We’re About to See a Rare and Record-Setting May Heat Wave | Hacker News Reader

We’re About to See a Rare and Record-Setting May Heat Wave

scientificamerican.com

45 pointsBender45 comments

This terrifies me. I read an article a few weeks ago how with the heat waves we had in the last years, the forests here stopped sequestering carbon in summer, turning them into net CO2 emitters.

Meanwhile our politicians still don't dare taking unpopular measures and focus on symbol politics.

Let's be frank. Drag queens pose a much greater threat right now. I'm so grateful for that focus. And, on Disney, with Mickey going into the public domain, we can't have him woke as well.

But maybe that's the trick on both sides. Western state politicians focus on what's happening in Florida rather than on their own backyard. Florida focuses on drag queens and the stench of San Francisco. I do see a lot of damage to the morale of teachers in Florida, however, done by local Florida politicians.

Don’t look up!

I know you're OT but I'm still rebutting the fully false insinuation here. I have been active with sexual assault survivors for more decades than most here have been alive. Actual sexual grooming is properly defined by those who've experienced it.

The overwhelming sexual threat to children and women has always been straight men. That is physics-level reality.

(I think OP was joking)

Aye, perhaps, and in poor taste.

Should have used the /s tag then to be clear.

I've been thoroughly down voted and I should be, as sarcasm isn't helpful here on HN.

I'm 100% in agreement with you.

I understand. With kindness, I suggest that your phrasing may have been indistinguishable from the actual propaganda.

Text is hard tho. I've certainly done similar. Maybe recently.

That's why it is great we are actually in conversation and not just reading sound bites. Nice to meet you and look forward to making the world a better place together!

Don’t look to politicians to solve these problems.

Who then? Individual action cannot make a dent. Corporations? Maybe when there is a profit incentive I’ll believe it.

Invent the technology that solves the problem. In this case, modular nuclear reactors and/or fusion, and diamondoid molecular nanotechnology. The former gives us a nearly limitless source of carbon-free energy, while the later moves our technology base off of refined metals (which emit CO2 in production) and into using carbon itself as the fundamental base material, making carbon capture and even atmospheric drawdown profitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)

It is more than time for many people, preferable the majority, to talk with politicians. Really talk with them. Have a very large strike. Express concerns loudly. Everywhere. Everybody.

In Europe some people are gluing themselves to roads. This won't work because this riles up people, but we should rile up politicians, not people.

About five years ago I switched my attitude from: "We will find a solution" to: "I hope we will find a solution". I am not very hopeful.

> This won't work because this riles up people, but we should rile up politicians, not people.

There's a well-known essay that explains why this is effective. It's titled, "Letter From a Birmingham Jail”. Highly recommended.

I am sure I don't understand all the nuances, but let's fantasize: what if celebrities glue themselves to roads? Imagine King Charles III, Roger Federer, Tina Turner, Gérard Dépardieu, David Beckham and others...

What doe celebrities have to do with anything?

Presumably politicians execute the collective will of the people. Otherwise it wouldn't be a democracy. Of course there is some wiggle-room for corruption, but in a decent system that's limited in those areas people care about.

Right now, a lot of the political apathy can feed off the fact that the average voter is pretty old in most Western countries, so climate change will have limited impact on them. So maybe motivating these voters is the way to go.

> Presumably politicians execute the collective will of the people. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a democracy.

And, arguably, its not, even in what are perceived as “democracies”, because a narrow elite controls the media narratives (even the apparent conflicts in the media are largely between factions of that narrow capitalist elite), controls public perception of reality and the available perceived space of political options, and thereby directs society even in the presence of the superficial forms of democracy.

Don't fall into the doomerism trap and fear mongering orthodoxy. Climate deaths are at an all time low, global poverty at a low, there are more trees than there were 100 years ago, the Great Barrier reef is coming back. It has more coral now than in 36 years. The Earth and technology can handle it just fine.

Climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’. U.N. reports and confusing headlines created a generation of doomers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/2...

Oh, so the mitigations are barely starting to work and we should increase our efforts since the net effect is working (no way have we reached full diminishing marginal returns).

Cool. Agreed, doomerism is the wrong approach. But there is still massive cause for concern, and we should proceed forward.

If the world would just consist of the USA, Canada and Europe I would agree, we could handle it just fine. It will be expensive, especially in infrastructure costs due to sea level rise. Transitioning our forests to species adapted to higher temperatures will be a pain, same for changes in our agriculture, but we would be fine.

The problem are the nations with megacities at the coast, but no money to build massive sea walls. Or the nations that are already at the edge of survivable (wet-bulb) temperatures in the summer, but little AC coverage (and often too little electricity to meaningfully increase AC rollout, even if they had the money). Or the nations that have to compete with their neighbors over water sources for drinking and agriculture. Those nations will all be in significant trouble. Which will probably mean migrant waves that will be on an entirely different scale compared to what we are used to, and quite possibly beyond what we can handle. But at the same time, both it's hard to stop desperate people from moving (morally and physically)

American politicians have recently been on a bit of a catch up for lost time.

And obviously some (at all levels from cities up) have been working away for decades. And that's not even counting the rest of the world where climate change is less of a political hot potato. Though yes more could and should have been done.

So I'm not sure a blanket "politicians are terrible" is a particularly good take. It both lets the real guilty parties off the hook while simultaneously blaming the blameless.

It’s been a real ride here this year. The winter was unreasonably long, with no spring to speak of. That said in places like seattle it was a very mild winter overall, marked with intense snow storms in the mountains (as was seen all over the west). That was inauspicious enough for extreme weather this summer. Now it’s starting to manifest I fear.

When I moved here everyone said “you don’t need air conditioning here.” I grew up in the south east, so I know you always want air conditioning everywhere, along with plenty of iced tea. So got a house with a heat pump. Turns out to have been a really prescient idea.

Yeah, I moved to Seattle recently and also knew coming up here that not having AC would be a mistake. I ended up using my portable AC a lot last year.

Mysteriously I still know people who refuse to acknowledge even after it got up to like 115F you need air conditioning. They’re like “it’s only a few weeks a year.” Uh…. On the other hand, their SO’s and children often whisper on the side how they’re going to force the issue this year.

I've had a very similar experience (both in terms of coming from the southeast and the "you don't need air conditioning here" lines). I don't know why people still say that AC isn't needed. Year over year, it seems to get worse. Add in the smoke from the fires that seems to settle in every other year, it just doesn't make sense _not_ to have AC.

A couple of summers ago, when the heat was so bad in the Seattle area, I called a local HVAC installation and repair company to talk about getting AC installed at my home (built sometime in the 80's). There was a wait list of _hundreds_ ahead of me and unit shortages. It was a nightmare. Luckily, folks seemed to reconsider installation over the winter and I was able to work our way up to the top of the line to get things installed during the winter. Best decision I've made.

Yeah I think the 9 months of winter tends to make people forget precisely how miserable summer can be without at least a little bit of AC. With the climate heat pumps are effectively ideal here and electricity is relatively cheap and renewable. There’s literally no reason other than stubbornness at this point.

Part of me wonders if it's similar to the "never carry an umbrella" dynamic? Maybe it's just a "well, this is just how it is, carry on"?

Anyway, it's probably different in our minds because in the southeast, the heat + the humidity can literally kill you. Not having AC isn't just an inconvenience there; it's an emergency.

Yeah absolutely. I spent so many nights with the bedsheets plastered to my body I can’t sleep if it’s even warm, I start flashing back to the trauma of my youth.

Perhaps an explanation is that the climate has changed? Some kind of warming of the globe?

I moved to Seattle 25 years ago and you truly didn’t need AC. Summers were pretty reliably amazing with clear skies and temps seldom above the low 80s. There were a couple of weeks with uncomfortable temperatures (by PNW standards), easily dealt with by ventilating the house at night and closing it up during the day. It’s gotten steadily worse, to where now I’d say you do need AC. Which is a terrible shame.

I came here to say the same. I moved here in 2003 and I can only think of one week in one summer (2009? 2010?) where an AC was critical.

This has completely changed in the last 6-7 years to the point now where I can't imagine not having an air conditioner here anymore.

On the opposite corner of the US, Florida winters are about 20° warmer than they were in the early 1990s. We've gone from regular frosts and seeing teens every few years to seeing frost every few years.

There's precious little of Florida that isn't transforming into Hell.

Its funny to me that we rely on AC's; where we bring energy from someplace else, cause some work to be done, and dispalce heat outside; thus overall increasing temps just by heat displacement and work involved. (similar thoughts as to "just open up your freezer to cool off your house" but in reality that just HEATS up your house, as you bring energy into house and cause it to work harder).

surprised musky isnt trying to build an AC for the earth on the moon... make the moon warm again.

Well, we can’t control how much heat there is (though we have found we can increase the average pretty effectively!) but we do have ways to control where it is.

E.g., in our house we just got heat pump water heaters that are basically air conditioners that pump heat from the room (which the furnace puts its waste heat into, btw) into the water tank instead of venting it outside.

Combined with record setting snow pack in the mountains, this will lead to some massive flooding.

Not sure where you are (Oregon? California?) but BC[0] and north NW US[1] are low.. 88%-95% of normal. Alberta is even worse, although it's hard to find numbers ([1] shows 60-70% for southern parts). That's partly because of the early heat that's already reduced the pack. Drought this year, not floods

[0]: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/air-land-water... [1]: https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/snow-drought-...

I was thinking of Utah when I wrote that.

https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/2022-23-statewide-snow...

Rare and record setting if you ignore the records set in 2021? What other years should we ignore to make this clickbait legit?

"This event won’t reach the heights of the punishing heat dome that obliterated records in the region in June 2021"

can confirm, it’s summer in western oregon already.

Maybe it was rare for last decades standards, but it may become pretty common in the following years.

Medium-rare, more like.

On the edge to well-done.

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