Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 129 posts

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#81

Post by JosephRedfern »

falcolas wrote: post #73
JosephRedfern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real question I have is ... who really cares Me, when the term “degrees” is used without further clarification.

Read TFA. The celsius measurement is in the first sentence, listed before the farenheit equivalent. "A weather station in Sicily may have set an all-time high temperature record for all of Europe on Wednesday, when the temperature climbed to a scorching 48.8°C (119.8°F) amid a regional heat wave that has shown few signs of relenting."

It’s a single byte of information, maybe 4 at a push. It doesn’t take much to include and avoids a lot of ambiguity.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#82

Post by lhorie »

perardi wrote: post #38

Yes, OK, everyone, Fahrenheit, we get it, metric system, cut the smugness, Axios is a US-centric publication, discuss the issues. Such as: the feedback mechanisms that may come into play here. Europe, broadly, hasn’t been big on AC. That may have to change, as 322 Kelvin is just not bearable. But that means more power use…which means more energy use…which probably comes from fossil fuels…which means more issues with…

Might be more on topic to discuss the fact that the legitimacy of this reading is being disputed...

With that said, I'm just waiting for articles coming out tomorrow about how mediterranean forest fires are being triggered by climate change and some shmuck objecting that fires have existed since forever. Meanwhile, Russia burns away with a fury of a million suns.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#83

Post by makomk »

lhorie wrote: post #25

That's 48.8 Celsius for the non-americans. Scrolling through the tweets, some people are saying it's likely a short spike in temperature due to foehn winds[0] and that this reading doesn't really mean much due to the source of the reading. Here's an interesting thread nitpicking things apart[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind [1] https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1425424519129407489

Yeah, if the replies to that tweet are to be believed there have been even higher measurements from similar European weather stations under similar circumstances that simply weren't recognized as records due to the measurement issues.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#84

Post by montalbano »

celticninja wrote: post #10
hhlbf wrote: post #2

Nice, you could boil a cup of water for your tea just by putting it outside.

Not even half way to boiling really. Although it refers to Europe, it is using farenheit as its scale, as it is a US based publication. Although for that reason temperature measurements should always include the type for reference.

Even with Celsius, perhaps not impossible at the right altitude, low convection, and with a dark color for better radiative absorption.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#85

Post by saeranv »

rootusrootus wrote: post #21
edhelas wrote: post #9

Tip: the world uses Metric system. USA is the exception.

UK uses miles for distance, stones for weight, and I'm pretty certain that many things in the US are measured using metric. The real question I have is ... who really cares? I certainly don't complain when someone uses a celsius temperature, I just convert it to terms I'm more comfortable with.

It's a complete mess when working on actual engineering tasks, I can't imagine how many hours have been wasted converting/correcting between units used by standards versus projects.

There's also abominations like the Energy Efficiency Ratio expressed in Btu/Wh, which yes, you are reading it correctly, is the ratio of energy in IP to energy in SI. I honestly don't understand why something so useless exists.

Units actually should mean something. I use them as a quick way of intuiting about physical relationships and something like EER completely removes that intuition and just makes all EER values a stupid number to be memorized.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#86

Post by aaronbrethorst »

alexose wrote: post #62
perardi wrote: post #38

Yes, OK, everyone, Fahrenheit, we get it, metric system, cut the smugness, Axios is a US-centric publication, discuss the issues. Such as: the feedback mechanisms that may come into play here. Europe, broadly, hasn’t been big on AC. That may have to change, as 322 Kelvin is just not bearable. But that means more power use…which means more energy use…which probably comes from fossil fuels…which means more issues with…

There could be a hidden benefit in the adoption of ductless heat pumps. Not only are they more efficient than the systems they replace, but they can also provide heating. This would reduce the amount of oil or natural gas being used to heat homes. Of course, this is also dependent on regional factors, and the ability to properly manage refrigerants... like everything in climate science, the feedback mechanisms are co…

I bought a house in Seattle in March and immediately had the old, unmaintained fossil gas (aka 'natural gas') furnace ripped out and replaced with a heat pump. The heat pump worked better for warming my house from March - May than the furnace did, and has managed to make the unprecedented heat wave we experienced earlier in the summer bearable.

It wasn't cheap, but a lot of HVAC companies are offering great financing deals (like 0% interest for 36 months) for the new systems.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#87

Post by smarx007 »

kansface wrote: post #59

It seems no one read the article: > The intrigue: There are some questions about the validity of the temperature reading, however. Randy Cerveny, the World Meteorological Organization's rapporteur for weather records, told the Associated Press the reading is “suspicious, so we’re not going to make any immediate determination.” > “It doesn’t sound terribly plausible,” Cerveny said. “But we’re not going to dismiss it.”

The suspicion is between 47.0 and 48.8 degrees C, i.e. whether the 1977 heat record was beaten in a well-documented manner. There is no suspicion of scorching heat.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#88

Post by falcolas »

rootusrootus wrote: post #53
perardi wrote: post #38

Yes, OK, everyone, Fahrenheit, we get it, metric system, cut the smugness, Axios is a US-centric publication, discuss the issues. Such as: the feedback mechanisms that may come into play here. Europe, broadly, hasn’t been big on AC. That may have to change, as 322 Kelvin is just not bearable. But that means more power use…which means more energy use…which probably comes from fossil fuels…which means more issues with…

> 322 Kelvin You know, I think this makes good sense. A degree can be celsius, or fahrenheit, but only a Kelvin is a Kelvin. So this could be unambiguously simplified in the future if we standardized on K.

Cool, what precisely is one degree K? What does it really mean?

The answer is as about as arbitrary as basing it on human comfort levels - it's originally based on boiling and freezing a specific composition of water at a specific pressure, then adjusted so the zero point is at a universal constant. That last is really the only meaningful part about it.

And practically speaking, the 0 to 100 C range is no longer even based on the actions of water - just as f is no longer based on human comfort.

Re: Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees

#89

Post by alexose »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #86
alexose wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be a hidden benefit in the adoption of ductless heat pumps. Not only are they more efficient than the systems they replace, but they can also provide heating. This would reduce the amount of oil or natural gas being used to heat homes. Of course, this is also dependent on regional factors, and the ability to properly manage refrigerants... like everything in climate science, the feedback mechanisms are co…

I bought a house in Seattle in March and immediately had the old, unmaintained fossil gas (aka 'natural gas') furnace ripped out and replaced with a heat pump. The heat pump worked better for warming my house from March - May than the furnace did, and has managed to make the unprecedented heat wave we experienced earlier in the summer bearable. It wasn't cheap, but a lot of HVAC companies are offering great financing…

I'm not 100% sure about Washington, but I know Oregon has a whole program to incentivize the switch. (I wish they paid even more, but something's better than nothing...)

https://www.energytrust.org/

Post reply on HN