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.
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.
> I have no problem believing that they were imprecise
I only took issue with the claim they were invented that late.
But it was more a taxation thing.
Herod's census was a tax thing too. Censuses are very expensive, and only even vaguely reliable if you threaten people with dire consequences for not taking part properly. So they don't often get done for funsies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_United_Kingdom_heat_wave#...
This is not specific to weather, although one interesting example would be California in November 1861 - January 1862. Most people think of the gold rush, but there was also a 20 year drought that ended with the largest flood in recorded history. 10 feet of precipitation in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days. It was followed by a huge bloom in vegetation, and the rancho cattle population quadrupled. Then another drought in 1864, that wiped out most of the cattle. And a smallpox epidemic that wiped out 90% of the remaining native population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-13-nc-780-st...
There's a whole meta-genre of academic papers that consist of taking unreliably measurement logs from prior centuries, comparing them to what the current best scientific understanding of the field is and then saying "aha, X wasn't mistaken about observing/measuring/concluding Y in conditions/location Z, his instrumentation was likely out of tune by a factor of N, if we re-do his math with the following error bars and plot the results you can see that what he reported is within the limits of our understanding of the subject today".
I'm not gonna say it's useful or useless science, but it sure is interesting to find out how close to modern understanding some of those guys back then were within their niches if you account for the quality of their equipment despite sometimes very unscientific conditions.
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).
It's not going to be terribly windy in Boston... There are places that sell/rent temporary roof coverings, mainly for protecting from storm damage until it can get fixed. But anyway, white/reflective coverings are available, and can be held down with a few bricks for a week.
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.
A significant minority wants green grass year round and those people water their lawn. It is not a majority though.
About 6 years ago we let our lawn die off (it was at it's EOL anyway; the soil beneath was sand). We replaced part of it with rough pavers spaced 2-3 inches apart and we let the grass and whatever else grow in the spaces, and keep it mowed. It's not as nice as a lawn, but it's greenery. I do have to water it, but it takes a tiny fraction of the amount a lawn would take. The hypothesis is that the pavers prevent evaporation, trapping the moisture in the soil.
I was inspired by the hearty, unwanted plants that would always manage to grow between the pavers with zero water.
ok that's hot. Being from Dallas, I usually poke fun at the NE when temps get warm there just like the NE pokes fun at the South when we get an inch of snow. However, 102 with humidity and heat index of 110 is hot no matter what. When it's that hot here i try to take off shoes/socks whenever possible and soak down my head and wash my face. A lot of heat is shed through your feet and head. But you reach a point where there's just no escape, once the concrete is heated up it takes weeks for it to cool back down. The feeling of a breeze only making it hotter instead of cooler is not pleasant, my sympathies.
edit: btw, i don't see how people in AZ survive, the temps in Phoenix and other places just seem incompatible with life. The usual reply is "low humidity" but the inside of your oven is low humidity too, i wouldn't want to live there either.
We can also have the coldest day in Central Park at some point.
Admittedly, this has only been characterized since 1969, but it has been in the news rather a lot since then.
LA has perpetually incredible weather (but a quickly worsening water issue). The USA is an astonishingly large place. Weather in NYC means literally nothing about weather in Los Angeles.
2) Even then I'd have been wrong, since the World Cup is all over the country!
The more you (I) know!
The New York area has really brutal weather on both extremes, unfortunately.
This year's tournament is all over the US, including several stadia and training bases in the north east. Only one venue is in CA. Next year has a similar layout, and in both years the final is in NJ.
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
oezi•7mo ago
stratocumulus0•7mo ago
RiverCrochet•7mo ago
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.
sjsdaiuasgdia•7mo ago
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...
add-sub-mul-div•7mo ago
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
Cthulhu_•7mo ago
deadbabe•7mo ago
callmeal•7mo ago
The thing is, we can do something about it, but unfortunately we've been lobbied into believing that profits trump "doing something about it".
larrled•7mo ago
quesera•7mo ago
sneak•7mo ago
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.
Cthulhu_•7mo ago
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•7mo ago
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/extreme-makeov...
ajsnigrutin•7mo ago
Not saying or denying anything, but on a universe-al scale, 200 years is nothing, since some changes take longer.
jakelazaroff•7mo ago
femiagbabiaka•7mo ago
aaronbaugher•7mo ago
But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"
femiagbabiaka•7mo ago
1: 2012, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_dome
timr•7mo ago
I'm very serious. And no, I am not a "climate denier". The earth is getting warmer, but you cannot measure it in discrete events like you're trying to do.
femiagbabiaka•7mo ago
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/extreme-summer-weather-patt...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2504482122
Why not at least do an internet search first?
timr•7mo ago
1) The paper is very clear that it's talking about changes over a 50 year period, which is more than my entire life. It's certainly not something you're going to use to explain a particular hot day this year, or even an imagined increase in hot summer days over the past decade. In my lifetime, the regression line of their count of annual "QRA events" has gone from a bit less than 2, to a bit more than 2.
2) The phenomena discussed in the paper is described as a particular spectral decomposition pattern in the global upper atmosphere [1], not a frequency measurement of heat events. The pattern may be related to the weather, but like everything else in climate science, you can't use it to explain the outcome on a particular day. And it certainly doesn't explain the existence of what normal people call "hot summer days", which have, indeed, existed forever.
[1] Specifically: "A QRA event is counted as such if high-amplitude, quasi-stationary planetary waves of wave numbers 6, 7, or 8 are found in the atmospheric wind field in ERA5 data, and at the same time certain resonance conditions are met".
That's what the paper is about. They counted those, and plotted them in Figure 1: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.2504482122/asset/22f39...
femiagbabiaka•7mo ago
Climate change is one of the only topics where people choose to be so pedantic, and frankly unnecessarily insulting.
timr•7mo ago
No, that isn't what I said. Here is what I said:
> There have been "heat dome events" every year I've been alive. We just didn't call them that, because we used to call this phenomenon "summer".
I don't know how you get to "heat dome events aren't real" from that. They're real. They're also part of summer, but the terminology is new. The paper you cited, in fact, shows that they go back 50+ years. They're just slightly more frequent now.
> I guess the second or third time in a year we see heat domes is the only appropriate time to bring it up?
Again, you should actually look at the paper -- or just the first figure. I linked to it for you, so it couldn't be easier. You will see these events happening 4+ times a year going back into the 1950s. We're talking about a very subtle historical change, here.
s3krit•7mo ago
bluGill•7mo ago
Sayrus•7mo ago
bluGill•7mo ago
tapoxi•7mo ago
this_user•7mo ago
We can be pretty certain that something is happening, and we are not just seeing randomness. We can also be certain enough for practical purposes that we know what the cause is.
In a situation where the consequences will be nothing short of catastrophic on a global scale and we are already far too late, insisting on 100% academic purity is really not a sensible position.
sneak•7mo ago