Death Valley Just Had the Hottest Midnight on Record | Hacker News Reader

Death Valley Just Had the Hottest Midnight on Record

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> 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.

120°F = 48.88°C

We are doomed, aren't we?

Humanity survived ice age(s) with much less technology. It’s going to take much more than that.

A couple of problems:

1. We no longer have access to easy to mine resources, which is also how we know that there weren't any really advanced civilizations prior us.

2. A lot of knowledge has been lost on how to do the incremental steps between ice age to here.

3. Lots of people will die.

4. We have very little genetic diversity as a consequence of the previous ice-ages, and we haven't actually recovered.

1.) It's easier to contain or add energy that remove it from a system

2.) The ice ages occured more gradually so didn't disrupt food systems as much

3.) Ice age wood is great for instrument making so we got sweet string instruments out of it

4.) Most hominems died in the last ice age. It's speculated that all non homosapien species were wiped out during or due to the ice age.

So far we mostly used technology to fuck things up.

Especially Tinder and Grindr.

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.

Perhaps, but I'm not exactly looking forward to a future where surviving is the main objective.

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.

We’re one tipping point away from really bad days.

I remember hearing this 20 years ago, and we've certainly hit at least one tipping point since then, no?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but when someone predicts a calamity for decades, they don't get credit when they happen to be right the 500th time.

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley

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.

Everyone being afraid is WAY better than people being convinced climate change is a non-issue.

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53788018

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.

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.

For more, see: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393608908

> 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.

> 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?

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.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1188101048/blight-warns-of-th...

> 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.

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.

We are not doomed. The climate is changing but we can still adapt. We can still lower emissions. We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

Doomerism is an awful mindset to have. It’s difficult to feel this way but there’s still a lot of hope and a lot of amazing people working on this.

There is certainly lots of pain ahead. My home nation will be underwater by 2100s, lots of animal species will go extinct, but we are not doomed.

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.

The recent news that Greenland was ice-free at +1.5C has increased my pessimism again.

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.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

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.

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.

36-37 Billion tonnes of CO2/yr, ..

That's actually a bit less bleak than I would have expected.

/sarcasm . dark humour

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.

We aren't doomed as a species, but billions of people will die.

> We can still lower emissions.

If the world were to decrease to net 0 today and until 2050, we'd still expect average and mean temperatures to continue to increase through 2050.

> We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

These are mostly prototypes and we do not have the capacity to get to 0 with these technologies yet.

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 mean, we're all going to die and humanity is going to go extinct. One climate or another doesn't have much bearing on either fact.

Yes

48 degrees - the temperature record for Europe set in Greece in 1977 at least until any current records are confirmed.

It’s worth reminding this is at midnight. Many parts of the worlds are hitting 48 and 50+ temperatures these days.

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.

Some people got leptospirosis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospirosis

>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]

Pakistan recorded 54°C several times over the past few years.

Shit.

I heard from someone who had been there, that Gulf countries such as Dubai routinely touch 50 or more.

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."

The low would be more interesting than the midnight temp. Low would be around 4-5am.

To be fair, all the cars I got in the ad were EVs

They do operate most efficiently in warmer temperatures — to be fair.

Up to a point. At 120F you're performing pretty poorly.

I definitely am performing poorly at 120F, but it’s probably a lower temperature than that to be honest.

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...

[0] https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/weather-and-climate.ht...

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.

Do you like new records or not?

One of my favorite things to do when the news is all about heat waves is monitor the weather at Furnace Creek, Death Valley:

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=36.44802000000...

The forecasted high on Saturday is 126°F.

From a factual point of view based on historic events by mankind - we are doomed.

The last 200 years alone we have destroyed each other and the planet.

The last 100 has been a catastrophe for he earth.

The last 10 years has been curing symptoms.

Realistically we are not looking into any bright future whatsoever.

No tech is going to save us. Tech brought us here.

Tech didn’t bring us here, greedy business practices and decades long misinformation campaigns did that.

... that were enabled by tech....

120 F = 48.8889°C

Thank you

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.

Death Valley is considered to be the hottest place on earth by many sources.

Direct link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a445809...

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.

I detest this kind of nonsensical sensationalism in the press. So what? It’s not a meaningful metric or temperature.

> I detest

It was recorder. It was reported. Not sure why they put it like this but why are you so emotional about that?

“I detest bad journalism” is now overly emotional?

Where do you get off making someone feel bad about making an emotional statement anyways, even though it wasn’t?

Hey what about the hottest 10 PM ?

I'll bet you $10 that the hottest 10 PM will happen after the hottest 5 AM on record.

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.)

Won't this vary by less than an hour? Seems like a distinction without a difference to me.

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).

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