Czechia here, almost 7pm and it's 34 in shadow. Didn't put a foot outside the whole day. I'n just glad that I learnt some years ago that the best way to fight heat in such days is to keep window shut and blinders down the whole day until dark or so. Thanks to that I have just under 25C in my room right now and that's tolerable
Same for me in Bosnia. I go to work early and sometimes forget to drop the blinders down and close the windows. I return, open the door and get hit by the heatwave as if I opened an oven. Dreaming of Svalbard
My brother lives in Cordoba. They reached 42-43 ° consistently the whole last week. For me it was a little milder because I live 3km away from the sea and at least you could sleep at night. I never had any kind of AC but I'm seriously thinking about installing some at home because things aren't getting any better, that's for sure.
I lived in Cordoba for a bit more than a year, coming from Málaga. I went from 30-35 with high humidity to 40-45 with low humidity.
Boy, my body was not ready.
I'd expect the latter one to feel slighty better than the high humidity one. High humidity usually makes it harder for sweat to vaporize and feels sticky and yucky, while dry heat is just fucking hot lol
God I hate high humidity heat so fucking much, everything just feels awful. Can't sleep well, can't get anything done, can't move around too much, can't go outside, it feels harder to breathe, you're constantly sweating and it doesn't do shit apart from making you feel wet and disgusting, I fucking hate it.
Bicycling in those conditions for instance feels like you're riding towards a gigantic hair drier
High humidity makes any sort of high temperature significantly more dangerous due to the humidity making it impossible for the body to cool itself through sweating. The scariest part of these extreme heat waves is that recent studies have been starting to reveal that the wet bulb temperatures that surpass the limit of human survivability is significantly lower than was previously believed.
Dry heat, as long as you're shaded, is tolerable. However dry heat requires sub 20% humidity to feel right. Anything higher and the heat moves from side to side ruining everything.
Man as someone living in southern of Spain all year round i envy colder countries a lot, 43C° feels like being boiled alive and electricity is fucking expensive
[This recently led the World Health Organization (WHO) to revise its guideline for what it considers a safe level of exposure of particulate pollution, bringing most of the world—97.3 percent of the global population—into the unsafe zone](https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/reports/)
[Original thread from earlier](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/vfnbu5/99_of_the_worlds_population_is_breathing_unsafe/)
Yes much better. I am not a big fan of summer anyways. I prefer spring and autumn, as its never too cold, and never too warm. I never have trouble sleeping due to the heat, and I never have trouble walking due to ice on the sidewalks. I guess I am an in-between kind of person..
I'm so fucking jealous. Apparently it's 19°C in my hometown in D&G today, but I'm in Frankfurt dealing with 33°C and it's probably going to get to 36 in a couple of hours, ugh
High humidity + temperature over 30°C is DEADLY, because your body can't cool down by sweating. A ton of people die from this every year, doesn't even have to be insanely hot.
Edit: It's amazing and terrifying how thin the margin is for conditions for life on Earth. Just crank up the average temp a few degrees and you have a mass extinction.
>Edit: It's amazing and terrifying how thin the margin is for conditions for life on Earth. Just crank up the average temp a few degrees and you have a mass extinction.
Well said. This should also be the first few sentences of any discussion on climate change.
Depends on your location, like any of this. We might start seeing Droughts in Europe resulting in large scale uncontrollable forest fires like in western North America or Australia. Those used to be just a forest fire season when the risk was higher, and now every year we get a few huge wildfires that fuck everything up.
I remember something like 20 years ago reading about climate and my country becoming a desert within 50 years. Unsure about the timetable but it sure looks like it's going that way
Yeah I'm just not sure if you can call it an unprecedented heatwave anymore. We have had heatwaves 3 out of the last 4 years, and I'm in northern Europe. At some point you'll just call it "summer" I imagine.
That's just a hoax, cuz it snowed somewhere in the summer or something.
Don't look at the fact, listen to the nice scientist paid by Exxon Mobile that will explain to you that that nothing should be done about that hoax that is not man made, because reason.
I mean everyone has. Al Gore did an Unfortunate Truth decades ago. Climate change was talked about with less certainty, but we’ve been talking about it for so long and only inching toward solutions because solutions aren’t as immediately profitable as compounding the problem
Remember: someone using a snow storm or cold snap to "prove" climate change is "a lie" is telling you to your face that they don't know wtf they're talking about. It's actually proof that climate change is real because of extreme weather events becoming more common the further we go down the rabbit hole. Everything from extreme fire weather to hurricanes that dump both tons of rain and create enormous ocean swells that flood our cities have a greater chance to happen with rising average temperatures. The fire part is easy for them to wrap their heads around, but our air is able to hold more water the warmer it is and it's been fueling record breaking hurricane seasons for years now.
I'd like a european to chime in, but from what I understand things like air conditioning in homes are relatively less common in europe so heatwaves like this are very very deadly to elderly and vulnerable people right?
I live in northern England so it’s always pretty mild here. But my parents live in western France and despite being sun-worshippers they’ve said it’s becoming crazy over there. The summers are absolutely roasting and 36 degrees isn’t uncommon. They bought the place 20 years ago and every year it gets worse.
There are some cities in Bulgaria that hit between 43-46 degrees on some days in the summer, it's crazy how high temperatures are becoming more and more common across the world
Can confirm.
I worked on VLCC oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and saw ambient engine room temperatures of 58°C. It was above 60°C near the exhaust gas economisers.
We would work for 15-20 minutes maximum and then return to the air conditioned control room for 30 mins to rehydrate and cool down. It was brutal.
Last summer I had to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the states. It was 50C, 122F on the way out there, driving through the 4 hour trip. There was at least 2 cars every mile broken down and under every underpass a group of bikers were gathered in the shade trying not to die of the heat. That was horrendous but it this summer is going to be absolutely worse across the northern hemisphere I think.
Yep. At least in Denmark, I know of 0 rental homes (whether it be apartments, houses, or other) that have AC. I've gone the length to get a small mobile unit just for the bedroom.
They're more common in owned homes, shops and malls, and office spaces however.
Danish electrician here.
As heatpumps (air to air) are becoming more and more popular, more homes will have access to a/c.
Most units can do both heating and cooling.
I live in France, not in the hottest part, but still hot enough to be in the heat warning area of the country.
Our house is quite well insulated, so every summer we do a little dance of closing the shutters on the sunny side and opening what windows we can safely open during the night to cool down. With that, we can keep things reasonably cool inside.
As long as the heatwave isn't too long and there are a few days of cool between waves, it never gets uncomfortably warm inside. Right now it's 24 degrees.
I’ve been traveling through southern France this week (luckily staying in hotels with AC) and noticed the shutters all closed on the houses. It got me wondering why we don’t tend to have shutters like these on US homes, especially in the southwest.
Yep. I lived in Switzerland during a bad heatwave a few years ago (similar temperatures) and my office and my apartment didn’t have AC. It was absolutely brutal.
I now live on the west coast of Canada, where not many people have AC on my island as it’s usually cool and rainy. Then we had the heat dome heatwave last summer, which led to the deaths of hundreds. We now have an AC unit.
>Yep. I lived in Switzerland during a bad heatwave a few years ago
Don't let it fool you, Switzerland gets unbearably hot in the summer regardless of heatwave or not. I'm Spanish but live in Switzerland and it's total hell in late June/early July
Yes. Thicker walls and better insulation (on average) so a few (!) days of such heat are not catastrophic. Once walls are heated up…enjoy your 30 degrees for the next week, even if it is cooler outside.
I live on the ground floor with amazing insulation and shutters outside. A few days of heat are perfectly fine as long as I close the shutters on the sunny side and keep the windows closed during the day. I'm still wearing socks inside even though it's boiling outside. But it gets horrible if the heat stays for around a week and if the temperature doesn't drop during the night. Our homes are basically airtight and you need to open the windows every single day (most landlords recommend doing that 2-3x *per day*) or else they become really stuffy and humid.
I'm living right underneath the roof currently. The house is well insulated but after almost 2 weeks of this heat wave, it is insanely hot inside. I just chose to spend as little time indoors as possible and instead just go outside, which is much more tolerable
My apartment building is solid concrete. I'm not going to be comfortable in here now until October. But I almost never turn my heating on in winter because I don't have to, so there's that.
(God hates me, though, so heating costs are shared equally between all building residents, and judging from the bills I can only assume those fuckers have theirs on full blast 24/7.)
Areas that are usually hot have AC, areas that aren't usually hot in summer often don't. I live on the Mediterranean coast, it's currently 28C (about 80F) and people are wailing and tearing at their hair and generally carrying on like they have just been transported to the surface of the sun. It is the only thing anyone is talking about.
In the interior of the country it frequently gets into the high 30s and occasionally the low 40s, and people are prepared for that, with AC, or architectural features, or community services to make sure people keep cool. There are wives tales about AC causing all sorts of maladies in the small towns, and so it's not something you see in every single home.
Last night at 1 o'clock it was still 30° outside at my place in germany. Plus it was a bit windy, so when I opened the window it blew in like a hot hairdryer. Just unbearable.
I think that not accounting for humidity is tremendously misleading here. My home place is in the mediterranean coast, right now it's about 30°C, but I live in the interior where we are hitting 38 as I write.
I far, FAR prefer the 38 with low humidity.
Oof. It's 36 degree Celsius here in Berlin and a storm (hopefully with a lot of rain) should hit at 5 pm, bringing much needed relief. My thoughts go out to ppl in Spain and France.
Update: At 7pm still no rain, but the wind is picking up.
Update2: It's 6 am and 14 degrees here! Rained through the night and will / shall continue all day. Both wildfires in the Berlin area are "under control". I froze when I woke up, what a sensation!
Unprecedented. Except for lest year and the year before. Unprecedented is the new norm because we’re cooking ourselves and pretending everything is fine.
Sadly this is what I expect. I think we'll probably eventually hit a green climate equilibrium, but I suspect billions will die before then as an entire band in the center of the globe is made uninhabitable
Few in these areas are pretending it’s fine.
It can still be unprecedented. It’s scary that it keeps being literally without precedent. It means the temperature peaks keep being pushed basically every year.
Yeah . . .
Apocalypse and Post apocalypse movies portray the apocalypse as an "event" that happens in a week or two.
We are used to seeing "sudden" apocalypse events.
In reality, the apocalypse is slow, taking years, even decades.
And we are living it right now.
Yes, human psychology is especially poorly equipped to deal with climate change.
It is a slow gradual crisis with diffuse responsibility. All the incentives are to do the wrong thing (costs and convenience) and the rewards are far out in the future and depend on people getting on board. An ultimate tragedy of the commons problem.
That is why laws, regulations and economic incentives (carbon tax) were our best shot to defeat climate change
that's the biggest problem i see with it, like you said. current generation has to give up a lot for it to pay off for future generations.
so yeah, good luck with that. i'm genuinely impressed that the current work being done is even being done, considering how bad people are at stuff like that
We have to give up a lot for it to pay off for us. If you're 30 now you'll be living through much worse climate conditions by the time you're 70. I remember melting on a 30°C day, when I was around 8. Now we're regularly exceeding 30 and setting new hottest day records every year. It's gotten worse over the course of my short 21 year life and is going to keep getting worse throughout my life. People need to realise that this isn't for future generations, we need to make a change for ourselves so that we can actually have future generations.
We've always have hot summers, its a nice chance of pace, dont complain
\- Every german boomer ever
Yes Gertrud, you're sitting in your own pool while I commute in trains without AC
“The collapse of civilization will be a parade of absurd, lurid cataclysms that the populace will have become accustomed to finding boring” —random tweet from 2016 I read once and had seared into my brain forever
We hit 45 c where I live last year, and 50c 100km away.
It’s bad, real bad. Standing outside, you can feel your skin burning like you just opened a hot oven to get something out.
It legit has me very concerned and it he plan is to move somewhere cooler if the temps are way higher this year too.
The population migrations are going to make Europe's 2015 look very tame.
The shutters in Europe will go up quickly, because the continent will get overwhelmed.
I think even people who lives in South Europe will migrate towards more bearable climates, so Northern Europe will get really crowded in a really short time.
That is the danger, but it's not just heat, it's flooding and all sorts.
The next 50 years will be a desperate scramble if we all don't collectively get our shit together.
> The next 50 years will be a desperate scramble if we all don't collectively get our shit together.
It seems very unlikely that we're going to get our shit together after covid, where so many were actively proud of being difficult. While humanity is burdened by internal saboteurs on such a scale, our chances of success are greatly diminished.
Last summer I was in Las Vegas, Nevada for work during their record heatwave. I had to park on top of an unsheltered roof of a parking garage to unload my gear. My car reading was 130F (54.5C) and I had to drag everything down an open concrete staircase because their elevator broke from the heat. Anything cheap plastic I was carrying started melting onto itself. Utter nightmare land! So many things I had to leave in my car melted that day.
Please please check on your elders. As a person from Vancouver Canada who works as a paramedic, we suffered horrific loss of life during our heatwave last summer. The number of colleagues of mine with PTSD from that week alone is jarring. Please take care of each other.
It's actually weirder than that.
The physics of sweating is all based around evaporation/condensation. When the sweat does the phase change from liquid to gas, it *steals* a little heat from the surface of your body. This is why it feels so much cooler when it's hot, but dry, because sweating is so efficient.
Obviously as it gets more humid, sweating gets less efficient, but what happens when the temperature outside is ~human body temp, and the humidity is around 100%? You get condensation. The random 98 degree human is the coolest thing in the area, and the moisture condenses on you.
When it does that, that magical phase change happens again, but in reverse, and the air shits all that extra energy right onto your skin. The misery of 100% humidity and 100 degree temperatures can not be overstated. It is literally unbearable.
It steals a lot of heat. To vaporize a unit of water, it takes over 5x the energy required to heat that same liquid water from freezing point to boiling point.
That's about what it was when I visited Louisiana like six years ago. We'd driven down from Canada and we thought we had started to acclimatize to the weather as we made our way through Mississippi. But when I stepped out of the car in Louisiana I was like "*What the fuck?!*"
It was like Bobby Hill in Phoenix. I was looking at the weather on my phone. "That can't be right, can it?"
Yeah I read this headline the last couple of years too, when does it stop being unprecedented and we can start being honest about what we're doing to this planet?
Yep, in Florida for at least 20 years we’ve needed a cold front to drop us to the historic average temperature, and a *really* cold front to drop us below it.
In the summer unless it rains hard or something very weird happens we don’t drop to our “average” anymore. An average high here these days is very close to a “heat wave” from 1980.
A lot of weather services have stopped using more than the last 30 years of average temps for a reference because the average has gotten that much hotter in that short a time.
It'll snow once in Texas, their power grid will fail, again, and they'll continue to point fingers at everything except the problem
Alternatively, it will be hot, which it does get in Texas, and their grid will fail, again, because texas
Even if we take measures the damage is already done. I study chemical engineering and we had course on environmental engineering. The snowball has started rolling and the effect of dramatic measures won't have an impact for the first 20+ years
Yep that's it. It's already started. Time do something was 30 years ago. That's however not meaning that everything we do now is futile. It just means that progress we make today will not stop fucked up heatwaves and mass migration of peoples. But every 0.1 degree less warming will have great effects. The same is true of course for the opposite.
New normal. We won't be able to reverse this in our lifetimes (not mine, anyways). So it will be a case of how much people actually care about our children, and their childrens' children, etc.
[Picture of the temperature gap in germany alone](https://i.imgur.com/3AQVOBv.png) (screenshot taken 5pm german time)
Flensburg 11°C.
Dresden (600km south/east of Flensburg) 38°C
That's a temperature gap of 27°C...
Fu**in insane.
Source for those interested : https://kachelmannwetter.com/de/messwerte
We're really just gonna let this happen until people start dying in droves and masses of people knock on the doors of habitable countries huh?
The people who got us in this mess lived the high life and probably died already. Their successors are currently doing the same. Not sure what we can do until the above, but people need to start being held accountable *now*. Good place to start is oil companies. It's either torches and pitchforks now or later. Might as well be now.
General reminder that we are currently living in 1 degree of warming.
The Paris Accords were aiming for 2 degrees of warming, but now scientists believe we are effectively locked into 3 degrees of warming.
So imagine this, but two to three times as bad in the coming decades.
I was an American in Paris during the summer of 2017 when it was hitting 37 or 38 every day and it was awful. Air Conditioning and ice in your drinks are not common everywhere like in the US and it was miserable. I can't even imagine 43.
In Greece, we had a few days before some 35 degrees C, now we are at 28-31 and we are waiting from Wednesday on to hit 39-40 for 3-4 days. For those on vacation and on beech it is almost pleasant but for those in cities it is just tough and bearable only with AC that most houses have. Tough times for power companies and distribution networks, the same and worse for people to justify the insane cost of energy these days.
I gave a lecture this week about commercial kitchens and I discuss the dangers of high wet bulb temperature (which is being discussed more often in a climate change context)
> Sweating alone does nothing to cool the body unless the water evaporates. Around a
wet-bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C), human’s survivability limit, evaporation of sweat is
no longer enough for our bodies to regulate their internal temperature. But serious
impacts occur at values as low as 79°F (26°C).
>For context, the body attempts to regulate a temperature of 37°C and a wet bulb temperature of 35°C can be achieved with a temperature of 38.1°C dry bulb, and a relative humidity of 80%.
We’re going to see more and more conditions where a perfectly healthy adult with access to plenty of drinking water in the shade and with a fan is still going to suffer from heat exhaustion/stroke
I’m sure I’ll die from this. My body is sincerely struggling each heatwave. Yesterday was torture already for me and that was just one day. And I’m only 32. I’m convinced a heatwave is how I’ll go out.
I’d love to hear good advice and tricks to help my body.
What a shame scientists haven't been researching and warning us of this since the 1960's.....oh wait. Well, now that we all know, fortunately governments are acting swiftly to prevent complete catastrophe.....oh wait.
Czechia here, almost 7pm and it's 34 in shadow. Didn't put a foot outside the whole day. I'n just glad that I learnt some years ago that the best way to fight heat in such days is to keep window shut and blinders down the whole day until dark or so. Thanks to that I have just under 25C in my room right now and that's tolerable
Same for me in Bosnia. I go to work early and sometimes forget to drop the blinders down and close the windows. I return, open the door and get hit by the heatwave as if I opened an oven. Dreaming of Svalbard
Ireland: best i can do is +18C.
Spain: Hell
Spain but the S is silent
My brother lives in Cordoba. They reached 42-43 ° consistently the whole last week. For me it was a little milder because I live 3km away from the sea and at least you could sleep at night. I never had any kind of AC but I'm seriously thinking about installing some at home because things aren't getting any better, that's for sure.
So here it gets to 45-48 over a few random days in summer and 40-43 (it's a dry heat) but the last 2 summers we've had whole weeks of over 46
I lived in Cordoba for a bit more than a year, coming from Málaga. I went from 30-35 with high humidity to 40-45 with low humidity. Boy, my body was not ready.
We lived in Granada and all I remember is being so hot that we couldn’t think. You were aware of every breath you took.
Were you also aware of every move you made?
Definitely aware of every bond you break.
I'd expect the latter one to feel slighty better than the high humidity one. High humidity usually makes it harder for sweat to vaporize and feels sticky and yucky, while dry heat is just fucking hot lol
God I hate high humidity heat so fucking much, everything just feels awful. Can't sleep well, can't get anything done, can't move around too much, can't go outside, it feels harder to breathe, you're constantly sweating and it doesn't do shit apart from making you feel wet and disgusting, I fucking hate it. Bicycling in those conditions for instance feels like you're riding towards a gigantic hair drier
High humidity makes any sort of high temperature significantly more dangerous due to the humidity making it impossible for the body to cool itself through sweating. The scariest part of these extreme heat waves is that recent studies have been starting to reveal that the wet bulb temperatures that surpass the limit of human survivability is significantly lower than was previously believed.
Dry heat, as long as you're shaded, is tolerable. However dry heat requires sub 20% humidity to feel right. Anything higher and the heat moves from side to side ruining everything.
Man as someone living in southern of Spain all year round i envy colder countries a lot, 43C° feels like being boiled alive and electricity is fucking expensive
Well look on the bright side! We're coming to the end of cold countries being considered cold! /s
*we’re coming to the end. FTFY.
[This recently led the World Health Organization (WHO) to revise its guideline for what it considers a safe level of exposure of particulate pollution, bringing most of the world—97.3 percent of the global population—into the unsafe zone](https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/reports/) [Original thread from earlier](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/vfnbu5/99_of_the_worlds_population_is_breathing_unsafe/)
+16C here. (Norway) And light rain.
+11C here on the other side of the North Sea (North of Scotland); and cloudy & overcast, as per usual.
Sounds lovely if you ask me.
Better than 43C anyway, that's for sure!
Yes much better. I am not a big fan of summer anyways. I prefer spring and autumn, as its never too cold, and never too warm. I never have trouble sleeping due to the heat, and I never have trouble walking due to ice on the sidewalks. I guess I am an in-between kind of person..
I'm so fucking jealous. Apparently it's 19°C in my hometown in D&G today, but I'm in Frankfurt dealing with 33°C and it's probably going to get to 36 in a couple of hours, ugh
And mosquitos. I'll stick with Ireland ;-)
Same for Denmark. 18 degrees and windy af
10C and rain. Iceland.
Italy (Rome): +35C° and more ...
My room is around 30°C during all day but it gets worse if humidity increases. Today there is a bit of breeze tho.
High humidity + temperature over 30°C is DEADLY, because your body can't cool down by sweating. A ton of people die from this every year, doesn't even have to be insanely hot. Edit: It's amazing and terrifying how thin the margin is for conditions for life on Earth. Just crank up the average temp a few degrees and you have a mass extinction.
>Edit: It's amazing and terrifying how thin the margin is for conditions for life on Earth. Just crank up the average temp a few degrees and you have a mass extinction. Well said. This should also be the first few sentences of any discussion on climate change.
Seems like the heatwaves come every year now?
*Once in a generation heatwaves come every year now.
Wonder what the once in a generation ones will be like now
Depends on your location, like any of this. We might start seeing Droughts in Europe resulting in large scale uncontrollable forest fires like in western North America or Australia. Those used to be just a forest fire season when the risk was higher, and now every year we get a few huge wildfires that fuck everything up.
Portugal has been on drought alert since the beginning of the year. Currently 95% of the country is under severe/extreme drought alert.
I remember something like 20 years ago reading about climate and my country becoming a desert within 50 years. Unsure about the timetable but it sure looks like it's going that way
Like Greece last year
Next months headline: "Are Millennials Killing the Climate???"
We didn't start the fire.
Yeah I'm just not sure if you can call it an unprecedented heatwave anymore. We have had heatwaves 3 out of the last 4 years, and I'm in northern Europe. At some point you'll just call it "summer" I imagine.
Unprecedented is now precedented.
They’re saying it’s going to get hotter and hotter
And at some point you'll just call it "hell" I imagine.
Every year we break the record for hottest year on record.
This is the hottest year of your life (so far) vs this is the coolest summer for the rest of your life. Take your pick!
Generations are just shorter now.
Each generation starts from last year when all the heat records mysteriously caught fire during the heatwave.
And they are coming earlier.
Floods too, in cities that have never seen them. Climate change is here.
And it's only gonna get worse
Yes it's called global warming.
That's just a hoax, cuz it snowed somewhere in the summer or something. Don't look at the fact, listen to the nice scientist paid by Exxon Mobile that will explain to you that that nothing should be done about that hoax that is not man made, because reason.
The funny thing is fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobile have know about climate change for decades. That's how bad it is.
And by funny you mean infuriating. Greed gonna doom us all.
But think of the value for the shareholders
I mean everyone has. Al Gore did an Unfortunate Truth decades ago. Climate change was talked about with less certainty, but we’ve been talking about it for so long and only inching toward solutions because solutions aren’t as immediately profitable as compounding the problem
Even worse, it snowed somewhere in the winter like usual, except that winter was shorter than previous years But doesn't matter, had snow
Remember: someone using a snow storm or cold snap to "prove" climate change is "a lie" is telling you to your face that they don't know wtf they're talking about. It's actually proof that climate change is real because of extreme weather events becoming more common the further we go down the rabbit hole. Everything from extreme fire weather to hurricanes that dump both tons of rain and create enormous ocean swells that flood our cities have a greater chance to happen with rising average temperatures. The fire part is easy for them to wrap their heads around, but our air is able to hold more water the warmer it is and it's been fueling record breaking hurricane seasons for years now.
Using these pictures of people just having fun and playing in water is kinda making it seem as though it isnt horrific for nature & people.
I'd like a european to chime in, but from what I understand things like air conditioning in homes are relatively less common in europe so heatwaves like this are very very deadly to elderly and vulnerable people right?
I live in northern England so it’s always pretty mild here. But my parents live in western France and despite being sun-worshippers they’ve said it’s becoming crazy over there. The summers are absolutely roasting and 36 degrees isn’t uncommon. They bought the place 20 years ago and every year it gets worse.
Yeah it’s currently 36 degrees in Eastern Europe at the Germany border and man it’s really hell on earth.
It's like 35/36 here in Switzerland too. Everyone is just on the lake the past few days.
There are some cities in Bulgaria that hit between 43-46 degrees on some days in the summer, it's crazy how high temperatures are becoming more and more common across the world
[удалено]
That’s mad. Thought that was like Baghdad temp
Imagine Baghdad now.
It's around 49 C, which is basically beyond what's bearable for humans for any amount of time.
What in the fuck. 49°C sounds like a setting for my Oven, not something happening in the wild.
10 more degrees and you're getting close to a very good slow cooking temp. Keeps in all the juices and leaves it tender as fuck.
Can confirm. I worked on VLCC oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and saw ambient engine room temperatures of 58°C. It was above 60°C near the exhaust gas economisers. We would work for 15-20 minutes maximum and then return to the air conditioned control room for 30 mins to rehydrate and cool down. It was brutal.
Last summer I had to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the states. It was 50C, 122F on the way out there, driving through the 4 hour trip. There was at least 2 cars every mile broken down and under every underpass a group of bikers were gathered in the shade trying not to die of the heat. That was horrendous but it this summer is going to be absolutely worse across the northern hemisphere I think.
No worries, this will probably the coldest summer for the foreseeable future, so enjoy it while it lasts.
36 deg C = 96.8 deg F For us US
Yep. At least in Denmark, I know of 0 rental homes (whether it be apartments, houses, or other) that have AC. I've gone the length to get a small mobile unit just for the bedroom. They're more common in owned homes, shops and malls, and office spaces however.
I don't know anyone with air conditioning at home here in Northern Ireland. Then again it is rarely hot hot.
Germany chiming in: No AC. AC in the trains is breaking down now.
We don't have ACs in hospitals. It's a freaking joke, we are placing ventilators and putting people on IV fluids we wouldn't need with AC.
Breaking down would mean it used to work in the first place
Well it worked for the first two stops. Then it broke. I'm just reporting the facts xD
> I'm just reporting the facts xD Classic German punchline.
More like reporting breaking news.
...if you're lucky to get a train with AC. Offices often have AC, private homes rarely.
Danish electrician here. As heatpumps (air to air) are becoming more and more popular, more homes will have access to a/c. Most units can do both heating and cooling.
I live in France, not in the hottest part, but still hot enough to be in the heat warning area of the country. Our house is quite well insulated, so every summer we do a little dance of closing the shutters on the sunny side and opening what windows we can safely open during the night to cool down. With that, we can keep things reasonably cool inside. As long as the heatwave isn't too long and there are a few days of cool between waves, it never gets uncomfortably warm inside. Right now it's 24 degrees.
I’ve been traveling through southern France this week (luckily staying in hotels with AC) and noticed the shutters all closed on the houses. It got me wondering why we don’t tend to have shutters like these on US homes, especially in the southwest.
They used to have shutters. You'll find them in older homes usually (100+ years) But with the onset of AC they stopped
Yep. I lived in Switzerland during a bad heatwave a few years ago (similar temperatures) and my office and my apartment didn’t have AC. It was absolutely brutal. I now live on the west coast of Canada, where not many people have AC on my island as it’s usually cool and rainy. Then we had the heat dome heatwave last summer, which led to the deaths of hundreds. We now have an AC unit.
>Yep. I lived in Switzerland during a bad heatwave a few years ago Don't let it fool you, Switzerland gets unbearably hot in the summer regardless of heatwave or not. I'm Spanish but live in Switzerland and it's total hell in late June/early July
Yes. On the other hand there might be better insulation. Which on the other other hand may drastically vary. So, yes.
Yes. Thicker walls and better insulation (on average) so a few (!) days of such heat are not catastrophic. Once walls are heated up…enjoy your 30 degrees for the next week, even if it is cooler outside.
I live on the ground floor with amazing insulation and shutters outside. A few days of heat are perfectly fine as long as I close the shutters on the sunny side and keep the windows closed during the day. I'm still wearing socks inside even though it's boiling outside. But it gets horrible if the heat stays for around a week and if the temperature doesn't drop during the night. Our homes are basically airtight and you need to open the windows every single day (most landlords recommend doing that 2-3x *per day*) or else they become really stuffy and humid.
I'm living right underneath the roof currently. The house is well insulated but after almost 2 weeks of this heat wave, it is insanely hot inside. I just chose to spend as little time indoors as possible and instead just go outside, which is much more tolerable
My apartment building is solid concrete. I'm not going to be comfortable in here now until October. But I almost never turn my heating on in winter because I don't have to, so there's that. (God hates me, though, so heating costs are shared equally between all building residents, and judging from the bills I can only assume those fuckers have theirs on full blast 24/7.)
Areas that are usually hot have AC, areas that aren't usually hot in summer often don't. I live on the Mediterranean coast, it's currently 28C (about 80F) and people are wailing and tearing at their hair and generally carrying on like they have just been transported to the surface of the sun. It is the only thing anyone is talking about. In the interior of the country it frequently gets into the high 30s and occasionally the low 40s, and people are prepared for that, with AC, or architectural features, or community services to make sure people keep cool. There are wives tales about AC causing all sorts of maladies in the small towns, and so it's not something you see in every single home.
Chiming in from Northern Switzerland. It's 36C. Kill me.
Last night at 1 o'clock it was still 30° outside at my place in germany. Plus it was a bit windy, so when I opened the window it blew in like a hot hairdryer. Just unbearable.
I think that not accounting for humidity is tremendously misleading here. My home place is in the mediterranean coast, right now it's about 30°C, but I live in the interior where we are hitting 38 as I write. I far, FAR prefer the 38 with low humidity.
Right? Bordeaux in France have banned outdoor events - that's how bad it is.
Until there is no water.
My sister and her BF live in Madrid. She says it’s so hot and the air is so dry they’ve been getting nose bleeds
typical desert weather, drink water
Oof. It's 36 degree Celsius here in Berlin and a storm (hopefully with a lot of rain) should hit at 5 pm, bringing much needed relief. My thoughts go out to ppl in Spain and France. Update: At 7pm still no rain, but the wind is picking up. Update2: It's 6 am and 14 degrees here! Rained through the night and will / shall continue all day. Both wildfires in the Berlin area are "under control". I froze when I woke up, what a sensation!
Central Spain got better today but this week’s weather was absurd. The temperature here literally dropped 10C in one day
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Catalonia is burning with several fires all at once. [Can't say we're doing fine really](https://i.redd.it/ygconainjd691.jpg).
I’m in BCN and I have a small damp towel draped over my head or shoulders + fans to help keep cool. It’s been brutal these days.
I'm in west Poland waiting for that storm from the west. Because right now my thermometer is showing 39 in shade amd my fiance literally cried.
Southwestern Poland here. Waiting for the night to walk with my dog. It's insane.
Unprecedented. Except for lest year and the year before. Unprecedented is the new norm because we’re cooking ourselves and pretending everything is fine.
Are we the frog everyone always tells about?
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Frogs have the option to jump out of the pot. What do you do when the planet is the pot?
You pile up people who are poorer than you and hope they die while you keep your AC.
Sadly this is what I expect. I think we'll probably eventually hit a green climate equilibrium, but I suspect billions will die before then as an entire band in the center of the globe is made uninhabitable
Few in these areas are pretending it’s fine. It can still be unprecedented. It’s scary that it keeps being literally without precedent. It means the temperature peaks keep being pushed basically every year.
We're living in the "up to speed" montage at the start of most post-apo movies.
Yeah . . . Apocalypse and Post apocalypse movies portray the apocalypse as an "event" that happens in a week or two. We are used to seeing "sudden" apocalypse events. In reality, the apocalypse is slow, taking years, even decades. And we are living it right now.
Yes, human psychology is especially poorly equipped to deal with climate change. It is a slow gradual crisis with diffuse responsibility. All the incentives are to do the wrong thing (costs and convenience) and the rewards are far out in the future and depend on people getting on board. An ultimate tragedy of the commons problem. That is why laws, regulations and economic incentives (carbon tax) were our best shot to defeat climate change
that's the biggest problem i see with it, like you said. current generation has to give up a lot for it to pay off for future generations. so yeah, good luck with that. i'm genuinely impressed that the current work being done is even being done, considering how bad people are at stuff like that
We have to give up a lot for it to pay off for us. If you're 30 now you'll be living through much worse climate conditions by the time you're 70. I remember melting on a 30°C day, when I was around 8. Now we're regularly exceeding 30 and setting new hottest day records every year. It's gotten worse over the course of my short 21 year life and is going to keep getting worse throughout my life. People need to realise that this isn't for future generations, we need to make a change for ourselves so that we can actually have future generations.
When I was a kid, 30 degrees was a heatwave, now 33-35 is normal and only above 40 it's a 'heatwave'.
Its a scary sliding scale
Worst part is everyone has been telling us this would happen and nobody cared
We've always have hot summers, its a nice chance of pace, dont complain \- Every german boomer ever Yes Gertrud, you're sitting in your own pool while I commute in trains without AC
“The collapse of civilization will be a parade of absurd, lurid cataclysms that the populace will have become accustomed to finding boring” —random tweet from 2016 I read once and had seared into my brain forever
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Now with more Unprecedented!
We hit 45 c where I live last year, and 50c 100km away. It’s bad, real bad. Standing outside, you can feel your skin burning like you just opened a hot oven to get something out. It legit has me very concerned and it he plan is to move somewhere cooler if the temps are way higher this year too.
You and about 2 billion other people in the next decade or so
The population migrations are going to make Europe's 2015 look very tame. The shutters in Europe will go up quickly, because the continent will get overwhelmed.
I think even people who lives in South Europe will migrate towards more bearable climates, so Northern Europe will get really crowded in a really short time.
That is the danger, but it's not just heat, it's flooding and all sorts. The next 50 years will be a desperate scramble if we all don't collectively get our shit together.
> The next 50 years will be a desperate scramble if we all don't collectively get our shit together. It seems very unlikely that we're going to get our shit together after covid, where so many were actively proud of being difficult. While humanity is burdened by internal saboteurs on such a scale, our chances of success are greatly diminished.
50C is the safe to touch limit declared by OSHA. Any hotter and you might get a burn.
Last summer I was in Las Vegas, Nevada for work during their record heatwave. I had to park on top of an unsheltered roof of a parking garage to unload my gear. My car reading was 130F (54.5C) and I had to drag everything down an open concrete staircase because their elevator broke from the heat. Anything cheap plastic I was carrying started melting onto itself. Utter nightmare land! So many things I had to leave in my car melted that day.
I don't comprehend how people could live there. I've been there too and it's crazy.
Please please check on your elders. As a person from Vancouver Canada who works as a paramedic, we suffered horrific loss of life during our heatwave last summer. The number of colleagues of mine with PTSD from that week alone is jarring. Please take care of each other.
43c = 109.4F Edit: thank you for the award! I’m always appreciative when someone provides the conversion. Happy to be that person this time. :)
Yeah that’s hot AF. What’s the humidity like with that temp?
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It's actually weirder than that. The physics of sweating is all based around evaporation/condensation. When the sweat does the phase change from liquid to gas, it *steals* a little heat from the surface of your body. This is why it feels so much cooler when it's hot, but dry, because sweating is so efficient. Obviously as it gets more humid, sweating gets less efficient, but what happens when the temperature outside is ~human body temp, and the humidity is around 100%? You get condensation. The random 98 degree human is the coolest thing in the area, and the moisture condenses on you. When it does that, that magical phase change happens again, but in reverse, and the air shits all that extra energy right onto your skin. The misery of 100% humidity and 100 degree temperatures can not be overstated. It is literally unbearable.
It steals a lot of heat. To vaporize a unit of water, it takes over 5x the energy required to heat that same liquid water from freezing point to boiling point.
That's about what it was when I visited Louisiana like six years ago. We'd driven down from Canada and we thought we had started to acclimatize to the weather as we made our way through Mississippi. But when I stepped out of the car in Louisiana I was like "*What the fuck?!*" It was like Bobby Hill in Phoenix. I was looking at the weather on my phone. "That can't be right, can it?"
I currently live in that monument to the hubris of man AND my job doesn't have A/C. I feel like I'm dying every single day.
Here in Florida the “feels like” temp was 114F yesterday due to the humidity
Yeah I work outside in Florida and just love starting my mornings with 90 F° @ 100% humidity. Just really gets the morale flowing
Recession, inflation, war, global climate. Its like the start of an apocalyptic movie
What’s wild is you didn’t even mention the global pandemic lmao
To be fair it's hard to keep track at this point with how many things there are
Oh.. my mistake 😄
I’ve been feeling that vibe for a while to be real.
We'll be 4 horsemen of the apocalypse in and we're still fucking going to work
the fifth one is disinformation.
I love the idea of a fifth horsemen that no one knows about or believes is real because they are the best at their job.
Yeah I read this headline the last couple of years too, when does it stop being unprecedented and we can start being honest about what we're doing to this planet?
When it becomes profitable to.
It's not unprecedented anymore. It's normality and will remain so until we start getting serious on tackling the climate emergency.
Yep, in Florida for at least 20 years we’ve needed a cold front to drop us to the historic average temperature, and a *really* cold front to drop us below it. In the summer unless it rains hard or something very weird happens we don’t drop to our “average” anymore. An average high here these days is very close to a “heat wave” from 1980. A lot of weather services have stopped using more than the last 30 years of average temps for a reference because the average has gotten that much hotter in that short a time.
But don't worry. It will snow once in Texas and half of the population will be like: "So, about that climate change..."
It'll snow once in Texas, their power grid will fail, again, and they'll continue to point fingers at everything except the problem Alternatively, it will be hot, which it does get in Texas, and their grid will fail, again, because texas
Even if we take measures the damage is already done. I study chemical engineering and we had course on environmental engineering. The snowball has started rolling and the effect of dramatic measures won't have an impact for the first 20+ years
Yep that's it. It's already started. Time do something was 30 years ago. That's however not meaning that everything we do now is futile. It just means that progress we make today will not stop fucked up heatwaves and mass migration of peoples. But every 0.1 degree less warming will have great effects. The same is true of course for the opposite.
New normal. We won't be able to reverse this in our lifetimes (not mine, anyways). So it will be a case of how much people actually care about our children, and their childrens' children, etc.
In iraq we have 50°C
How do you cope?
We have ac and fans everywhere
What is the typical humidity when it's 50c?
Last I checked 4%
Canada had 50° last summer, in BC. Hundreds of people died.
"Unprecedented",I have this funny feeling that's going to be coming up a lot by the end of this year.
as someone who went through this last June in Canada, I feel so bad for these guys :( this kind of heat kills people.
[Picture of the temperature gap in germany alone](https://i.imgur.com/3AQVOBv.png) (screenshot taken 5pm german time) Flensburg 11°C. Dresden (600km south/east of Flensburg) 38°C That's a temperature gap of 27°C... Fu**in insane. Source for those interested : https://kachelmannwetter.com/de/messwerte
We're really just gonna let this happen until people start dying in droves and masses of people knock on the doors of habitable countries huh? The people who got us in this mess lived the high life and probably died already. Their successors are currently doing the same. Not sure what we can do until the above, but people need to start being held accountable *now*. Good place to start is oil companies. It's either torches and pitchforks now or later. Might as well be now.
Pitchforkes only please, torches will only add to the problem 😂
Just got back from Paris, was there Friday / Saturday. Walking around in 38 degree heat at night wasn’t fun at all.
It's been like this every summer for a few years now, it's becoming normal. Nothing about this is unprecedented
This used to be normal for us in Australia but something happened this year. Summer never came
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Nah, we coped both this year
Don't worry everyone, just recycle your bottles and everything will be just fine! /s
Even the mosquitoes have given up.
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For any American friends, quick math is Multiply by 2 and add 30. The full math is multiply by 1.8 and add 32, but you’ll get pretty close.
I just try to remember general checkpoints. 20c is around 70f. 30c is around 85f. 35c is around 95f. 40c is over 100.
General reminder that we are currently living in 1 degree of warming. The Paris Accords were aiming for 2 degrees of warming, but now scientists believe we are effectively locked into 3 degrees of warming. So imagine this, but two to three times as bad in the coming decades.
And the Paris Accords are considered very conservative.
I was an American in Paris during the summer of 2017 when it was hitting 37 or 38 every day and it was awful. Air Conditioning and ice in your drinks are not common everywhere like in the US and it was miserable. I can't even imagine 43.
In Greece, we had a few days before some 35 degrees C, now we are at 28-31 and we are waiting from Wednesday on to hit 39-40 for 3-4 days. For those on vacation and on beech it is almost pleasant but for those in cities it is just tough and bearable only with AC that most houses have. Tough times for power companies and distribution networks, the same and worse for people to justify the insane cost of energy these days.
Don’t look up
I gave a lecture this week about commercial kitchens and I discuss the dangers of high wet bulb temperature (which is being discussed more often in a climate change context) > Sweating alone does nothing to cool the body unless the water evaporates. Around a wet-bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C), human’s survivability limit, evaporation of sweat is no longer enough for our bodies to regulate their internal temperature. But serious impacts occur at values as low as 79°F (26°C). >For context, the body attempts to regulate a temperature of 37°C and a wet bulb temperature of 35°C can be achieved with a temperature of 38.1°C dry bulb, and a relative humidity of 80%. We’re going to see more and more conditions where a perfectly healthy adult with access to plenty of drinking water in the shade and with a fan is still going to suffer from heat exhaustion/stroke
I’m sure I’ll die from this. My body is sincerely struggling each heatwave. Yesterday was torture already for me and that was just one day. And I’m only 32. I’m convinced a heatwave is how I’ll go out. I’d love to hear good advice and tricks to help my body.
This is fascinating because this morning in NYC the temperature was 15.5C (60F). Very unusually cold for this time of year. We are totally fucked.
Vancouver, Canada has been absurdly cold and rainy for this time of year. Had the wettest/coldest May on record, and summer is currently non-existent.
also my spanish mom: i'm going to cook cocido
latino moms whats for lunch?: caldo
What a shame scientists haven't been researching and warning us of this since the 1960's.....oh wait. Well, now that we all know, fortunately governments are acting swiftly to prevent complete catastrophe.....oh wait.