> Temperatures in some locations from Philadelphia to Boston could be the hottest in any month in over a decade. Additional records could fall Wednesday and Thursday.
Boston here (home of decaying old red brick pizza oven buildings, not designed for modern summers).
This morning, as we enter a forecast high of 102F real temp, and heat index up to 110, my own old building is trying to get a 5-hour water shutdown of our entire building of ~100 residents, including elderly... postponed until after the scorching peak of the heat wave is over.
Not only do we have neither the architecture nor the acclimation for hot climate, but we don't even know what's ridiculously stupid behavior in such a climate.
voidfunc 1 hours ago [-]
I don't miss my old 3rd floor, top floor apartment in an old brick building with a black roof and no AC in Boston. I put up with that for a decade before I upgraded.
neilv 1 hours ago [-]
Yep, flat black roof. 20 years ago, I'd get through Boston summers fine without AC. On the hottest days, just put down the blinds for the afternoon. And about one week per summer, I used a small fan.
I'm ready to upgrade, as soon as I know what city I'll be moving/staying to, after new job/startup search (and what my budget will be).
voidfunc 1 hours ago [-]
Good luck! I'm still in the area, beautiful city, but the housing stock sucks for what it costs.
londons_explore 52 minutes ago [-]
just fill up a bath or washbasin and you should have plenty of water to last 5 hours, even in a heatwave...
neilv 45 minutes ago [-]
I actually sent that advice and a few other tips to people on my building's email list already.
Unfortunately, with ~100 people, and a general culture in the university neighborhood of non-cooperative, non-engaged, disconnected... there's a real chance that not everyone is going to do all the right things, and someone will get heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
potato3732842 34 minutes ago [-]
>unfortunately, with ~100 people, and a general culture in the university neighborhood of non-cooperative, non-engaged, disconnected
It's not the neighborhood, it's the people who inhabit it.
Just remove the word "university" and trade all the street parked Prius's in for driveway parked Tacomas and you've basically just described every snooty neighborhood in <shuffles cards> Wayland or <shuffles again> Dedham.
I assure you that just as many people in the suburbs are "not doing the right thing" or are otherwise completely surprised by outlier weather events. 100deg temps just have less consequences when you're not 22, living in an apartment with no A/C and drank yourself to a .3 the prior evening.
stavros 36 minutes ago [-]
I don't know what the purpose of the shutdown is, but filling up a bathtub would probably lead to way more usage than if they hadn't cut off the water supply.
bluGill 24 minutes ago [-]
Bathtubs are tiny users of water. Anyone city with a water supply problem is worried about people watering lawns which will use orders of magnitude more water.
simoncion 16 minutes ago [-]
In addition to that, if this is an old building, then I'd bet that the reason for the water shutoff is to fix a leak. If there's a leak, it's likely that the leak is leaking into the structure somewhere.
Might be that five days of leakage are much, much more water wasted [0] than if everyone in the building stocks several gallons of water for use during the shutoff period.
[0] And in this case, actually wasted because they'll not make it to a drain to get to a water treatment plant.
timr 20 minutes ago [-]
We also just had a month of extremely cold summer weather. It was around 60-70 degrees most of last week in New York.
Padriac 13 minutes ago [-]
So it was hotter 137 years ago in 1888. Global cooling.
votepaunchy 2 hours ago [-]
Current (and more accurate) title is “Central Park hits temp record last seen on this date in 1888 as heat wave hits eastern US”.
bdw5204 1 hours ago [-]
It's also worth noting that reliable daily temperature records only go back to the late 1800s. The way you know this is that there are no record highs or lows in 1788 or even 1828. Most likely, at least some of the real records were set prior to the invention of temperature measurement.
On a related note, global population data before about 1800 or so is also unreliable because censuses hadn't been invented yet. During the Enlightenment, people actually debated if world population was increasing or decreasing. Many thought it had been constantly decreasing since the decline and fall of Rome. In general, reliable statistics for more or less anything are newer than the United States of America.
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
Even after that records are not really up to current standards (and I am sure even current standards are not perfect - things will always go wrong). What would have been the highest temperature recorded in the UK in the 20th century not counted in records because there were issues with its reliability:
Uhm, censuses are described in the Bible - in fact one has a central enough role that even a committed heathen like me is aware of it -, and existed many places on a similar timeline. I have no problem believing that they were imprecise, and not widespread enough to give good global numbers, but they had certainly been invented much earlier.
Cthulhu_ 35 minutes ago [-]
There's also the Domesday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book), which wasn't an exact census but it did log 268,984 people considered to be the head of a household; based on this and all the ifs and buts around the number, they estimated the population of Wales and England in 1086 between 1.2 and 1.6 million people.
But it was more a taxation thing.
graemep 53 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but they were imprecise and inconsistent.
The Roman Empire had a motive to take a census (for things such as taxation of its subjects) and the means to enforce it over a wide area, neither of which survived its fall.
qoez 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm going to allow this piece of news out of my control to ruin my day and leave me a nervous wreck for the rest of the week.
potato3732842 41 minutes ago [-]
Make sure you screech about it in every online comment section where it seems applicable for the next 6-16mo for best effect. :)
steveBK123 51 minutes ago [-]
It’s also very humid and the heat isn’t breaking overnight… really taxing home cooling systems in the northeast.
2 hours ago [-]
tiahura 21 minutes ago [-]
How did it get so hot in 1888?
EncomLab 48 minutes ago [-]
Wonder if this winter will see another blizzard of 1888 event?
newer_vienna 33 minutes ago [-]
p(new high) in a static normal distribution is significant when there are 365 samples of it per year
simianwords 21 minutes ago [-]
I think I get what you are saying. By definition we will always hit keep records for every selected statistic over time.
We can also have the coldest day in Central Park at some point.
cochne 23 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn’t it be 1/(number of days since 1888) for a given day? Or 1/(number of years) for a given year? So less than 1/100 if static and independent
burnt-resistor 2 hours ago [-]
ETA until "Climate change is a myth and CO2 isn't increasing." is uttered? Can we call this ~~Wingod's~~ Carson's law?[0]
I’m not a denier, nor do I dispute climate change, but it seems taken for granted that extreme weather events as of late are caused directly by climate change.
It seems probable; likely even.
But how do we know? Is it a guess?
The very fact that New York hit this temperature in 1888 (pre industrial revolution) suggests that we can’t take it on faith, as we have at least one data point that suggests heat spikes like this have happened in recent planet history without extra atmospheric CO2.
tapoxi 3 minutes ago [-]
It makes the formation of heat domes significantly more likely, and that's what causes these temperatures.
Cthulhu_ 31 minutes ago [-]
There's a correlation, but it's better to look at long term weather trends and averages, like this page does https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... (read it while it's not censored yet). It shows a clear increase in average temperatures, at least for the time period we have fairly accurate figures (so after 1880).
for anything before 1880 and pre-history there's other sources like deep ice cores, geological strata, tree rings, etc. Not accurate, but good enough for an educated guess.
femiagbabiaka 29 minutes ago [-]
The effects of human-driven climate change are not about the existence of extreme weather events, but about their frequency.
That's exactly what my climatist friends tell me when the weather is nice, and they're correct. Climate change, as described by the scientists, is not about day-to-day, or even year-to-year, weather patterns.
But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"
Not saying or denying anything, but on a universe-al scale, 200 years is nothing, since some changes take longer.
s3krit 24 minutes ago [-]
1888 is very much not 'pre-industrial revolution', which had started over 100 years prior.
bluGill 21 minutes ago [-]
True, but 1888 had much less CO2 in the air. Or so we assume, we didn't measure it.
Sayrus 38 seconds ago [-]
Actually we do have measures of it based on ice cores. We went from ~280ppm at the time to over 400ppm today.
oezi 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think anybody seriously thinks Climate Change is a myth. There are just too many people who are too selfish to care.
sjsdaiuasgdia 57 minutes ago [-]
It's difficult to reliably sort the "it's a myth" believers from the opportunists, the selfish, and the lazy.
The US has a president that has routinely supported the "it's a myth" viewpoint [0], which increases the visibility and credibility of climate change contrarians regardless of their motivations.
The most fascinating thing about him is that from day to day and topic to topic he can switch between looking (convincingly) like he's either selling the grift or buying it.
Cthulhu_ 31 minutes ago [-]
There's plenty, but they don't know the difference between weather and climate.
stratocumulus0 1 hours ago [-]
Every time there is a longer period of cold weather in the warm season I see populists on social media ironically asking where is this climate change supposed to be. People have a short context window. It doesn't help that our efforts to combat climate change consist in large part of petty consumer regulations that are annoying to individuals while not achieving much.
RiverCrochet 50 minutes ago [-]
Social media is so easy to fill with unaccountable non-genuine activity (bots, shills, trolls, influencers, guerilla marketers, reputation managers, bored attention seekers) that I no longer consider most social media a valid heuristic for what "everyone thinks." I made this decision after looking at the profiles of those who tended to post like that, most of the time they seem fake.
What is the valid heuristic is that what you see on it all the time is clearly what someone wants you think.
Someone in real life that cites rando social media too much is probably on their phone too much or themselves in a non-genuine activity group.
deadbabe 1 hours ago [-]
I haven’t heard much about Climate Change in recent months, and to be honest it’s kind of comforting to forget it exists. If we can’t do anything about it, then might as well not think about it. It’s so much less stressful and doesn’t put me in a bad mood the way doomer articles do. The outcome won’t change either way. If someone isn’t proposing a solution, I don’t want to hear the problems.
callmeal 55 minutes ago [-]
>If we can’t do anything about it, then might as well not think about it.
The thing is, we can do something about it, but unfortunately we've been lobbied into believing that profits trump "doing something about it".
Rendered at 13:25:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Boston here (home of decaying old red brick pizza oven buildings, not designed for modern summers).
This morning, as we enter a forecast high of 102F real temp, and heat index up to 110, my own old building is trying to get a 5-hour water shutdown of our entire building of ~100 residents, including elderly... postponed until after the scorching peak of the heat wave is over.
Not only do we have neither the architecture nor the acclimation for hot climate, but we don't even know what's ridiculously stupid behavior in such a climate.
I'm ready to upgrade, as soon as I know what city I'll be moving/staying to, after new job/startup search (and what my budget will be).
Unfortunately, with ~100 people, and a general culture in the university neighborhood of non-cooperative, non-engaged, disconnected... there's a real chance that not everyone is going to do all the right things, and someone will get heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
It's not the neighborhood, it's the people who inhabit it.
Just remove the word "university" and trade all the street parked Prius's in for driveway parked Tacomas and you've basically just described every snooty neighborhood in <shuffles cards> Wayland or <shuffles again> Dedham.
I assure you that just as many people in the suburbs are "not doing the right thing" or are otherwise completely surprised by outlier weather events. 100deg temps just have less consequences when you're not 22, living in an apartment with no A/C and drank yourself to a .3 the prior evening.
Might be that five days of leakage are much, much more water wasted [0] than if everyone in the building stocks several gallons of water for use during the shutoff period.
[0] And in this case, actually wasted because they'll not make it to a drain to get to a water treatment plant.
On a related note, global population data before about 1800 or so is also unreliable because censuses hadn't been invented yet. During the Enlightenment, people actually debated if world population was increasing or decreasing. Many thought it had been constantly decreasing since the decline and fall of Rome. In general, reliable statistics for more or less anything are newer than the United States of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_United_Kingdom_heat_wave#...
But it was more a taxation thing.
The Roman Empire had a motive to take a census (for things such as taxation of its subjects) and the means to enforce it over a wide area, neither of which survived its fall.
We can also have the coldest day in Central Park at some point.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
It seems probable; likely even.
But how do we know? Is it a guess?
The very fact that New York hit this temperature in 1888 (pre industrial revolution) suggests that we can’t take it on faith, as we have at least one data point that suggests heat spikes like this have happened in recent planet history without extra atmospheric CO2.
for anything before 1880 and pre-history there's other sources like deep ice cores, geological strata, tree rings, etc. Not accurate, but good enough for an educated guess.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/extreme-makeov...
But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"
Not saying or denying anything, but on a universe-al scale, 200 years is nothing, since some changes take longer.
The US has a president that has routinely supported the "it's a myth" viewpoint [0], which increases the visibility and credibility of climate change contrarians regardless of their motivations.
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/trump-clings-to-inaccurate...
What is the valid heuristic is that what you see on it all the time is clearly what someone wants you think.
Someone in real life that cites rando social media too much is probably on their phone too much or themselves in a non-genuine activity group.
The thing is, we can do something about it, but unfortunately we've been lobbied into believing that profits trump "doing something about it".