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Comment by liberte82 | Hacker News Reader

I saw it was 115 in Phoenix yesterday, like what? As a Canadian that does not even compute.

I've experienced a week or two of temperatures like that. They aren't too miserable as long as humidity is low and you've got a bit of a breeze (and a source of hydration). Fortunately, Arizona is pretty arid.

Frankly, 80 degrees in Florida can easily be significantly more unpleasant than 115 in the southwest.

I spent last summer in California's inland empire region. You've gotta remember something. In between SoCal and Phoenix, AZ lays Death Valley, one of the literal hottest places on the planet. It really shouldn't be that surprising, then, that the regional area can become super-heated, if that's even a term.

When it was topping the high 110s where I was last summer, it really wasn't that bad. I spent 4 years living in the middle of Georgia, and 95 degrees with 95% humidity was a much more unpleasant feeling than a dry 118 was, at least for me.

Seeing flights cancelled due to extreme winter conditions is something people are used to seeing, but now it's due to extreme heat.

https://www.wired.com/story/phoenix-flights-canceled-heat/ https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/20/15837804/phoenix-extreme-...

Anything above 118°F is beyond the current design limits of some planes, so those planes are grounded. That's going to become a frequent event at the rate things are going. It's also scary hot.

yup, when it gets hot the air expands, gets less dense, too thin to support a fully loaded plane

Yeah, but I don't understand why you'd cancel the flight instead of just reduce takeoff weight. Perhaps it just becomes uneconomic to run the flight if they can only load half the passengers?

These planes were tested/certified for a certain temperature range. If higher temps become more common, they could potentially be re-certified with more stringent weight restrictions.

Because if you exceed the designed operating range enough something bad will happen, expected or not. Yeah, it's probably fine but nobody wants to blow up a space shuttle.

Part of the preflight that pilots have to do is calculate how much runway is needed for takeoff given the planes loading and current conditions. If the plane doesn't include data for the current temp, they can't run their calculations and fly. It's not that the plane itself can't fly in the heat, but they often aren't tested at very high temps due to lack of need.

115 in Phoenix at this time of year is not abnormal. Having grown up in southern Arizona 105 or 110 was not uncommon and really didn't deter us from going out, of course going out met going to a pool.

Yeah I didn't really have a larger point about this being due to climate change or anything. I realize that no one specific data point is ever evidence of climate change or lack thereof (unlike that senator who brought a snowball into Congress).

I could handle 115 in a pool... probably couldn't handle the walk to/from the vehicle.

And when we hit 120 last week it was the last straw for my aging car battery! I had to get a jump and go get a new battery in the middle of the afternoon heat :(

Now when some freak traffic accident takes out a power line to your neighborhood and you have no power for hours during that heat, then you're in for some real pain! But other than that we're pretty used to it, just stay inside during daylight hours.

As a phoenician the canadian deep cold temperatures I see during the winter do the same for me.

Dress for the weather, you'll be fine. People have been doing it for tens of thousands of years.

You can't dress for 120°F. You can only avoid it.

People in the Sahara (and other deserts) dressed for the weather. It's not comfortable by modern standards, but people were able to bear it with the right clothing to keep the outside heat out.

Humidity is a killer in high temperature, you do not have to deal with that in the desert.

Well, Phoenix is an arid desert.

Which makes me wonder, how would 120 feel in Florida?

Not as hot as an actual sauna, I'm sure it'd be fine. ;)

Like Mercury on a foggy day.

As true as that is, even those that live in a desert would limit their activity on especially hot days. At some point even camels are going to refuse to cooperate.

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