Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
49 Celsius = 120.2 Fahrenheit, for the oldies out there.
I came here to ask what that was in ‘Merican.
Halfway between freezing and boiling, the specifics hardly matter at that point.
“Australians are finding out” yeah, we’ve BEEN finding out for as long as i can remember lmao. the hottest we’ve logged the factory i work in was 56 degrees (that was when outside was ~48)
Why I feel that business hours during summer season have to be extended at least a couple hours before closing because it is debilitating to even try do anything even under the shade at over 40C. Also, much exercise I have to do during such a season needed to be conducted at night.
Tucson here: June is routinely >40° every day here, but humidity is generally <30%. >60% humidity at that temperature kills if you’re not prepared.
thankfully our southern states aren’t particularly humid: equator to our north, antarctic to our south
it kind of sucks living in a part of the world that requires you to sit in air conditioned bubbles all day. it’s a fucking depressing way to live.
That is exactly how I felt about Texas.
And I was shocked no one thought to build or market reasonable 3rd spaces.
I always imagined thats why there were so many drunk people out and about. Because the only habitable place outside of homes were bars if you didn’t have a gym membership.
Plenty of 3rd spaces exist in Texas. You just have to pay to play. The hyper-capitalist dream is alive in the Lone Star State.
I always imagined thats why there were so many drunk people out and about. Because the only habitable place outside of homes were bars if you didn’t have a gym membership.
I gotta wonder how much of the decline of alcoholism in the subsequent generations boils down to affordability.
Gym memberships are way cheaper than bar tabs.
yes. everyone is inside because it’s hot, and everyone is getting drunk because that’s the only thing there is to do, and everyone is driving a car because that’s the only way to get there. if you didn’t drive, then you’re waiting around for the person who drove you, and you’re getting really drunk because they don’t want to leave yet. what a stupid ironic life
And people forget wildlife don’t have AC.
We’ll be living in a dead world soon.
most of them avoid those areas, marsupials also have lower body temp than placentals.
I wonder if ACs have doom loop effect. They produce more heat than cold, so eventually you need to deal with even more heat (on a global scale), prompting even more AC use
The AC is just moving existing heat around, basically evicting it from an enclosed area.
I’ve read that it can add to the “heat island” effect of large cities, but globally I don’t think the AC’s themselves are the problem, it’s the carbon in the atmosphere that holds the heat of the sun in, as well as the fossil fuels still used broadly to power the AC’s adding to that carbon.
Yes. Making and running AC’s contribute straight in to carbon emissions, so its a feedback loop.
I don’t have any proof, but I’d imagine AC alone would be insignificant on planet scale.
Anything short of us detonating enough nukes to light up the atmosphere.
It’s the sun’s energy getting trapped by our emissions that we need to worry about.its an AC stupid it makes it cold! Your thinking of a heater
The Doom loop is actually more to do with architecture that is not designed with hot temperatures in mind, because it’s assumed that central air conditioning will be used.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C
There are not enough swear words in my vocabulary to successfully articulate my reaction to that.
Min of 35 is absolutely fucked
40c is 104F, it’s not common but it happens where I live at least a few times a summer.
49c is 120F that wouldnt be fun
My state high happened near where I live in 1934. 118 degrees.
Personally I think the highest I’ve experienced is 112.
The line I was reacting to stated an overnight low of 95. It was 104 by 9:30am. We’ve had stretches where it didn’t dip below 85 (cycle of nightly cloud cover basically acting as a wet blanket) and it was absolutely miserable. A low of 95 is nightmare territory.
I live in corn country. At night and morning the corn swets, and makes the humidity skyrocket can easily make night stay in the high 80s low 90s sometimes
To elaborate on “the corn sweats” for anyone curious, the process is “transpiration” and it’s a significant source of local humidity.
Can tell you’re not an Aussie, seen 47/116 quite a few times
That is nice for those who have been accused of having room temperature IQs in freedom units though.
104 is not terrible as long as you drink water can be in the shade every now and then it’s doable depending on humidity
I agree, I have experienced temperatures up to 45c in Spain and India; not pleasant to be out in the sun, quite survivable once you are used to it.
Once temps hit more than 37C and 100% humidity, the human body loses the ability to regulate it’s temperature through sweating.
This temperature happens a lot in Taiwan and is also 100% humidity. It’s not comfortable.
South Australia doesn’t have humidity.
I’ve worked in mines in the desert in South Australia where temps semi regularly hit 46-47 degrees.
It’s OK (ish) because the humidity is low. But you can drink a litre an hour all day (11+ hours) and not need to pee. All that water goes somewhere.
The underground workings are often more dangerous, with lower temperatures but higher humidity. Once wet bulb temps get above 34 degrees underground personnel need to retreat from the area and the only work that can be done there then is work to fix the ventilation.
There’s heat stress meters that measure wet and dry bulb temperatures and airflow, and can basically compute cooling power in watts. Not enough cooling power -> everyone out.
I can only imagine, as I sit on the Stockholm metro with cold and damp feet after walking through snow and some slush to get to the bus earlier.
I am happy to hear that you have rules and regulations for these eventualities.
Yeah, in those conditions, you live and die by wet bulb temperatures.
Now, please correct me if I am wrong, but would drinking cold stuff balance out the temperature difference? Like say it’s 40c wet bulb, but you have access to cold water to drink, would that work?
You couldn’t physically drink enough water. Math is not my strong suit but this seems pretty straightforward.
It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius, by definition. Plugging in some numbers (a liter of water starting at a very frosty 1 C) takes almost 40 kilocalories or about 160 kiloJoules of energy. That’s like half of your “simply existing” calories per hour, so you’d need to consume 2 liters of ice-cold water every hour (and excrete every gram of it to 40, which you aren’t doing with your living body) just to break even.
It gets more complicated when you factor in evaporative cooling and I already said I’m not a math-man but the environmental factor is simply too strong for biology.
Fair, I was uncertain if the cold water would be sufficient. Thanks for your reply!
It’s dry as a bone here right now. (That’s good)
Also means it’s all a big tinderbox. (That’s bad)
It makes evaporative air conditioners work better (That’s good)
Yup. Wet-bulb conditions are no joke and can kill, making functioning A/C a life-saving technology if not an outright requirement for survival.
Actually at 100% humidity the highest survivable temperature for a human is 35 C° wet bulb temperature.
But that is with everything else being perfect, being healthy, in the shade, and perfectly hydrated, and zero physical activity.
A more realistic maximum survivable wet bulb temperature is closer to 30 C°. But 35 C° is the absolute maximum, where above that everybody dies.Sorry, but that’s wrong. WBGT takes radiative heat into effect when it’s calculated. The sun and shade effectively have two different WBGT readings. That’s why its measured with a black globe. Protocol is to measure ~2 meters heigh in direct sunlight away from structures that block wind so you get the worse case scenario. Like any whether reading, its localized.
Isn’t this called wet bulb or something and lethal?
That was it, yes!
1-100 Celsius is about water freezing —> boiling and I’ve always been confused about why it’s so eminently logical to understand the weather by that scale.
1-100 Fahrenheit, meanwhile, is a really reasonable approximation of the habitable range of temperatures.
And you just showed this by having to establish for everyone that the upper bound of habitability is 37C. A completely random number anyone would forget.
No one “forgets” temperatures dude, 17°C might be meaningless to you but to me it’s just shirt and light jacket weather. Nobody forgets what the body temperature in Celsius is. It’s two digits, your brain can do it.
Fahrenheit simply puts the human at the center where physical phenomena like water freezing and boiling happen at “random” points on its scale, while Celsius takes two simple, constant (as long as you’re not on a mountain), verifiable points based on physics, where the temperature of a human body falls on a “random” place on it.
The point is very simple: if you have an unlabeled thermometer and need to calibrate it, you stick it in freezing water, mark 0, stick it in boiling water, mark 100, divide into equal segments, and it will be exactly right. If you want to do the same for Fahrenheit, you need another reference thermometer. (Unless you happen to have the same unspecified mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride that Fahrenheit supposedly originally used to mark the 0 point)
I appreciate the elegance of your field calibration, but it will not be “exactly right.” The boiling point of water is readable repeatable but sensitive to altitude and the contents of the water. Freezing is also sensitive to salt and mineral content, but even more basically: where’s this “freezing water” you can stick your thermometer into, that’s reliably == 0 degrees? Ice keeps getting colder, and melted water can be any temperature above 0.
Good in theory, but even if field calibration were a real need, it’s not very exact. And anyway, if you can work all that out, you can do it for F or C. Since no one will every forget 212 and 32, as you point out.
where’s this “freezing water” you can stick your thermometer into, that’s reliably == 0 degrees? Ice keeps getting colder, and melted water can be any temperature above 0.
A substance undergoing phase change will hold its temperature until the change is complete. That means that once water starts freezing, it will be 0°C until it is all ice. Same goes for ice thawing. Yes only pure H2O will freeze at exactly 0°, but unless you deliberately put some shit in it it will be very, very, very close. Boiling is a bit more sensitive, but still a lot less than the natural variance between body temperatures in normal conditions.
You’re taking the procedure literally, but it was just to get a point across. Also, using the freezing and water boiling points of water was used to define Fahrenheit too for most of the 20th century.
Well, that last point suggests that you don’t need the Celsius scale to use water’s phase changes as a reference / definition. Which undermines your entire case for Celsius being superior because it’s based on that.
All I’m saying is that F has some human usability merit in that the scale just happens to corresponds nicely to a human quality. Since any scale can use physical qualities as a definition, why shouldn’t we use one that’s more human-centric.
From my side, it doesn’t because what the fuck is 40 f? I have no clue. The human merit you’re referring to is all due to what you have been taught
I am sorry, but you are wrong, however you are not wrong at what you might expect me to call you out on.
There is nothing inherently superior with F for “habitable” temps, both C and F works fine for that, for me who is used to C, talking about body temps of 37 makes sense to me, for me 98.6 seems completely wrong.
It all boils down to what we are used to.
It’s funny how it’s supposed to be great to measure “human temperatures”, yet 98.6 is normal and 100 is a fever.
I agree that celcius is better, but this is a terrible point. This would be a biological reaction. Different topic.
Terrible point? The body temperature is literally the upper defining point of the scale. Except that Fahrenheit chose that point to be 96, and he was still wrong.
Yes, it uses the the human body in a healthy state to determine a range of habitable temperatures. There is no math involved that is even remotely concerned with temperatures in a sick person. Not my opinion. Fahrenheit factors in general habitability, it doesn’t take into consideration something like a specific group of elderly people who’s temperature runs low due to low blood pressure.
Whoa that’s a lot of being butthurt about nothing.
I’m just saying, if you’re going to make a scale that is defined by body temperature, why tf would you make that point 98.6 or 96 instead of 100? The “you need to remember 37” argument doesn’t make much sense if you need to remember 98.6 does it?
You may be shocked to discover that we can also measure the temperature of water in F.
Your talking right and wrong is beside the point. No one scale is superior for any use, strictly speaking. The point is that 1-100 in F relates in an intuitive way to the range of human habitation. That’s a more intuitive thing to base a scale on in my opinion. Now tell me my opinion is wrong, I dare ya!
- You never mentioned this being subjective in your earlier post, it read as if you presented facts.
- C is highly intuitive, at 0 water turns to ice, at 100 it boils. Simple to understand, and just as in F you have temperature ranges that you have learned are suitable for different things.
Do you respond to everything everyone tells you with a complaint that they haven’t already told you it before? This is a discussion. I’m not defending a written doctorate thesis.
C is highly intuitive if you are a water molecule. Absolutely brilliant for those chaps. Wait… I have assumed this whole time you are human. Are you a water molecule?? You never mentioned that before!!
You brought it up in a completely irrelevant post, do you always bring uo irrelevant point in a discussion and get annoyed when people discuss your irreleveant tooic?
It is in fact getting to be a bit of a hobby to mention Fahrenheit’s good points, just to see people wet themselves and complain when their worldview shatters.
I’d much rather know if I should expect ice or wet pavement outside than whatever 1 degree F is. What’s the difference to me, functionally, between 0 and 1 degrees F?
And 100 degrees F could be a nice day or an absolute hell depending on humidity. So it’s still not useful.
You just think it makes more sense because it’s what you are used to.
I explained it in objective terms. Human habitability range. We’re in a thread about weather exceeding what humans can withstand. That point is pretty easy to remember in F, as if the scale were determined by the extremes we can withstand, a fairly relevant range, regardless of what anyone is “used to.”
Fahrenheit wanted repeatable, laboratory-friendly reference points, not abstract physics.
These were the anchor points:
- 0 °F brine ice: A mixture of ice + water + salt settles at a repeatable equilibrium temperature.
- 96 °F human body: The temperature of the human body.
They could have chosen 100 °F for the human body, but then the math works out oddly for other common calculations (e.g., the freezing point of water is ~33.33). They went with 96 because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, and 4 (perfect for halving, quartering, and thirding with 18th-century tools). This placed the freezing point of water at exactly 1/3 the way up to the top anchor of 96.
It’s a system designed for convenience with ancient tools and ways-of-life. The boiling point of water wasn’t used because it was too difficult to reliably reproduce at the time.
What stands out here is that this does not necessarily model after some kind of “habitability zone.” Such a zone is only prescribed post-hoc, with the conventional understanding of Fahrenheit -> comfortability conveniently engrained in your intuitive reflex already.
The truth is, habitability changes based on factors like humidity too. I’ve experienced 120F that wasn’t so bad, dare I say it was a “nice toasty summer.” In contrast, I’ve experienced 75F with very high humidity and I wanted to die.
I agree that Celsius’ definability and reference points are more sensible.
All I ever say on this is that F has its appeal in everyday usability terms, because of how nicely 0-100 encapsulates our comfort zone. Not that it’s designed that way, it just happens to work nicely.
And whenever I say this much, people (not you) begin screaming at me about how I need to live my life by water’s phases changes :/
Yeah. I see your point that it’s a good rule of thumb, given it should as the human body temperature sits so close to 100F and that’s upper bound used. I see your point.
Boiling water hard to reliably reproduce? What?
I like the idea that it’s hard to boil water, but easy to find a person whose body temperature is exactly the same as the reference point.
As a temperature that could be consistently referenced with then-modern technology, yeah. You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.
You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.
Uh… if you can get liquid water hotter than 100°C without adding other substances or pressure you should go claim your Nobel prize or wizard robe.
Today we casually say “100 °C at 1 atm,” but in Fahrenheit’s time, controlling or even measuring atmospheric pressure was hard. Boiling water on different days could still get different temperatures because the air pressure was different that day or at that location. They also only had alcohol-based thermometers, maybe some early mercury ones… it wasn’t easy to measure reliably.
Boiling point drops ~0.5 °C per 150 meters of elevation, or something to that effect. It was unreliable for big science when the goal is lab-friendly anchor points.
Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too. It’s really not very easy at all to get any quantity of water to 100C stably and consistently throughout. Not easy enough to be a foundational reference, with the tools of a century or two ago. Boiling is also sensitive to altitude and pressure changes, and may be shifted slightly based on the mineral content of the water. It is in fact not dead simple.
Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too.
No it won’t, who told you that? That’s not how thermodynamics works
Yes it will. Who told you it won’t? This is how thermodynamics works.
The second law?
Please explain how there can be a cold zone in boiling water, I’m dying to learn.
is that 49 wet bulb or 49 normal?
The highest wet-bulb temperature ever recorded was 36.3C according to wikipedia. So very likely not that.
To clarify, that’s outdoors. If you buy a steam combi-oven (fancy tech for food nerds), it has a wet bulb thermometer in it for cooking with steam. You can easily hit wet bulb temperatures in the 90C+ range (100C just does not work due to the lack of pressure seals).
Instant Pot could do wet bulb temps above 100C if they actually had a temperature probe inside the pot itself. They tend not to bother, for cost reasons.
I can cook 230C low steam, 130C medium steam, 100C high steam in my oven
At 230C without a sealed pressure vessel there’s no way the temperature probe is still functioning as a wet bulb thermometer. That temperature in your oven is going to be dry bulb.
A wet bulb thermometer measures the temperature with the probe completely immersed in liquid water. At 230C there won’t be any liquid water at anywhere near atmospheric pressure. 230C corresponds to a saturated steam pressure of 27 bar or 2.7MPa (391 PSI). That’s nearly 10 times the pressure in a pressure cooker at max temperature.
Well it’s EOB9S31WX I believe it’s pressure sealed because if I make fries and leave water steam is only going out when I open oven. The manual is here https://media.flixcar.com/webp/synd-asset/Electrolux-271175672-8ffb5481-853f-4c96-978a-e9d79845e09d.pdf page 16 if you’re interested.
Just for further reference, 27 bar of pressure is equivalent to 268 meters depth under the ocean. There’s no way a home oven can be built to contain that amount of pressure.
You may set your oven to 230C and put a dish of water in there, but if you placed a wireless temperature probe in the water the temperature would be at or below 100C until the water boiled away and the probe was exposed directly to air and steam. No matter how hard you tried you could not get a reading much above 100C with the probe immersed in liquid water.
Looks like those ovens have steam pump and drain pump. Interesting, how big would be device that would sustain 27 bar pressure ?
I guess not as wet bulb 35 already kills humans
That’s pretty damn hot. Around 120 F for those imperialists among us.
Dangerously hot, those are “fall and the sidewalk can burn you” temperatures.
good soldiers follow fahrenheit
It’s not that we’re not imperial, it’s just that we use very logical measuring units.
Speaking as an American mechanical engineer who had to learn both systems… Do we? Do we really? Is multiplying everything by 10 not logical enough for you?
Pretty sure they were saying where they are, outside of the US, is also imperial but uses more logical units of measure (i.e. metric). Double-negative and all that.
I assume they meant aussies. You know, the country that the article is about, that uses metric, and that celebrated their genocide day yesterday
Metric is superior for conversions.
Imperial’s basis on body parts makes for highly intuitive human-scale measurements.
I don’t spend all my time converting measurements, I guess. The 10x jump in increments sometimes leaves big gaps in usability. Centimeter level precision isn’t enough for carpentry. But I can’t read my ruler with milimeter precision unless I get out my glasses and turn all the lights on. 1/8ths of an inch are precise enough and easy to see. 🤷♂️
Damn, everything above body heat (37°C) is bad for your body.
at body heat is also bad for your body. There is no temperature difference so heat doesn’t go into/out of your body.
That heavily depends on humidity, look up wet-bulb temperature. Basically as long as humidity is low enough your body can cool down using evaporation even if the air temperature is above body temperature. Once you get close to 100% humidity you can’t really survive longer durations at temperatures above 35°C or so.
I lived in Perth for several years and I’ve seen 45 degree heat there. It’s a desert, so it’s dry heat. But that’s hot. Real hot. 49-50 is just insane.
I live in Italy, in the valley around our biggest river. It’s humid as fuck. Summers used to reach 32-35°C. Nowadays 40-45°C is not uncommon. Our offices are usually air-conditioned, but production areas aren’t.
I worked in Saudi Arabia for several years. According to the law, people working outdoors can have a break when it gets over 50. Usually, that law was actually obeyed. Hottest I ever experienced was 52. You don’t have to out in that for long in order for it to be lethal, even if, as in my case, I was running every day in the desert and somewhat acclimatized to it. I’d go at 6 AM because that’s the only time it wasn’t infernally hot. The Bedouins, who know a thing or two about surviving the local climate, would get under cover and minimize activity when it got that hot.
Now I live in southwestern England, where it seldom gets above 30. I’m fine with that.
Oh it’s nice you get a break when it hits 50. How long of a break?
Seriously the fact that we are adults and don’t just say fuck off it’s to hot and call it a day or at the very least go cool off for a hour is insane
In Texas the hottest day I remember was 46 and that was miserable.
texas is practically a desert though. if you have agaves, cactuses there its a sign.
That’s part of the state. It also has forests
yeah, it was damn near 100% humidity the 46 day i was there. i was moving, too. fucking sucked but i had the joy of knowing it was my last day in texas.
i have no idea how much water i went through, but we moved a tiny studio successfully.
It was ‘fun’ at work. We don’t have air con, just big sheds - plenty of ventilation though, it’s not still and not in the sun.
It’s workable, you’ve absolutely got to keep up with hydration, stop for a drink every ~10-15mins, keep the fan on you.
Double Wall 1L+ drink bottle is required, filled half with ice cubes to keep the water frosty.
Can’t imagine how bad it’d be if it was humid.
42-ish here in Belgrave. Current status: finished work, drinking a cold cider, then off to the pool.
Alcohol and coffee being among the drinks to avoid once we get to wet bulb territory.
Alcohol also being a drink to avoid when going to a pool.
Then why do Piña Colladas taste so great in hot weather?
Checkmate Atheists
If he’s in Belgrade, good luck getting him to give up nescafe and rakia.
Oh, yeah. Currently low humidity, though.
Wow, my tropical country often gone to 34/35°c high humid in hot days, can’t imaging anything higher than that.
in a desert, where its 0 humidity, will be very unpleasant. somewhat great for people with atopy.
