It's 8pm here in the Bay Area and my home is reading 91.8 degrees with the sun down and all my windows open. I remember when I moved here in 2002 and my first landlord told me, "You're in the Bay, you don't need an air conditioner."
That's still true, though. We only have heat like this around September with a little overlap before and after. It's pretty unpleasant for that six or so weeks, however. It's noticeably worse than 15 yrs ago, too.
> You're in the Bay, you don't need an air conditioner.
Wow he must have been an iron man. Maybe in SF you don't, but you go a bit south and you so much do. I've spent lots of money setting up AC in my current house and now I am feeling it's worth it. I'm relatively ok with heat but 100+ is too much even for me.
I've lived for 10+ years without an air conditioner. I usually just go to common air-conditioned spaces (coffee houses, school campuses) or near the sea where it's cooler.
I hate being at home during the day anyway, but it's also to try to save a little energy ;) Everyone turning ther A/C on is actually making the planet hotter.
> Everyone turning ther A/C on is actually making the planet hotter.
This really needs to be emphasised to all the newcomers to SF.
In Fremont/San Jose/Sunnyvale you probably will need AC, but most areas you're probably fine with a few fans running, which are more environmentally friendly.
But alas, the culture here is changing. The sales people in our office have this lazy habit of opening the windows and keeping the AC running.
Even if the energy to run an air conditioner came from a source like hydroelectric power and the machine operated at 100% efficiency, it would still heat the outside air.
A typical air conditioner is one example of a heat pump, a device that moves heat from one location to another. In this case you're pumping heat from inside your house to outside, warming the air around the house.
Your refrigerator is also a heat pump, moving heat from inside the fridge to the outside. This is one reason cats like to climb up on top of the refrigerator (besides the fact that they like to climb on everything) - it's warm up there.
It's less about heating the outside air directly and more about carbon emissions from massive cities all using air conditioners at once.
Not saying give up air conditioning altogether, but consider hanging out in an air conditioned public space instead of switching on your own. Libraries, malls, coffee shops, universities, just to name a few.
From the basic energy conservation considerations, it is clear how much heat is produced by the AC - the same amount that it consumes from the power grid. There is no other place that energy can go to, and there's no additional energy that can be converted to heat. So if your AC consumed 1kWh, that's 1kWh of heat that was dissipated. It doesn't matter what's inside the AC, conservation of energy works the same way. BTW the same would be true for any device that consumes 1kWh, unless it creates mass (very uncommon for household devices).
> Everyone turning ther A/C on is actually making the planet hotter.
That's bull. I won't have absolutely any effect on the planet if I run my AC 24/7 for all my life. The scales are way too different. You are free to do what you want but please spare me the sanctimonious baloney.
BTW, how do you get to the sea - I bet it's in a car and not on the back of a unicorn? At least most people do. Same as they get to air-conditioned malls (whose AC would probably be consuming energy couple of orders of magnitude more than that home AC) and other places. As I said, it's your choice how to deal with it but please, less posturing.
Ac works by pumping heat out of the house and pulling Air in that passes by coils with compressed solvent. When solvent changes from liquid to gas when released into the coils under less pressure, the molecules absorb heat energy from the incoming air (gasses inheritely have more energy because the molecules are moving around faster). The gasses used are greenhouse gasses which contribute to making the world hotter. You say it's on a small scale, and I agree with you, but so is an individual cow, but cattle contribute a large percentage of the greenhouse gasses. The collective use of air conditioning does indeed contribute to climate change. While it does push out hot air, I don't think this would have a noticeable immediate effect on the local temperature.
Oh and btw I love AC and am totally wtfing about not having AC now that it's hot and all the fans being sold out wrf.
Thank you, I know how AC works. The point is the difference is minuscule, on home scale. Unless all home AC users start to vent their refrigerant tanks into the atmosphere (which would defeat the whole purpose of having AC), and keep doing it for decades, the effect of it would be nil. In practice, the leaks are small and are promptly fixed because when refrigerant is leaking, AC is useless and nobody wants that. Of course, it would be nice to use even better chemicals (such as HFOs), but even now the contribution of home AC - if properly used and disposed - is small.
> The collective use of air conditioning does indeed contribute to climate change.
Not significantly more than any other use of the same energy.
I live in the tropics and don't have it, but we are in the country. Family in the city do and every house I have been to in the city does (middle classes and up (where middle class is basically anyone who has a regular job)
We also had cultures based around weather - you wouldn't see people out and about in that kind of heat, because everyone would be in the shade trying to keep cool. Now we have a bunch of concrete buildings and roads and glass skyscrapers.
The difference between A/C and antibiotics is that there are plenty of alternatives to A/C like drinking enough water and staying in the shade. There really aren't any alternatives to antibiotics. The Internet is totally frivolous to human survival on a basic needs level.
Quite a few people still die without A/C. Children and the elderly are particularly susceptible to heat stroke.
I grew up in Sacramento. I know full well that hydration and shade are not nearly as effective as just staying inside an air-conditioned room. They're certainly important in those cases where you need to be out and about, but it's almost always better to just not be in that environment in the first place.
... and clothes, shoes, agriculture, metal, etc etc. A/C is a luxury, yes, but humans have been without pretty much all artificial things for most of their existence.
Humans survived without dental care, anesthetics, antibiotics, regular bathing, deodorants, vaccination, pasteurization, etc. for most of their existence. At least some humans. Now, people are free to get as close to the stone age as they like, but I like my civilization, thank you very much. When my teeth hurt, I don't bash them with a stone and don't drink boar's urine, I go to the dentist, where she fixes my problems under anesthesia. When it's too hot, I turn on AC. Yes, it is a luxury, as most of our civilization is. And I love it.
Not true. Think of to the Bedouins in the Sahara, the Inuits in northern Canada and the tradesmen crossing the Silk Road since the first Egyptian empire. Or anyone in India for the last 7k years. Humans have been living with temperatures ranging from -50C to 50C for thousands of years.
Yeah, but a window mounted unit is good enough. Keeps your whole place cool. It sounds like everybody has their windows open anyway, and this way you can store them or sell them when you don't need it anymore.
Well, it depends on how it's installed, the power, the model etc. Built-in central air models, especially combined with heating, can run pretty pricey. If it's a big house and it's a new model, with all regulation-required energy-saving features, it's a five-figure territory. Of course, if you need to cool only one room, you can get small second-hand one for much cheaper.
>I remember when I moved here in 2002 and my first landlord told me, "You're in the Bay, you don't need an air conditioner."
Hell, I bought a home in Richmond in 2013 and when we were getting the furnace replaced I asked about adding an AC as well and the guy laughed at me. At 11pm its 88 in my hallway. 74 in my bedroom where I bought a window AC unit. Really wish he would have just given me the price and let me decide...
Are you so nonconfrontational you were unable to ask for what you wanted? If a contractor wont do the work, find another. Don't just accept what some random guy tells you. Conversely, don't blame your contractor for your inability to decide for yourself.
"I'm going to make a lot of weird assumptions about a stranger on the internet and snarkily give them advice in a super awkward way. This will be helpful somehow."
Today at lunch with a friend in Palo Alto, we measured 106°F at our table in the shade. We ate outdoors because the cafe had no A/C and was intolerable.
Even on a normal warm day, so many Palo Alto restaurants are uncomfortably hot inside because of no A/C and poor ventilation. Especially the places that face south or west!
You're making an invalid, hasty generalization from ancedotal evidence. A ground-floor apartment or shaded house is not the same thing as a flat-roofed, unshaded, uninsulated, top floor apartment.
I've lived in California for almost 40 years. The house I grew up in south San Jose had a small, in-wall air conditioner because it was needed about 5 weeks out of the year. It's true most houses on the peninsula didn't have air conditioners originally, but many of them do now (probably more affordability than climate change).
Mmm idk I've been here for 30+ years and we always seem to have one or two weeks of intense heat and its not clear to me that its that much worse. I certainly remember the summer of 2002 when we had some 100+ days in August (I remember this because I was playing golf at Stanford and getting utterly toasted)
If it's unpleasantly hot for longer than a month, every year, that sounds like an air conditioner is extremely appropriate. The cost is what, half a month's rent to have many year's worth of comfortable Septembers?
It's generally only a few days where it's in the 80's or above at night, even the 70's is rare at night.
If you open the windows at night, cool the place down, close the windows and shades in the morning, the house will stay pretty cool throughout the day.
Cool showers can help. Even room-temperature water is great at transferring heat away from your body as long as the room is at less than human body temperature. Also, if you have a fan, this is a great time to point it directly at you. If you don't have a fan, Walgreens should be open for the next sixteen minutes.
(I'm in similar straits at the moment, but feeling fine.)
parents in some of my local fb parenting groups are frantically sharing locations of any stores in the city still selling fans. looks like most of the places you'd hit up (costco, target, bbb, hardware stores) are all sold out. so is prime now. walgreens may not have any fans even as a last resort - some of the locations seem to be sold out too. it's worth calling ahead and asking.
prime now wasn't sold out of things like ice cream though, and maybe they still have things like cooling towels in stock? i was swapping my cooling towel with my baby earlier today.
Cooling towels are great. My 10 yo stepdaughter had one for three days at Universal Orlando in August, 95 degrees, 90 percent humidity, and it saved the day(s).
I've been told hot showers are better. Opens your pores allowing your body to cool itself. I don't know if it is "true", but from personal experience, it works.
Take this advice from a person that has lived with no A/C in hot and humid north east summers: cold showers at night go a long way to helping you get to sleep on hot nights.
Yeah! Although, I don't know how well that would work when the ambient temp exceeds normal body temps.
Anecdotally a really, really fast hot shower is great for cooling. Like less than a minute, probably more like 30 seconds. Then park your butt in front of a fan to get some evaporative cooling and relax for as long as it takes.
Opens your pores
I don't know about that. I've always figured the key here is vasodilation, which helps the body shed heat. Opposite of vasoconstriction obviously. A cold shower causes vasoconstriction, while simultaneously not providing enough surface area contact between you and the water to effectively change your body temp.
Of course, if you really want to change your body temp, there's no substitute for total immersion in a bathtub or swimming pool. There's a reason why this is how it's done in a medical setting.
I'm sorry, but please think very carefully about this. Exactly how would "closed pores" change thermal regulation? You don't need a biology degree to work out that this is at best a minor effect compared to evaporation.
You're bathing yourself in hot water which will raise your body temperature. Afterwards it'll evaporate and remove some of that energy and by compariosn, yeah it'll be cooler.
But you can get the exact same effect by taking a cold shower.
It doesn't matter at all if the water evaporating from your skin is sweat or from the shower, the phase change is what transfers thermal energy from your body. So, cold water will remove slightly more heat warming to the point of evaporation (about 4 joules per gram per degree Celsius difference) but the latent heat of evaporation of water is about 2000 joules per gram, which is much more than the difference between hot and cold water. So it doesn't matter that much whether the water is cold or hot, just that it evaporates off your skin and takes the heat with it.
A hot shower would dilate your blood vessels and thereby bring your blood vessels's walls closer to your skin to enhance dissipation of heat. But if you're coated in water that's warmer than you, you're going to heat up.
One of the most effective ways to cool is to wear something thin top and bottom, then wet it (just jump in the shower with your clothes on if necessary) evaporative cooling works much better, the more fluid there is. In Saudi, when people get heat stroke, they cover them with wet sheets, then use the fans, much more effective than just fans, or ice packs. Or when you go to sleep, strip off and sleep with a wet sheet over you, and just wet it again if it dries out during the night.
Keep the humidity in mind if you do this. Out in Saudi it is the desert so evaporative cooling works outstanding. Where I am the humidity often gets up to 100% overnight so you would just be sleeping with a soggy warm sheet all night.
41 is definitely warm but I think San Francisco has a pretty gentle climate in general. For comparison Melbourne Australia has a climate which is mostly similar to San Francisco but we also get temperatures over 41 Celsius every summer. Usually we get a couple of weeks in that range each year. Our record temperature was 47 Celcius (116 Fahrenheit).
The main thing keeping SF cool in the summer is a cold ocean due to the current coming from Alaska, high coastal ranges north and south of SF, and the large central valley to the east. The air in the central valley heats up and rises causing a strong flow of cool air to move from over the Pacific Ocean, across San Francisco and the Bay, into the central valley. This keeps the Bay area relatively cool in the summers. Sometimes this flow is interrupted for various reasons and things can heat up quite quickly. Especially if the wind starts bring in hot air from the east.
One 37°S latitude and one 37°N latitude from the equator I could have sworn Melbourne was much closer to the south pole. That gap in the ocean looks much smaller than San Francisco to the north pole. I live in that gap it's called Canada.
The gap south of Australia is in fact smaller than Canada. The problem is that there's a whole continent between the gap and the South Pole, and most maps truncate Antarctica near the coastline.
Some people in India consider 40 deg C or above (or really, even temp near 40, like 38 or 39) to be pretty hot. Though it does get even hotter at times, in some places. Interestingly, I read (I think a couple of years back) that the state of Kerala (which has a lot of rain and trees, so should generally be cooler than an equivalent place without those) had temps of around 50 deg C that summer.
Yeah, it's a dry heat, thankfully. 100° without humidity is better than 90° with 80% humidity, IMO. Fans are much more effective when it's dry; when it's humid, the evaporative cooling that they're supposed to create doesn't work as efficiently.
Been doing that over in the Sierra Nevada foothills, except that last few days - as the smoke from the Yosemite Fires is hanging around all night (nasty stuff).
Big thing is, if you can, open the windows at night/early morning and then close em up before it gets warm. Then keep windows AND curtains closed all day till later in the evening (after 7pm) when the temperatures go down. Curtains are a big insulator from the sunlight generated heat.
It works much better when the walls are made of brick or stone. No matter how much insulation you stuff into a modern drywall, it will never match the thermal mass of solid stone.
Yeah, my wife and her family are big proponents of the "crank up the AC at night to save money during the day!" thing and it's just not very effective when talking about "modern" wood-frame-and-drywall homes.
Edit: They also seem to think that this somehow makes sense when the temperature at night is below 70F. My wife (an otherwise intelligent person) insists on running the window unit AC at night with the thermostat set at 68F even when it's 65F outside. I've tried every "logical" alternative... adding ambient fan noise to match the air conditioner's soothing rumble... window-mounted fans to bring the cool air inside... I dunno, I've given up. Costs a few hundred extra bucks per summer but it's not the hill I want to die on. God knows I spend money on things she finds useless!
(OK, in her defense, the AC spits out cool dry air instead of the cool damp air the outside world often provides here in the Philadelphia area, which borders on a tropical climate in the summer)
What really kills me here in vienna are the very hot nights with no less than 20°C. While temperatures during the day are "only" around 30-35°C the lack of sleep and refreshment really adds up after some days.
As a resident of TX, you have my condolences. Here we measure the intensity of our summers in terms of the number of days over 100 (typically around 4 weeks I'd guess). OTOH, SF rarely experiences temperatures that high in any year. OTOOH, because of that I'm guessing few people have AC. So yeah.. I feel for you.
It's been oddly cool in Dallas Texas. The temperatures have stayed between 70 and 90F. I can't complain but this is cooler than last august (when it was like 100F all the time)
As citizens of the largest industrial nation whose president not only doesn't believe in climate change, but is even working actively to bury it: You don't get condolences, you get to apologize to the rest of the world and realize that you too need to work on fixing this.
This comment and subsequent thread violate the guidelines. This is what happens when you start flamewars, you get a flamewar and the rest of us who aren't in battle mode suffer from the information vacuum.
Dude, there's no reason to make his words political. Texas gets temps like this regularly, and thankfully they built their houses with AC, but some probably have dealt with not having AC for some part of the summer (in places like Texas or Florida it's required to have functioning AC by law, depending on where you're at, just like water and electricity). He didn't say anything about climate change, or anything about politics, so there's no reason to bring it into the discussion.
"in places like Texas or Florida it's required to have functioning AC by law, depending on where you're at"
I couldn't find evidence that this is true. Can you point me to that requirement?
This must be a recent change since I grew up in Florida in a house w/o air conditioning. (Easier in a Florida cracker style home than one designed around A/C.) My Dad would have been pissed if there were the law 20 years ago. Of course, even if we had A/C he wouldn't use it - the house was only slightly more insulated than a tent.
> Unless otherwise agreed in writing, in addition to the requirements of subsection (1), the landlord of a dwelling unit other than a single-family home or duplex shall, at all times during the tenancy, make reasonable provisions for ... Functioning facilities for heat during winter, running water, and hot water.
In any case, this only applies towards rental properties.
Sorry, yes, it's only for rentals (the state govt isn't paying for the upkeep of a private home's AC). I just looked up about the laws in Florida (it's been a few years) and realized it's not about providing AC directly, but rather if the AC was working when you moved in, the landlord has to pay for its upkeep if it breaks, and I incorrectly conflated the two. In practice it's effectively the same, but the details aren't. I believe the same in Texas.
Ahh, yes, I knew about that one. I believe that's part of contract law. If I rented a place with A/C, washer, dryer, and washing machine, then the landlord is supposed to maintain those appliances.
I wonder if the FL law gives more leeway to the renter to have the air-conditioner fixed and to take the money off the rent in that case. Wasn't easy to find that in the law.
"Effectively the same" is true. Though I did once rent a garage apartment in north Florida for the summer which had no A/C. The water to the place went under the driveway. I measured the cold water coming out of the kitchen faucet at 95F.
This isn't political, this is about a country dragging the rest of the world along into death, and then commiserating itself not about how bad its own actions are, but about how bad the death feels.
Making the world two degrees hotter has a lot of bad environmental and storm effects, but it's not the root cause of Texas being hot. Texas is hot because of where it is.
Pretty sure the first thought of all of those who are of fully able mind in that group is "fuck the white house".
That said, no, because these people are in extraordinary circumstances and don't have time to calmly sit down and think things through rationally. (Comparing storm flood victims with people who're a bit warm is a bit silly.)
No, it's not about the comparison of people who are in hot temps to hurricane victims. It's about the root cause, which is global warming, that causes both, and because of that they don't deserve sympathy because of the position of politicians.
It's a comparison you made and it's a silly argument to try because it moves the conversation away from the context it was in.
The person who's a bit warm does not deserve nor need condolences, instead they and the person tempted to send the condolences should see it as a wake-up call.
The storm flood victim doesn't need a wake-up call. They had theirs. And they probably also don't care about "thoughts and prayers" when their very life is at stake. They're not in a soccer match where the audience cheering actually does anything for them.
This subthread isn't too civil. There's no reason to be aggressive. It's good that you care about climate change, but forcing your beliefs on others isn't a popular move.
A better way to do it would be to point to this as an example of a possible climate change, otherwise both sides become even more entrenched in their beliefs.
If i thought anyone here needed convincing that climate change is already killing the planet, then your comment would be worthwhile. As it is i think there are only people here who close their eyes to it because they cannot handle staring that horror in the eyes every single day.
Can you substantiate why you think there are people here who need convincing, as opposed to reminding?
(Also, quite frankly, you seem to write as if you yourself think 'it is only a theory' instead of it being cruelly real and deadly fact. Is this the case?)
I was referring to the idea that you should actively shame people for not holding your same views. You're overplaying your hand in this, since it's not at all clear to average people that there even is a threat.
Say I did believe that climate change was a hoax. What then? Should I be excluded from the community? Should it be used to question my decisions, destroy my career, hound me for it? Should it follow me around?
I don't believe that, but your logic taken to its conclusion doesn't paint a pretty picture for the world. I wouldn't want people to behave like that to each other. Being able to disagree is a fundamental right, necessary for discourse and debate to work at all. If you vilify a position you lose the benefits of this.
Two points: I asked why you think there are people here who don't believe in climate changing killing the planet right now, but you went down an orthogonal path; that second paragraph also veers way off track from the original context.
You're a nice person and try to be nice, but i will not acceed to giving the HN userbase that kind of coddling, because the people posting here are not average. Not about an issue of life death for the entire human race. You care about someone feeling sad. I care about whether children 2-3 generations down the line from now get to die a natural death. Do you think the former is more important than the latter?
You remind me of Barrett from FF7. They killin' the planet, Cloud! Good memories.
I think it's very far from obvious that children 2-3 generations from now will die horribly due to climate change. It's clear that it's a real phenomenon, but the impact remains to be seen. People have also been predicting doomsday scenarios roughly since people were people, yet the planet finds a way around them and life goes on.
It's not really about being nice. It's more like, if there were evidence that climate change will absolutely lead to large-scale death and destruction, then it wouldn't be necessary to make it a moral imperative to care about it. As it stands, it's very hard to prove that it will. And without proof, the idea that people should be shamed for being skeptical doesn't really add up.
Well, why do this? What's the point of alienating people for no reason? It's not realistic to show up with no evidence and claim that children will die horribly just to make your point.
Because there's exactly three types of people in this equation:
1. Those without the prerequisites and means to access on education. (Think people with no internet.)
2. Those who are willing to consider the horror of this directly, if reminded of it.
3. Those who do not want to it to be real and refuse to educate themselves on their own accord because it would mean confronting a literal existential horror.
We're just as angry as you are. More people in the US voted against Trump than for him. Just because the GP is from Texas doesn't mean they don't believe in climate change.
That is hot IMHO. Grew up in Houston where it was hot and humid. Here in Nashville it is a balmy 59 degrees today but that is the result of Harvey and we have had 2 days of nonstop drizzle/light rain.all next week it is unseasonably cool....in the 70s to low 80s. Had a week in August this year in the 80s already. Climate change must be driving it as that is unheard of here.
Typically August through early September are high 90s and we usually have 10-12 days of the month over 100. Humidity is usually anywhere from 40-80 percent. I don't think I could live without AC but it is the humidity not the temperature that gets me.
Hope you all get a break in the temp soon. When it is so hot you cannot comfortably sleep fans and or AC are a must in my book.
I wonder if AC will pay for itself in resale value in the Peninsula these days.
Just added it earlier this year and I'm damn thankful for it right now. Our neighbor recently sold and I remember talking to the agent at the open house. We were both standing there dripping sweat on a heat wave day. Now if I sold I'd hope for a heat wave because it would magnify the presence of AC.
My tech dudes and dudettes in the Bay, I feel for you. Kind of. 95 degrees in 20% humidity...it could have been worse John. A lot worse. Try networking 8 connection machines and debugging 2 million lines of code in 95% humidity at 95 degrees in NYC.
But seriously. I get why it's a big deal and when someone isn't used to heat like this, it can overwhelm you. Just hydrate hydrate hydrate. And If you feel like making something this weekend to cool off, build an evaporative cooler. Check out: http://www.instructables.com/id/Swamp-Cooler-1/.
WET A T-SHIRT AND WRING IT OUT WELL, THEN PUT IT ON.
You can get by with temperatures up to at least 100 degrees this way. Personal experience from heat waves in Europe where many people do not believe in air conditioning.
After living in Davis for university, coming back to the Bay Area feels like a walk in the park. I used to be bothered a lot more by the heat than I am now.
On the other hand, I can't stand, say, Atlanta. I guess they say you should live in California at some point, but just not first. Humidity is something I just can't seem to adapt to.
This is why I prefer living in the basement of my own house (I live in Queens, NYC). Also I don't have carpet, and also not wooden floor (only upstairsnin the living room). Helps dissipate heat. Also room has enough space / gaps more surface areas to dissipate heat.
The worst part about solar with PG&E is a power outage kills your production without a battery.
Today I should have been able to easily offset a bit of demand on the grid during peak time, but they apparently couldn't keep the power consistently on in San Jose!
My AC went out about 2 years ago, and I've been meaning to have it fixed, but realistically, it gets really bad around maybe 2 weeks of the year here in SoCal. For the really bad days, we just rent a hotel room. It was a 104 yesterday, just finished checking in.
I've been wondering if the heat will take down a few data centers in this area. I guess reddit is hosted on AWS, however, so its current outage is not related.
GP doesn't imply anything about AGW. It's possible to have a long perspective while still recognizing that this temperature is extraordinary for the Holocene. SF probably had warmer days in the Cretaceous but there were significantly more dinosaurs. So "all time" is still wrong.
If you're going to be that pedantic, then the full phrase is "all-time record". It's specifically referring to the record. If we don't have recorded temperatures from the cretaceous, then there's no record there to break.
For more pedantry, it's also described as the record for the city of San Francisco, not the peninsula of. I'm fairly sure the city didn't exist in the cretaceous.
You're not being pedantic enough. The peninsula wouldn't have been a peninsula then, if you play the San Andreas fault back far enough. But hey, the SF part of Laramidia also would have been under water.
True. But whenever things like glaciers melting, Arctic sea ice melting, etc. get brought up as evidence for global warming someone inevitably mentions that recorded time is quite small in relation to geologic time. It's a response that is useless and it's annoying to hear. It's the global warming equivalent of Godwin's Law.
You might be seeing global warming deniers in every shadow. Sometimes people just mean what they say without a popular political motivation behind it. I agree with the GP and the title irked me too. "all-time" is OK for sports or other human inventions where we do have a record of all time, but for the Earth, it's just wrong to misuse it for sensationalism.
I think all that they are implying is that the recorded maximum of the short past is unlikely to place predictive limits on or reveal much about the potential enormity of that maximum's successor.
This is sufficiently well known that it doesn't need repeating every time a weather anomaly occurs. It seems to me that the post in question has come to be a rallying cry for climate change deniers. It has become coded language for a certain segment of the population.
My central unit was out, I bought 2 window units for $400. AC was fixed in a couple of days. I could have gotten a hotel room cheaper, but I'm more than happy to just put those units in garage in case it happens again. It seems kinda silly to have an Apple Watch on my wrist, but no back up plan for staying cool. (Granted, I'm in Houston ....)
"San Francisco summers typically mean coats, space heaters and high heating bills. Air conditioning in city homes, well, it’s not even a thing."
Author used the wrong tense here. He should have used the past tense. Air conditioning is an absolute must these days though so are coats and high heating bills (mainly in old buildings with bad windows/insulation). Same thing in the northwest (except the coats). I don't see many new places being built without AC in either location. This heat has been the norm for years and it's not going to go away. It's global warming anyone can feel and experience. Only idiots still cling on to their climate change denial bullshit at the expense of the rest of society.
It's been hotter than hell up here in Portland. Over the last five years, at least three summers have seemed hotter than any summer I can remember. This August was the hottest on record:
And I believe it! It's gotten to the point that a forecast of ~80 is a huge relief. Used to be I thought 80 was hot. The worst of it has been the nights when it doesn't even cool down much -- it's hard to sleep without AC. I'm planning to get AC set up this year. I don't think I can stand another summer without it.
I have A/C in the Portland area but the upstairs of my house never cools well. I added an ecobee thermostat with the room sensors and that's helped immensely. Now my bedroom upstairs can actually cool to 75 even though it might be 67 downstairs where the thermostat is. It hasn't saved me any money, but it has made this summer bearable at least.
I've lived in the bay area for 26 years. We have a couple/few at most weeks of hot weather in the spring and fall, the rest of the summer the fog is sucked off the ocean by inland hot weather, and winters get pretty chilly.
The idea that you need ac in SF is wrong IMO. East bay is a whole different climate and story....
When I moved to a building in SOMA (1045 Mission), I thought it was odd that the unit had air conditioning. Turns out the damn unit needed it most spring/summer days to keep the interior temp in the 70/80s. It probably had something to do with my unit being one of the live/work units on Minna that had all 6 walls made of either concrete or glass.
I don't have air conditioning at all and I'm not used to it, but I don't consider 75 degrees to be a cool night. "Cool" doesn't enter the conversation until you're under 70.
"Cool" doesn't enter the conversation until you're under 70.
Same. I have trouble sleeping if it's above about 70 or so. My AC went out for a couple of nights about a month ago and it about drove me batshit crazy.
It's funny how perspectives vary though. I was a consultant a few jobs back, and so traveled all around the country for a few years. And early on I made assumptions, like, "all hotels will have AC". And then I get sent to a northern city (I think this was Milwaukee, if memory serves correctly) in winter-time. I get there and it's way too hot in my room for me to fall asleep. I turn the thermostat down and nothing happens. After a while I call the front desk and they're like "Oh, we turn the A/C off this time of year". Uuuuurgggh... they finally had to send maintenance around to undo the window locks so I could crack the window to let some cold air in (thankfully it was freezing ass cold outside, so it didn't take much to cool the room down).
depending on who's counting, the deviation is currently like +0.21 degrees C since 1980. although it is a meaningful amount you probably could not actually "feel and experience" it
That's still true, though. We only have heat like this around September with a little overlap before and after. It's pretty unpleasant for that six or so weeks, however. It's noticeably worse than 15 yrs ago, too.