar activity?
- EricE 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiFWhvg7Fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiFWhvg7Fg
- dgellow 6y ago130°F <=> ~54°C
- yters 6y agoso we had higher temperatures pre 1931?
- cromulent 6y agoI think there is a typo, as the Death Valley record was set in 1913. This article goes a long way towards discrediting that record though: http://stormbruiser.com/chase/2013/08/29/death-valleys-134f-record-temperature-study-part-one/ http://stormbruiser.com/chase/2013/08/29/death-valleys-134f-...
- EricE 6y agoNot a typo but deliberate obfuscation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiFWhvg7Fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiFWhvg7Fg
- valuearb 6y agoIt’s the dry heat.
- Osiris 6y agoI rode my motorcycle through Death Valley just last month and it was an unseasonably cool 105 F. The average for that time of year is 113 F. "Climate change" used to be more commonly referred to as "global warming", but my understanding now is that climate change is actually causing more volatility in the climate, meaning larger swings in temperatures, which has other impacts on things like tornadoes and blizzards. Is this assessment accurate? I'd love to have a better understanding of the effects of climate change.
- yovagoyu 6y agoI remember living in the middle east (UAE) and seeing the temp over 120 pretty regularly, so 130 as a world record struck me as pretty ridiculous. After some searching around, the hottest I could find was "Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when it reached 81 degrees on July 8, 2003". This is 177.8F. Sources: https://time.com/3981478/ira/ https://time.com/3981478/ira/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/weather/ct-wea-0814-asktom-20150813-column.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/weather/ct-wea-0814-asktom-20... I'm not sure if this record in particular is 100% valid but these are modern articles about temps above 160 and using the 177.8F as a comparison. I'm pretty sure no one would think to record 130 as a record over in the middle east, as I remember people would speak about 130-140 as a "bad" summer just in conversation (with no verification though, I just remember that was what people said).
- nojvek 6y agoHN is predominantly American so "degrees" is implicitly assumed to be "degrees Farenheit", but for the non US folks here, 130F = 54.4C.
- amai 6y agoOn a side note: Why did the US fight an independence war, but then used imperial units?