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Comment by pgalvin | Hacker News Reader

The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.

Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

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> unnaturally high temperatures

> poor planning.

> very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

What?

Global warming keeps making the temperature unnaturaly high, don't tell me you didn't hear about it.

If it's every summer, how is it unnatural? If it's poor planning how is it every summer? There's poor planning and then there's ... what, forgetting that summer happens? It sounds to me like somebody sat down and penciled in some numbers and decided that "it makes less money to let it break?" which seems pretty weird when you consider second-order stuff (but it's not like people tend to do that anyway)

Come on, you expect me to believe you honestly have no contextual knowledge about the changing climate?

No, I think you are opting for disguising your full on climate change denial under a tattered veil of feigned ignorance.

I know the average temps have gone up and there have been more extremes, but it's not like it moved 20˚F. They really don't have that level of tolerance in these systems? USA and other countries have been dealing with global warming too, the A/C still works.

https://www.wunderground.com/history/monthly/be/brussels/EBB... shows lately it was 97˚ in Brussels. In 2005 it was 93˚ around the same time.

The affected building was last renovated in the early 1990s, where average max temperature was around 18 degrees.

But even now "normal" average max temperature is only 21.7 degrees[1] and on the 23 of June temperatures reached 36.6 degrees, which is indeed over 20 deg F hotter than the normal maximum temperature for June.

[1]: https://opendata.meteo.be/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#... see INS 21004

I get what you mean with the normal max temp being 21.7C, but would expect the AC to be able to handle the peaks, and 33.5C wasn't unheard of ~20 years ago. Not sure what the situation was in the early 1990s, but they had 30 years to figure it out.

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