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Comment by ainiriand | Hacker News Reader

No, and yes. Heatwaves like the one experienced in Spain have been extraordinarily long. We experience heat waves all summers and they usually last 2-3 days. This one lasted 1 week. And last year we had 2 heat waves 5 days each. I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28. You can compare historical data here (es) http://www.aemet.es/es/idi/clima/registros_climaticos

You can look at the median yearly temperature and see how it is steadily increasing http://www.aemet.es/imagenes_gcd/idi/clima/registros_climati...

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Would people be able to physically adapt to longer periods of higer temperatures? I mean, it is around 40 degrees every day for most of the two months of hot season where I live. And a lot of people don't have air conditioning. On the hottest days they sit around in the village in the shade, drinking a lot and not moving much. Lots of complaining but we don't hear much about heat related deaths.

Yes of course, if the same would happen here in Dublin half of the population would be in trouble! Just kidding, it is just funny sometimes how they present the weather information, painting/coloring the numbers of the temperature as red when they get over 20C.

Adaptation works until the wet bulb temperature is above human body temperature, at which point you'll just slowly broil since you can't lose energy by sweating. Not very likely to get there in Europe, but other (hotter, wetter) countries may.

I was in Doah recently, and people live almost their entire lives indoors. We even went to the main street market after dark and it was too hot to stand without sweating. It's hard to imagine what would happen there if the temperature were to increase by even a few degrees.

I read about this wet bulb temperature thing too, but then I wondered what about saunas? Super humid, can't lose energy by sweating, hotter than human body temperature, yet people stay in them for hours? (Not me personally, I don't like saunas)

We have already physically adapted to different environments. People in Africa can stand higher temperatures. People in Scandinavia can withstand lower temperatures. This is what "races" are, humans adapted to their environments.

Where can I read more on this? I live in Sweden but there are plenty of African immigrants that cope with the cold just fine. I've also not had trouble in much warmer climates, but I haven't been abroad for more than three weeks at a time.

Nick Lane's book on mitochondria[1] has a section on adaptations to hot or cold places related to them. The topic is a bit more complicated than you might think and I'm pretty sure that people of any race can adapt to colder climates though the brown fat response[2].

[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39001.Power_Sex_Suicide?...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue

I was thinking in the short term, not on evolutionay time scales. Personally, when I moved to the tropics I sweat non-stop for about the first two years. But I seem to have adjusted and don't break much of a sweat until the temperature gets to about the mid 30's. On the other hand, I really feel the cold now when it gets below 20.

I think that the parent commenter was being sarcastic to ridicule people who think that there being one cold winter day means that global warming isn't real.

Sufficiently advanced denialism is indistinguishable of satire of said denialism.

Meaningless as written.

> I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28.

Where I come from that's not called a heat wave that's called summer.

And your buildings have been adapted for that environment. If Paris was relocated to North America it would lie a bit north of halfway between Seattle and Vancouver (Right about Bellingham, WA). Those cities would suffer quite a bit as well with long sustained temps that high.

That graph suggest that climate change has caused a 2 degree change in the last 50 year. No one believes that—the number is more like 1 degree in the last hundred.

And anyway, we’re talking about outlier heat waves, not yearly medians.

One degree globally, perhaps, but then there can be regional variation that's larger. The Washington Post just ran a long story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...) on a region in Uruguay that's been heating up more rapidly. Quoting from that article:

"Straddling the equator, the tropics are already hot because they receive the most sunlight. As the sun hits the tropics, enormous columns of air rise skyward and then outward. But as greenhouse gases trap more heat, those columns of air are pushed farther toward the north and south poles. Air that rises in the tropics falls back down over the middle latitudes. With a warming planet, though, the air is falling in different places. ... Near Uruguay, the Brazil Current collides with the cold and nutrient-rich Malvinas Current that flows north from waters off Argentina. Where the two currents meet — what is known as the “confluence” — features sudden temperature contrasts and fosters rich fisheries. But that zone, too, is on the move. Research suggests it is shifting southward at a rate of more than 40 miles per decade."

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