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.
For those who don't know anything about it, Death Valley is a unique edge case for summer air temps largely due to its geography:
> The depth and shape of Death Valley influence its summer temperatures.
> The valley is a long, narrow basin 282 feet (86 m) below sea level, yet is
> walled by high, steep mountain ranges. The clear, dry air and sparse plant
> cover allow sunlight to heat the desert surface. Heat radiates back from the
> rocks and soil, then becomes trapped in the valley's depths. Summer nights
> provide little relief as overnight lows may only dip into the 85°F to 95°F
> (30°C to 35°C) range. Heated air rises, cools before it can rise over the
> valley's mountain walls, and is recycled back down to the valley floor. These
> pockets of descending air are only slightly cooler than the surrounding hot
> air. As they descend, they are compressed and heated even more by the low
> elevation air pressure. These moving masses of super heated air blow through
> the valley, creating extreme high temperatures. [0]
Any number of random variables can have an amplified effect on temperature by what's described above...
There is a little bit of a misleading in the headline here. Even if 120°F was the temperature at midnight, the actual low for that night was 103°F. That itself is not even the highest low recorded in Death Valley, which Wikipedia reports to be 110°F.
So death valley will need a grid of points with a supply of extra water and shadow to rescue the area and improve our chances of avoiding the expensive collapse in the local plants and ecosystems. This doesn't seem technically complicated, just needs money. Here have a problem with a possible action to take. We only need to find the will.
Having read the article, I'm still confused ... are they saying Death Valley in particular had the hottest midnight on record? Or that it was the hottest midnight ever recorded on the planet? The article doesn't make this clear. Both interpretations are bad, but one is more frightening than the other.
I'm a Florida native and have paced at Badwater. I think it was around 110F when we were in furnace creek in 2015; it was like being in a convection oven with the wind blowing. I can't fathom another 10 degrees while the sun is gone.
Also a Florida native (grew up near Jacksonville — the swampy part not the beach part — WITHOUT air conditioning).
I lived through the PNW heat dome a few years ago (also without air conditioning). 110+ all day long and 80+ at night was as close to hell as I’ve ever been.
I’ve never been so glad to be 40 years old with a chronic illness as I am today. Good luck to anyone who’s going to be alive in 75+ years.
I'm a PNW native and made it through the heat dome. I had an old window unit AC in the bedroom that made it much more tolerable, though the walls in the rest of the house were hot to the touch (I had a terrible roof at the time). The entire time the scenario of everyone maxing out their AC and the power going out, though, plagued me to the point that I spent most of my time out of the bedroom, trying to make sure I would acclimatize a bit in case that happened. I think we can survive more than we think we can, but I really don't want to put that to the test.
I did have some food around that didn't need refrigeration just in case. Next time I'll make sure I have some water squirreled away just in case the water goes out too for some reason.
Guess I can help most people outside US reading these unfamiliar strange numbers;
Earth first avg temp: 22,78c
Then 26,67c, “even” 32,22c.
Todays avg: 15,56c.
I guess I would invest in the market leaders in Europe?
These links have some market share and forecasts, this is not really my area so I have no if the sites below contain bias.
The planet is heating and you’re asking how you can profit from this?
Research companies and buy shares. Don’t limit your self to AC companies either, lots of opportunities abound, look at renewable energy build out, mineral exploration. deep sea mining, and I feel like defense companies are going to see more growth too.
Climate change will shrink the pie, but you can have a larger share of it.
Profiting by fixing problems is how we fix problems.
I will add that the pie has never grown faster, and shows every indication of speeding up.
Major challenges like climate change (challenges to the economy, that is) look relatively minor when you compare it to past issues like WW1, WW2, possible nuclear destruction, widespread famines as recently as the 20th century; and when you also take into account that we have proven tech like nuclear and solar power and greenhouse and hydroponic farming that we can now use to tackle this issue.
Climate change is an ecological catastrophe, but we'll find a way to grow wealthier with or without a thriving ecosystem.
I wouldn't say that buying stock in companies that provide air conditioners to consumers fits any definition of fixing the problem of man-made climate change. In fact, wouldn't a warmer planet be better for AC businesses?
Why not - a well-funded AC company will be more capable of meeting the challenge, and since people demand green solutions to things now, also be more able to develop more efficient climate control systems.
This of course will not happen on autopilot, so investors must as always keep a close eye on the CEO and vote in shareholder meetings instead of just buying-and-forgetting.
It doesn't solve climate change of course, but it does make a tiny improvement to one aspect of it. Multiply by every company touching the climate, and you can effect real change.
> Profiting by fixing problems is how we fix problems.
I take your point. But only partly: the profit motive can be useful to some degree for some situations, provided that market failures don't undermine the connection between private action and public benefit.
(Aside: Many classes of problems are solved without an explicit profit mechanism.)
Also useful:
- rules for such mechanisms (a "floor", in a sense, for how they operate)
- expectations for such mechanisms (what we hope they accomplish)
- philosophies and moralities for people that guide us
P.S. Bonus points if you can answer this question. Mathematically speaking, what would it take for a market to incorporate the relevant time horizons and externalities such that we might have even a 50% confidence that a market would get the incentives right to reduce global warming?
Being an investor in sales of new heat pumps and related technology is a great way to reduce wood, oil, gas, and coal burning in the house and in general -- as heat pumps are typically greater than 100% efficiency.
Considering how well someone survives the coming decades depends on how wealthy they are (more than in the past), it makes sense. It is a little callous of them, but sometimes survival and being nice are at odds.
Merely surviving is different from being happy you survived. I am not sure it will feel like much of a victory when you survive to bake in intense heat every summer and breath smoke filled air, or lose your mansion to a hurricane or tornado.
This whole mindset of “at least I profited” seems to rely on the notion that there is somewhere on the planet that will still be safe and enjoyable to live in as the climate apocalypse settles in. I don’t see where that is.
If the number of safe and enjoyable places to live approaches 0, it will be much much much better to have “at least profited” than to have not profited.
There may not be an enjoyable place to live on earth when the climate apocalypse hits, but at least having more money will mean less personal suffering for yourself. Given how unlikely that the world will actually get its act together to prevent such an apocalypse from happening, you might as well assume it’s going to happen anyways and prepare accordingly
I would counter that by staying that Homo sapiens is at the top of the evolutionary success ladder because of collaboration with one another. Which means being nice to one another is the actual winning strategy.
We're in this situation because a handful of people have decided they have to own everything, and the necessary collective action to deal with it has been in short supply for all the decades we've known there was a problem. It's only now when it's almost too late that people are waking up from all the propaganda deployed to confuse the issue.
I'm still doing my part by advocating for good policies and collective action, but like ActorNightly, I think it's prudent to build a boat just in case things continue to not change.
Given the world’s track record in not changing for as long as the alarm has been raised, I think this is a pretty sensible approach to take. At this point, it may well be more prudent for the individual to assume that the climatepocalypse is going to happen anyways, and prepare accordingly rather than continuing to hope for futile efforts to stem the tide
It is certainly prudent to consider that an overall "win" over time may be decoupled from individual circumstances.
If we are to overcome climate change as a earth-wide society, it will have to be through collective action of enough people forcing those in power to be "nice" - whether that will happen in a fast and large enough scale - I have my doubts about too.
If we aren't systematically nice to a wider swath of people (even if in a self-interested Machevellian, The Prince kind of way), I share concerns about needing to plan for a general decline of civilization.
When we were at war with each other in large groups a lot of productive elements went negative for a long time, and it took world cooperation to rebuild it. Even when you study war victors and losers, the winners being nice to losers was more value for everyone vs when not-nice severe loss conditions were imposed after.
The only reason that nothing is being done is because its people are not that inconvenienced yet. Once climate changes starts affecting things, Im like 90% sure humans will figure out how to adapt.
If you're asking this question, you've already missed the boat and it's priced in. If anything I'd consider this an excessive scare and bet against AC.
Within EU markets heating is still the main thing in terms of the amount of energy consumed, but the same air-to-air heat exchanger hardware also does cooling during the summer.
I'd suggest you invest in e.g. Mitsubishi Electric and Daikin. They are the market leaders in that sweetspot of a) efficiency, b) quality/durability, c) demonstrated long term local support, d) price, IMO.
They are not European-based. They have product design in Japan, manufacturing in e.g. Thailand and sales/support offices in Europe.
Unlike other manufacturers, these companies actually listen to their sales orgs and adapt their products to suit the vastly varying climates of the EU.
Especially Mitsubishi Electric has a great reputation in the cold northern parts over the past 2 decades. Daikin is the challenger.
Mitsubishi and Daikin are leaders in the high end of the market, which mainly sell to high income countries, which already are fairly saturated. But if I were making a long bet on the growth of air conditioners in response to global warming, it would be in the markets where there is a lot of growth potential. In these markets, I bet lower priced competitors will have an advantage, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gree_Electric
Sure, if you support genocide I suppose that could seem to be an appealing investment strategy.
In my experience the Chinese hardware is noisy and inefficient. It may make sense for keeping a garage above frost levels, in case it lasts, but it does not make sense for heating/cooling a human abode.
Yes, I don't personally invest in Chinese companies for a multitude of reasons. But it is the reality that a lot of the growth in the market is from people in low income parts of the world who may only have the choice between low-end Chinese ACs, or legacy alternatives to AC.
Of course, the definition of "hottest midnight" depends on time zone arbitrariness, unless they mean local astronomical midnight, which I doubt.
(The definition of "hottest day" hardly depends on time zones in practice because the hottest time is very unlikely to be around the middle of the night. Perhaps they should have instead looked for the highest of the lowest temperatures reached between consecutive noons.)
Of course this is just pedantry, but if you wanted to compare different places on Earth then the difference between civil midnight and solar midnight can be a lot more than one hour. China has a single time zone, for example, so solar noon in China can be anywhere between 11:27 and 15:10 (https://www.timeanddate.com/time/china/one-time-zone.html).
> 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.