China logs 52.2 Celsius as extreme weather rewrites records

schizoidman@lemmy.ml to World News@lemmy.world – 421 points –
China logs 52.2 Celsius as extreme weather rewrites records
reuters.com
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Gonna be a fun next century or so

Not if all the capitalists get their shit together and see that short term profits aren't worth the mid term extinction of humanity.

Which should happen any moment.

Aaaaaaaany moment.

Oh, people have long since realized that they have to do something about it.

The problem is they've realized that it's far cheaper to prepare for their own survival than fix the fuck ups of the world.

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Ok, so it doesn’t mention wet bulb temperature anywhere, so I went to figure it out. The first thing I was surprised with is apparently most of online calculators don’t take in values higher than 50C.

I couldn’t find the exact data about humidity for that day, but it has been 35-40%+ at a minimum for most days in that region, sometimes even reaching 90%.

So, 52C at around 40% humidity is 37.5C in wet bulb temp. The point of survivability is around 35, and most humans should be able to withstand 37.5 for several hours, but it’s much worse for sick or elderly. 39 is often a death sentence even for healthy humans after just two hours — your body can no longer lose heat and you bake from the inside. That’s like having an unstoppable runaway fever. And with that humidity it’s reached at 54C.

We’re dangerously close to that.

Just out of interest, what would be the wet bulb temperature at 90% humidity? I'm not familiar with that temperature scale.

Wet bulb temperature is basically converting to 100% humidity equivalent, so as you get closer to 100%, WBT approaches measured temperature. We use this metric because our bodies cool mostly via evaporation, and no evaporation is possible at 100% — the air is already fully saturated. So in general, WBT means minimum possible temperature that can be reached by evaporative cooling. Once your body loses the ability to cool, it rushes to match surrounding wet bulb temperature (or even exceed it, since we produce about 100W of heat energy by simply existing).

So 52C at 90% is about 50C WBT. Survivable for mere minutes for some, and probably for about an hour or so for most humans. Definitely not survivable for a full day.

To put this into perspective, a humid 60°C are conditions where hyperthermia (getting too hot) can take effect within 10 minutes of exposure.

We're 8°C from that point. We are within arms reach of creating conditions so hostile to human life that survivability for most people will be unimaginably low.

Hottest day ever.

Until next year.

With how cyclical heat seems to be, probably the hottest year until ~4 years from now.

Just long enough for sceptics to dismiss it again, because any day without high heat means climate change is fake.

According to this informative video about the "super El Niño" we're heading into, next year is going to be worse. Less easily dismissed, not that it'll help. If we get any kind of extreme weather this winter before next year's even hotter summer, that'll be fodder for them, too. As we all know, anytime it snows, that proves climate change is a myth. 🙄

Yay, more heat. Looking forward to my skin melting off soon.

Nothing so extreme as that. You will literally bake to death before you melt, so don't worry about that! Cheers.

Just imagine how summer temps will be in 10 years from today.

Hoooooo boy... it's gonna be HOT eh

By the end of the century, there's going to be a lot of places abandoned to heat and sea level rise.

Incidentally, China is the single largest contributor of GHGs in the world. Their coal fired power generation is immense and incredibly damaging.

Because China is a country with the third largest land mass with the second largest population in the world. But per capita, they produce half of what an American does.

Both need to significantly reduce their emissions. We do not need deflection for either.

Thank you, I'm so sick of hearing it. It's just another cop out from climate change deniers.

2 things about this; the planet don't care about per capita numbers - 52.2 is gonna drop that population real quick. I doubt that would even slow their ruling class down

Second fuck is America a bad comparision. Those 2 will race to a scorched earth quicker than a nuclear war ever could

Exactly, the world doesn't care. The average co2 footprint per person globally is around 5 tonnes and as we've noticed, that is way too much for our planet to handle, one estimate is that we would need to drop that to below 2.5 tonnes.
China at 7.5 per person is a lot closer to than Canada at 18, Australia at 17, US at around 15 or Russia at 12. EU on average is close at around 8 I believe.

No way canada's that bad? Thats a perfect example then cause were mostly hydroelectric, just empty as ass (an example I used to the other person is imagine the per capita numbers of an artic exploration group, probably horrible but we could never visit the artic again and still be boiling in superpowers pollution)

"Per capita" means per person, it has nothing to do with being mostly unpopulated. And it sure is that bad.
The exact figures differ slightly depending on who you ask, my source was Worldometer.

Whoops shoulda been a little more specific, I meant because most gas based generators arent nearly efficient as coal based plants (which aint as efficient as nuclear...) in terms of emissions to energy. That added on the fact that they're probably not designed for sub zero temps and you end up with a horrible per capita (probably, I don't have any actual numbers to back this up).

Ngl im not too great at expressing my whole thought processmao

Oh we're pretty bad. Cold winters we need lots of heat. Big houses. Mostly car dependent inner infrastructure. Lots of distance for goods to travel and we still use trucks for it. BC and Quebec may have lots of hydro but that's not the rest of the country.

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Ok? Thats a great way to ignore the problem. How does it reduce emissions?

It's not ignoring the problem, you are complaining that we are running out of food because that group of a billion people are eating too much when you have over twice as much food on your own plates, and saying the solution is that they should be forced to eat even less.

It is ignoring the problem. I'm complaining about the massive amounts of carbon China is pumping out and getting worse every year and you're making excuses.

Classic tragedy of the commons. It's no one fault. Everyone is doing it. Blah blah blah. None of this is lowering GHGs.

And if we split China into three smaller countries with a population of 450 million each, then those would only produce 3/4th the Co2 of USA each putting USA in the number one spot and solve climate change? China currently pollutes the most overall simply because it has the (second) biggest population, and that makes it look bad in the "per country" statistic. But per person they pollute less than half of what someone from the US, Australia or Canada do.

Another extreme example is India, it is on spot 3 on overall emissions, which means it produces a fuckton of CO2, even though per capita the figure is 1.89 - one person from the US produces as much CO2 emissions than 8 people from India. They are already well below the global average (~5 tons per person) and even below the suggested target to counter climate change - 2.5 per person.

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You have to measure per capita. A population 4 times the size of the US, you can't compare straight numbers.

Their one child policy is probably the best thing that ever happened to reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.

This is actually not true. The US has contributed almost double the total emissions of China.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

OP said China is there largest contributor. That is true.

OP did not say China made the largest contribution historically.

This isn't about historical. What's done is done and we need to act on what can be changed now. We can't change history. Your link is useless.

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and here I thought 33 C is already hot enough

That really is hot :(

People and native animals start dying en-masse around the 50Deg mark, it’s horrific this is becoming normal.

Maybe a stupid question, but is this measured in the sun or shade?

Temperature reports like this always use in-the-shade measurements. You can get much higher temps when measuring in direct sunlight, like easily 100C+, depending on the material of your measuring device.

Thanks. So the 60 degrees in Spain were also in-shade. That is truly messed up.

If politicians didn’t reassure us frequently there is nothing going on I’d really start to think we are in real trouble.

60deg in Spain was ground surface temp not air temp, air temp was like 40deg.