12 ms·

Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

• beders 5y ago
  The huge waves of human migration caused by climate changes will not only lead to suffering and death of millions, it will also bring us to the new brink of a new world war. Whole regions becoming unlivable will affect us all. We can't wait around until some invention saves us. We need to act now. We can turn this around with WWS alone.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    What is WWS in this context?
    • h4waii 5y ago
      Wind, Water, Sunlight.
      • t0mbstone 5y ago
        Sometimes I really wish people would just write things out instead of trying to save time with needless acronyms...
        • h4waii 5y ago
          How else will they feign domain expertise unless you are dazzled by jargon?!
          • beders 5y ago
            You must be new to HN.
            • t0mbstone 5y ago
              YMBNTHN
  • irrational 5y ago
    I personally would not buy property or a home south of the 45th parallel. I know people moving from Oregon to Texas because they disagree with how Oregon handled the pandemic. I think they are nuts in more ways than one.
  • freeflight 5y ago
    It's already happening but barely anybody notices because it's so politicized. Syria for example has been in over a decade of civil war, refugees spilling over deep into Europe affecting local politics, as the ME region was already saturated with displaced people trough Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet most peoples take on Syria is a regurgitated: "The Syrian people rose up against an evil dictator regime! Arab Summer!". When in reality the people in Syria went trough a 10 years period of drought [0] prior to "shit hitting the fan". A combination of the climate getting hotter while water is getting more scarce in the region, as Turkey controls the majority of freshwater inflow into Syria and large parts of Iraq [1]. An inflow that's steadily getting smaller, as Turkey is expanding its own agricultural infrastructure projects, with plenty of dams, in Southeastern Anatolia. In 2008 Syria sought more drought support from the UN, and particularly the US. The cable can be found on Wikileaks [2] and the warnings by the Syrian UN representative and minister of agriculture read pretty much prophetic in hindsight. [0] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Full_Report_3074.pdf https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Fu... [1] https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/turkey-syria-and-iraq-conflict-over-euphrates-tigris https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/turkey-syria-and-... [2] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DAMASCUS847_a.html https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DAMASCUS847_a.html
• tomcooks 5y ago
  Everytime you take your car think about the discomfort you felt by reading the headline.
  • xyzelement 5y ago
    If you are trying to persuade people to your point of view, I don't think this method works. First, skimming the article for the causes of "heat dome" I am not seeing connections to climate change. Maybe I didn't read carefully enough so let me know but this could just be a "thing". But more importantly, short of that connection it looks like you are trying to appeal to guilt and fear and that's just not something that attracts mentally healthy people. Nobody is interested in that emotion so if it's warranted you have to work much harder to make a case. Besides our cars have good AC.
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    On the one hand, it is easy to see the direct link. OTOH, you can't blame a person - or company - for playing according to the rules of the game. It comes down to: "Why should I eschew a car and take 250% longer to travel places on COVID infested public transport, when my neighbour Bob jumps in his BMW SUV and drives." We need leadership from lawmakers or nothing meaningful will happen.
    • Klonoar 5y ago
      A bit off topic, but: COVID should not be a reason we eschew public transportation; we already have enough of a stigma against it in the USA. I think last year was understandable why some would shy away from it, but if you'll ride in an airplane I don't see why you would be unwilling to take the train.
      • _carbyau_ 5y ago
        I love the idea of public transport. The reality doesn't match the idea though. Same as "drive vs not drive" for climate change, the rules have to change for most people to consistently prefer public transport over using their own car. Plane vs train? Two different use cases which people would rate differently depending on benefit vs risk/cost. I can easily see people happy to use a plane to travel long distances with a known set (to the carrier) of people but not want to use a public train with strangers getting on and off at each stop. Here in Australia where we have limited number of COVID+ people and track'n'trace is feasible it makes a huge difference.
• semitones 5y ago
  We're all gonna die.
  • undfg 5y ago
    Every news piece about "climate change". https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f5d6d60c-adba-478d-835c-8a3804ea03eb https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f5d6d60c-adba-478d-835c-8a3804e...
  • riffic 5y ago
    on a long enough timeline..
    • kiliantics 5y ago
      it's already happening: https://mobile.twitter.com/JimBair62221006/status/1354175511954481152 https://mobile.twitter.com/JimBair62221006/status/1354175511... I don't understand the downvotes. These tweets are documenting record droughts/floods and crop losses in the last year and people are dying of starvation and the numbers of people starving will only go up.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    Some will die, some will always survive this. That doesn't really change - so that's barely what this is about. We need to make an effort to stop climate change. If we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity, investing in a prosperous future.
• blondie9x 5y ago
  To some seeing records such as these fall is heartbreaking. It’s agonizing and vexing when you wonder what can you do to help slow down climate change? The reality is we aren’t doing nearly enough to slow it down and the Earth is gradually destabilizing. We see insane cold snaps such as those that impacted Texas this winter, and at the opposite end of the spectrum heat waves unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. The worst part is these will continue to get worse year after year while greenhouse gas emissions rise. Imagine the record high temperatures falling this week and year. In 5 years or 10 years they might seem to be distant memories as we continue to see records broken and the planet becomes less livable. The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods. The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and societal actions and sacrifices now to address the climate crisis.
  • Taek 5y ago
    As an individual, there isn't really anything you can do. Going vegetarian doesn't help. Recycling doesn't help. Using your shower for 5 minutes doesn't help. As a society, we've chosen to manage resources via capitalism. If you use less water, what that means is water is cheaper so some corporation can afford another few acres of almond trees. If consumers cut their waste in half, the slack would be picked up at the corporate level. I genuinely believe the only answer is violently enforced regulation. Set a standard like the Geneva convention that says how much pollution and waste you are allowed to generate on a per-area basis, and actually go to war against countries that don't meet the goals. Throw executives in jail that increase profits by migrating production to countries with less regulation around emissions and waste. This is a tragedy of the commons problem, and you aren't going to fix it by having even a large percentage of the population agree to be respectful of the commons. You have to declare war against those that aren't respecting the commons. I don't see another path that will actually result in meaningful change.
• andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Maybe it’s time to signal political leaders that climate collapse is an urgent issue.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    Perhaps in the same way the civil engineers signal to south Florida condo boards that their buildings are about to collapse? It's the same problem, really. Collective action by a political body controlled by older people who are trying to just hold on to their wealth until they die is impossible. We need new political structures to write down the capital loss on all the junk we built in the 20th century that has no purpose in the 21st, and the political will to tell a handful of people that yes your underground mineral rights are being expropriated.
    • 6f8986c3 5y ago
      Environmentalists fought against nuclear power for 70 years. The result? We burned coal. So I’m not interested. You wanted the world to burn. So let it burn.
      • Avamander 5y ago
        How much of that has actually been environmentalists and not a result of intentional deceptive tactics and undermining of public education by fossil fuel companies?
        • 6f8986c3 5y ago
          Most of it has been environmentalists.
          • bavent 5y ago
            Can you provide some evidence of that?
            • 5y ago
• dvaun 5y ago
  While the topic is certainly interesting, the way that this article is written feels odd. It reads (to me) like GPT-generated text.
  • IMTDb 5y ago
    Maybe that's because the author is not a native english speaker ?
  • wil421 5y ago
    How else would they make you look at all those ads? A lot of the paragraphs were repeating themselves without really saying anything.
• kiloreux 5y ago
  The affects of this on third world country are even worse. Here in Algeria we are having the worst drought in over 20 years. What I fear, is that if this continues to happen, people could literally start dying from thirst again. I wonder how good is desalination of sea water technology and if we could see some startups that explore this field, certainly a lot of people's lives to be changed.
  • Taek 5y ago
    I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight. People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.
    • neaanopri 5y ago
      People dying in Algeria won't realistically get the US, French, or Chinese governments to significantly cut fossil fuels supplied to their citizens.
      • petre 5y ago
        Guess what Algeria's first three main export products are? Crude petroleum, petroleum gas and refined petroleum. They're trying to diversify but it's too litlle, too late.
        • AngryData 5y ago
          Plastics and polymers certainly aren't going away anytime soon so its not like a renewable energy world would just kill them. I don't expect plastic production to actually contract until long after we have made the grid renewable/sustainable and have extra energy for active carbon sequestering. Disposable plastic from grocery bags and simple wrappers are easy to reduce and eliminate but how many consumer devices are made of just metal or wood now and aren't 95% plastic? Plastic is still replacing tons of metal piping and ducts and on cars and everything else. When is the last time anyone has seen a wooden handled screwdriver for sale?
• Lammy 5y ago
  Maybe it's time to start talking about ways humanity can geo-engineer our way out of this instead of just sitting here waiting to suffer. The US Air Force has been interested in this topic for decades, but there's no way to know how viable any of that research actually is. Some of the speculative documents I've read propose using carbon black dust as a way to artificially reflect heat, like https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/vol3ch15.pdf#page=42 https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....
  • andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    The Matrix!
    • Lammy 5y ago
      I wish that was what they meant by "VR WX — Virtual Weather" :p
  • riffic 5y ago
    One of the more compelling geoengineering strategies I've seen discussed has been Olivine weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine
    • tempestn 5y ago
      Agreed. Following Project Vesta with interest: https://www.projectvesta.org/ https://www.projectvesta.org/
    • londons_explore 5y ago
      In the best case, one ton of oil/coal requires a few tons of olivine to neutralise it right? So we need to go olivine mining at a greater rate than we have done oil extraction... Will there be millions of olivine rigs, olivine pipelines, olivine wars? Somehow I don't think it's gonna happen...
    • splittingTimes 5y ago
• bob1029 5y ago
  I wish I knew more about meteorology. It must be incredible (and maybe a little harrowing) to be in that profession these days. Does anyone have any idea how this heat wave will conclude? Does all that energy just fade out into a nice polite rainstorm, or should we expect something more dramatic to cap it off considering the unprecedented circumstances?
  • squidfood 5y ago
    On the Pacific NW coast where this is happening, cool marine air will push in and eventually overwhelm the system holding in the heat. The change can be quite abrupt, as the two systems wrestle for dominance, I've felt it (in Seattle) is as a sudden breeze followed by what feels like turning the AC on - literally a 5-10deg temp drop in minutes and can drop 30deg in a couple hours. It doesn't generally end with full-on rain but with cool coastal clouds rolling in.
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      In this case it was a 40-50 degree (Fahrenheit) swing from the record high to the overnight lows as the air compression from sinking air off the mountains dispersed and marine air came onshore: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/even-more-extreme-extraordinary-record.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/even-more-extreme-ext...
  • s5300 5y ago
    Check out Frankie MacDonald, he's an autistic savant meteorologist. Not saying that in any disrespectful way, I know some people get a bit butthurt when using those words. I don't know if he's commented on it yet, but if he has, >99% chance he's correct.
    • JKCalhoun 5y ago
      > Not saying that in any disrespectful way, I know some people get a bit butthurt… Incongruence detected.
• buildbot 5y ago
  It was very bad in Seattle, most building AC systems couldn't even keep up with the load. Lots of wildlife certainly died, there were so many heartbreaking posts about finding dead cats and birds.
  • ttul 5y ago
    Same in Vancouver. The hotel I stayed at couldn’t get the room to go below 25C - about 80F. Extremely uncomfortable, albeit better than 95F outdoors.
    • Avamander 5y ago
      Have you acclimated yourself to 20C/86C using AC that 25C/80F is uncomfortable?
      • thesh4d0w 5y ago
        Nobody here has AC to acclimate themselves to that, 20C is a more normal temperature for Vancouver.
        • Avamander 5y ago
          I don't live that far up north but I'm just a bit surprised 25C is considered uncomfortable, especially if it's only a short way from usual room 22C.
    • Izikiel43 5y ago
      25C vs the over 40C in monday is heaven
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    To think that a few years ago some design firm were firmly convinced they could build an office building there without AC. http://archive.kuow.org/post/modern-seattle-building-doesn-t-have-ac-purpose http://archive.kuow.org/post/modern-seattle-building-doesn-t...
• jimmytucson 5y ago
  I feel like extreme weather is right up there with super moons and other astronomical events when it comes to generating headlines, so I did a time constrained Google search for "heat dome" and here's what turned up: 2020-07-10 - "How a ‘Heat Dome’ Forms—and Why This One Is So Perilous (A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US. The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.)" https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-heat-dome-forms/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-heat-dome-forms/ 2019-07-29 - "What exactly are heat domes and why are they so long-lasting and miserable? (Since late June, bouts of extreme heat have scorched both the United States and Europe. To blame are large, stagnant zones of high pressure known as heat domes.)" https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/29/what-exactly-are-heat-domes-why-are-they-so-long-lasting-miserable/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/29/what-exact... 2018-07-29 - "Scorching, long-duration heat wave to roast much of U.S." https://www.axios.com/scorching-heat-wave-hits-us-millions-affected-20cda585-2f74-4bd4-8aed-d3826d2c4126.html https://www.axios.com/scorching-heat-wave-hits-us-millions-a... 2017-07-22 - "Meteorologists keep mentioning the 'heat dome' - What is it?" https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/What-s-a-heat-dome-11240229.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/What-s-a-heat-dome-11240... 2016-07-22 - "'Heat Dome' Causing Excessive Temperatures In Much Of U.S." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487031278/heat-dome-causing-excessive-temperatures-in-much-of-u-s https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487031278... I don't mean to make light of important meteorological events, especially as they relate to climate change, but can anybody with better knowledge tell me if this is a significant incident, or just another "super blood worm moon to appear larger than it has since 1944"?
  • npunt 5y ago
    Yes, the absolute values being seen here are breaking past records by up to 10*F. This isn't media just making something of nothing.
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    There were pretty significant heat records set in western Canada
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly. Yeah... um... call me skeptical on that claim. So far as I can tell, Covid didn't break anybody's air conditioners. It didn't (so far as I know) leave people more susceptible to heat. That article seems like attention-grabbing nonsense. (I'm not blaming you, just commenting on what your search turned up.)
• lwansbrough 5y ago
  Here in British Columbia we had 100+ excess deaths over the past 4 days (COVID excess deaths here are probably zero over the same period.)
  • eloff 5y ago
    It's up over 480 now.
• fragbait65 5y ago
  Honestly, why bother? The earth isn't dying, the earth will be fine, it will recover over time, humanity on the other hand needs to be reduced. If it isn't climate change, an epidemic or something else, then it will be war over resources some time in the future. On the other hand, climate change will probably lead to war anyway, since resources like water and places to live will decrease from that, so war is probably in the future anyway, since world population continue to rise, especially since the Chinese seem to allow 3 children moving forward.
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    I think you are half right. The earth isn't dying, it will be fine. We should have a human focus, because it's a global common ground. We should bother because this is all about what kind of life we will have in the future. Some will die, some will always survive. That doesn't really change. But if we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity. That's why it's worth bothering, to build prosperity, invest in the future.
    • fragbait65 5y ago
      I agree with everything you say. It's actually not a science/technology problem. The problem is human nature, and that's not solvable with technology. If it was, then everything would be rather simple...
      • kzrdude 5y ago
        I think it's a problem of politics, just like you say, it's not about technology, of course. But it's an issue at the cross section of science and politics. Maybe you can also see why the young climate activists use banners with "system change, not climate change": They don't believe, either, that our current sociologial systems are capable of solving this, the "system" needs to change.
        • fragbait65 5y ago
• wstrange 5y ago
  Since that article was posted, Lytton BC broke the previous days record again: 49.6C (121 F) [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-alberta-heat-wave-heat-dome-temperature-records-1.6084203 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-alberta-h...
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Wow, that's Death Valley hot.
    • geocrasher 5y ago
      I haven't had the opportunity to look up the humidity in BC, but certainly it is far greater than what you would see in death valley. Death valley is a very dry area. The Pacific Northwest is wet and the humidity just adds to the misery of the heat. In my area we saw almost 110° at about 35% humidity. I have experienced 120° in 5% humidity and I have to say the 110 felt hotter! Definitely more miserable!
      • Turing_Machine 5y ago
        > The Pacific Northwest is wet West of the Cascades, yes. Eastern Oregon and Washington are quite dry. Lytton, BC is in a similar geographic position. It's inland of the coastal range. It gets 430.6 mm (16.95 in) of annual precipitation, compared to 1,189 mm (46.8 in) for Vancouver.
        • geocrasher 5y ago
          Yes that's true. I forget about the Dry Side, having never visited there. I'm a transplant to the wet side :)
      • xyhopguy 5y ago
        thats a dewpoint of 76F!!! dunno what its like a little more east but in the northwest that's unheard of. Portland's dewpoint I think peaked around 65F.
• throwitaway1235 5y ago
  It sounds like a reverse polar vortex? If any meteorologists are around to confirm.
• npunt 5y ago
  I wonder if this heat dome effect contributed to Venus' eventual fate. My #1 fear is we're just going to get into some runaway cascade of warming and turn into something like Venus much faster than we realize.
  • freeflight 5y ago
    It's kind of sad how we are fantasizing about terraforming Mars, while we've been seemingly very effective at venusforming Terra.
    • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      Well, looking at mars, solutions like "keep slamming it with ice comets till the weather improves" are on the table. On earth we'd have all the NIMBYs whining about impact craters spoiling the view or something.
  • lamontcg 5y ago
    The Earth has had 2,000+ ppm CO2 concentrations in the past and hasn't turned into Venus. And more or less we're going to dig up all the dinosaurs and plants that died and turned into oil/carbon and put them back in the atmosphere and return to that if we do nothing. But we have a record of what that looks like and its not Venus. That's also a very silly things to "fear" since to turn into Venus you gotta do things like melt all of Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas first which will take a couple hundred years. There's an awful lot of thermal mass in all that ice. Disruption to agriculture and food production though doesn't require turning the Earth into Venus.
    • the_third_wave 5y ago
      The planet has been ice-free in past interglacials, e.g. the last interglacial (before the current Holocene) was warmer than the current. Earth becoming like Venus would take far more terraforming than it would take to turn Mars into a new Earth, probably comparable to turning Venus into an Earth-like planet - i.e. it is not going to happen. In "a few thousand years" [1] the temperature will drop precipitously and we'll be heading for the next ice age if the pattern from the last ~2.5 million years holds. In other words, enjoy the warmth while it lasts, it is sure to get very cold again sometime in the future... [1] which can mean anything from "soon" to "100.000 years" depending on who does the talking
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Izikiel43 5y ago
  I'm from a 3rd world country and its the first time in Canada it's as hot as back there, with the difference people here don't have AC, so lots of people are dying from the heat.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  There have been some previous discussions on HN about this weather event in the Pacific Northwest, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27670739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27670739 One thing I want to mention is that it is not known if this heat wave is caused by climate change or not. A UW professor named Cliff Mass, who specializes in climate science and has written books about the weather of the Pacific Northwest, has specifically said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatures-are-being.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...): > Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well. He also said in the same article: > Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
  • angst_ridden 5y ago
    The thing is, this is a chaotic effect of the jet stream going into tighter oscillations. Think of a river in a flat area meandering more and more until oxbows form. It's an analogous phenomenon with the jet stream and pressure. The jet stream tends to follow warmer air, which means increased temperatures overall give a "flatter" plain to meander on, to return to the analogy. Obviously, like anything, it's far more complex than the analogy permits.
  • throwawayuw 5y ago
    Throwaway as well because I've worked with Cliff Mass and am not interested in being at the receiving end of the retaliation that he's known for doling out. Cliff is kind of a pariah among meteorologists and climate scientists. He _loves_ that fact, and revels in this idea that he's the lone genius who got it right while the rest of the community got it wrong on climate change. But he's not viewed as someone who makes credible statements, particularly as they pertain to questions about climate. Many of his blog posts are deliberately misleading or contain incorrect information. Others I'd categorize as "You're not wrong... you're just an asshole." He has a decent understanding of some of the meteorological phenomena that are unique to the Puget Sound region, but even there I take every word he writes with a grain of salt. Sure, read his blog to understand how the snow is going to be this weekend at Crystal. But I'd leave it at that.
• grishka 5y ago
  In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. It was as hot as +35 in northwest part of Russia last week, for several days, with sun barely coming down at night, and that felt like a torture at times. Some historical records were broken.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Whoever is building and selling ACs these days, I think these companies are a good investment right now. Summers in Europe are on track to become unlivable without air conditioners in individual homes; I give it few more years before everyone and their dog will want to buy one.
    • fomine3 5y ago
      Sadly they also have been affected by the chip shortage.
  • cryptoz 5y ago
    > In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. I think you are misinformed. Some areas have it for sure, but in some very large population areas like the Pacific Northwest (say, 20M people), it is very rare. I know that 0 of the houses in my neighborhood have AC originally. [1] Any AC that someone has now was purchased in the last few days, and many people cannot afford to purchase a window unit or portable unit. [1] This is knowable because nighttime sound has skyrcoketed. It used to much quieter at night here, but now, after 8pm or so when the car noise is less, you can hear the blasting of everyone's new window unit as it struggled to keep up.
  • freeflight 5y ago
    > In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. Afaik that depends on the specific region in the US. Some states have hot regions where AC is common, but plenty of others don't because heat didn't used to be as common as it's now, thus the sudden need for cooling to such a degree that even public cooling shelters are a thing [0] Another factor, even for places with AC, is that their infrastructure and AC is built to certain heat expectations, if the weather goes outside these expected then the infrastructure can't cope. A version of that was the Texas electricity grid failing during the sudden high demand of a "real" winter. [0] https://www.axios.com/northwest-heat-dome-global-warming-5915a972-20d2-4c62-bdd7-ac3ae609e4b4.html https://www.axios.com/northwest-heat-dome-global-warming-591...
• irrational 5y ago
  Monday in Portland was crazy. We went to a friends house to eat. Our car said it was 119 when we went in. When we came out 2 hours later it was 82!
• ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  There are 241 coal power plants in the USA. Get 50 people chained up in front of the gates, and stop workers and coal coming in. Maintain this human blockade until the last coal power plant is shut down. Ignore arrests and ignore the police. Screw the impact on the 'investment'. The grid will handle the loss of electricity anyway. That's about 12,000 people across the USA who could actively shape the future of humanity.
  • jhayward 5y ago
    > The grid will handle the loss of electricity anyway. No, it won't. And if you do it in the midst of a hot summer, or a cold winter, people will die because you killed them. There are responsible ways to close those plants without killing people.
  • justshowpost 5y ago
    US has enough domestic terrorists already, there is no need for additional 12k eco-terrorists more, thanks.
  • fragbait65 5y ago
    Problem with that, especially in the US I think, is that the majority of people will not like what you are doing. The only way to enact change is to get the majority of people on your side. What you suggest will only antagonize people though... What you suggest has only ever worked through history when protesting slowly enlightened people and the majority of people chose to support the protestors over time. I think the US is so divided and fed up from BLM and the election chaos at the moment, so enacting change that way is a hopeless cause.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ Cliff Mass's blog has been providing good context about the meteorology of the heat dome.
• smusamashah 5y ago
  I am from Pakistan and have quite a few cities there were temperature goes up to 50 degrees Celsius. I am living in UK these days and feel that UKs cold will kill me. Summer is the only one or two months when I feel alive.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    My mom grew up in Guddu for part of her childhood and her cousins lived down the road in Daharki at same time. I wonder if those get as hot as Sibi/Jacobabad
    • smusamashah 5y ago
      Not sure but I think most cities in Punjab do reach 50, my village included.
  • PedroBatista 5y ago
    To be fair, even the UK natives feel miserable with their weather. But also try to see things on the bright side, at least you will not get arrested for complaining about the weather like in Kuwait :)
• eloff 5y ago
  In Vancouver we had over 480 sudden deaths over the last 5 days. Mostly heat related. It reached 40 degrees on Monday with humidity around 60%. It was still 32 by sunset. I lived in Panama for ten years. I've never felt heat like this.
• justshowpost 5y ago
  I'm concerned how this article speaks about setting records. Setting new records aren't always a good thing. Setting a new record in climate change destroys uncountable organisms affecting the nature system, and eventually humans. By staying ignorant of our impact on the nature system, we dig our own grave.
  • eloff 5y ago
    Nobody, including in this article, thinks breaking these records is a good thing.
• newbie789 5y ago
  This heat is ridiculous. My friend’s mousepad fused to his desk and he had to scrape it off with a butter knife. I’ve had to build makeshift doors to isolate a tiny cooled room in my house. I haven’t worn pants in days. My partner and I went through a 1.5L spray bottle misting ourselves in the couple hours leading up to midnight (!) Now we’ve just gotta hope that nobody lights a match in this giant, extremely windy basket of bone-dry fuel. The fact that there is a fireworks stand open on the main road in my town right now is, to put it mildly, very unsettling.
• NoPicklez 5y ago
  Here in Australia I am certain that the last couple of years of summers have been drastically cooler than previous. From memory alone, I remember having weeks of 30c+ weather with multiple days above 40c. However, after looking at our Bureau's temperature history it says otherwise: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/temperature/ http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/temperature/