Still boggles my mind the amount of people that decided to move to Arizona without considering what it is like to live in Arizona. People that are not used to heat should think multiple times and try to live for a summer at a hot place before ever deciding to move there, as someone born and raised in the tropics, and that lived in the most arid places in South America, it's not for everyone.
I moved to AZ. I spent my first month here on a visit in July, when I could feel the heat from the asphalt through my shoes to the point is was painful after just a few minutes.
I figured if I could handle it then, the rest of the year would be great. It is, it’s basically vacation weather 7 months out of the year with multiple biomes within a 2 hour driving radius. You can literally drive an hour into a snow fall in the winter.
I grew up in humidity & constant allergies. AZ is heaven by comparison. The dry heat really is amazing for health and sinuses.
Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US. Going to be a heck of a natural experiment as it only keeps getting hotter, and how long it takes for the climate migrations to occur.
It's still quite high. I'm surprised so many people like to live in hot places. I'm told it's a "dry heat" though, so it's not as bad. You can use swamp coolers to cool down.
Hot and humid places are more uncomfortable. Houston in August is 110 F with 80+ % humidity. It's oppressively hot.
Swamp coolers are not effective during at least July-September, when the dewpoint regularly rises to 65°F+ for weeks at a time.
Drier than the south still isn't dry enough when it's 117°F with a dewpoint of 65°F. You'll end up with output temps in the high 80s (or higher), and the output air will be extremely wet.
No, but if the air is saturated with H2O then sweating doesn't work. Swamp coolers are useful up to a point; ideally they bring down the temperature until you don't sweat. If they can't, and saturate the air instead, then they're worse than nothing.
Eh, as long as California has things that destroy their homeowners like Prop 13 and Prop 103 people are going to be moving to Arizona from California.
The key to enjoying Phoenix is understanding that from October to May or so, it's basically San Diego. That's when you do all your outside stuff, you walk places, you have a great time. Then from May to October it's the surface of the sun.
Arizona is hot, no doubt about it, but the cliches about dry heat are true. I lived in Tempe for about five years. 100-110F there is pretty comfortable, so long as you can get some shade. Even 115F in the shade isn't completely overwhelming.
I also lived in the Cayman Islands for three years. 88F 88% humidity is far more uncomfortable than 110F 15% in Arizona.
The most uncomfortable places I've been are Southeast Asia and India. 95F 90% and I could barely breathe and came close to heat stroke a number of times.
Arizona summers are more tolerable to me than the tropics or the Gulf coast state summers.
> 100-110F there is pretty comfortable, so long as you can get some shade.
I agree with you there, but I'd also mention that in Phoenix, it's not the heat that will kill you, it's the sun. The deserts in Arizona and eastern California have the most intense sun in the US. If you can't find shade, for example while hiking in the desert, the climate in Phoenix is brutal.
It's also very easy to get dehydration and low blood sodium, because sweat evaporates so fast you don't even realize you're sweating.
This all makes the climate very dangerous - it's not as uncomfortable as heat with high humidity, but it will sneak up and kill you. One third of all heat related deaths in the US happen in Arizona.[1]
I’m guessing they live indoors and only go outside long enough to reach the next AC enclosure, like they do during Florida summers (aside from beachgoers).
I grew up in Phoenix. Your house is AC, and your car is in a conditioned garage. You get out of the car and feel heat for as long as it takes to walk to the grocery store or the office. Maybe a few minutes a day, total.
Adults at least. Somehow my friends and I played basketball all day. Youth is something else.
> Your house is AC, and your car is in a conditioned garage. You get out of the car and feel heat for as long as it takes to walk to the grocery store or the office. Maybe a few minutes a day, total.
A whole new level of alienation from nature... I'd go insane in a month
>> People that are not used to heat should think multiple times and try to live for a summer at a hot place before ever deciding to move there
Many of the people moving to Arizona come from the midwest where they know all about living for a summer at a hot place.
Highest dew point ever recorded in the US comes from Minnesota in the summer. The people moving from the midwest to Arizona are choosing somewhere more arid.
What they are giving up is shoveling snow, which is a heart attack waiting to happen for anyone over 50.
the heat doesn't require you to go outside and do work, the mornings are also dramatically cooler. if they were to head out for a walk at 1700 it would be dangerous, but unlike shoveling snow it is optional
> The combination of a heat wave and power outages “is the most deadly climate-related event we can imagine,” said Stone.
> He and a team of scientists explored the potential impacts of a heat wave coinciding with a multi-day outage caused by extreme weather or a cyberattack. Focusing on Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix, they looked at exposure inside people’s homes, a major driver of heat-related illness during a power outage.
> The figures were particularly stark for Phoenix. During a three to four-day heat event and outage, half the city’s population — nearly 800,000 people — would require hospital treatment for heat-related illnesses, according to the findings. More than 13,000 would die.
> A power outage in Phoenix causes a “very dramatic shift in heat illness,” Stone said, because the city’s climate is so extreme and people struggle to adapt. In an unfortunate irony, widespread air conditioning may actually make residents less resilient because they are so acclimatized to cooling in their homes and workplaces, Stone said.
Given how cheap solar is these days, enough solar as backup to run an air conditioner (and a backup air conditioner) everyone there should just have to be being prepared in that part of the world. Much like you have tornado shelters or earthquake kits, or hurricane storm windows and such.
If the 100F heat comes with very low humidity (which is what I'd expect in AZ), it'd feel nicer than the weather we get in Kansas (except maybe for this year; this year was cooler).
It does not. 40C / 104F temperatures do not feel comfortable no matter what the relative humidity is. Those are the low summer temperatures in the desert lowlands.
The fact that the heat doesn't go away even at night is another issue. If the power ever fails for vulnerable populations, they're immediately in danger. There's no reprieve of night or insulation you can use to fully mitigate those conditions.
>> 100 days of over 100F heat is going to kill you
I don't know whether you know this or not, but you don't actually have to be out in the 100F heat all day if you live in Arizona.
Somebody has to shovel the snow, though, if you live in the places people move to Arizona from. Otherwise your car can't get out of the garage. Sometimes you can't even get out of the front door.
No robots do that snow shoveling thing yet, when they do, sign me up.
That's still not going to stop the drain of people from Michigan or say upstate New York to Arizona.
The economy doesn't stop because it's hot out. People still exist outside all summer in Arizona doing construction, delivering packages, working in warehouses without climate control, living in open air prisons, etc.
I have a setup similar to this, using it about as much effort as walking a small dog.
> That's still not going to stop the drain of people from Michigan or say upstate New York to Arizona.
Good, more fresh water, natural splendor, cheap housing, mild winters[0], and beautiful fall colors for us.
[0] To be honest I’ve only even used that snow thrower maybe thrice in the past 2 years in southeast Michigan, winters are getting warmer and warmer every year it seems. The river barely even freezes any more, we had enough snow to cover the grass for maybe 2 total weeks last year.
Daily, medium effort menial labour has been shown to be a boon to longevity. Don't be afraid of exerting effort as you age, embrace it as a tool for extended health.
Not advice everyone can take, but if you are just getting old and otherwise healthy, then use it or lose it is pretty sound advice.
I injured myself as a teenager one winter in New Hampshire because I had the audacity to walk out the front door after an ice storm, slid about 5 feet, flew off the porch and then slammed on my back. It would probably kill an older person, no snow shoveling required.
> People that are not used to heat should think multiple times and try to live for a summer at a hot place before ever deciding to move there
Is there evidence of migration from Phoenix by people who moved there on account of the heat?
Like the Gulf, most of Phoenix—certainly the neighbourhoods someone out of state would be moving to—is air conditioned to a fault. Solar power is plentiful and cheap. Hell, there are tanning salons everywhere because people avoid the sun in the summer.
I've lived in Phoenix for 30 years. I had no problems with the heat until now. The heat island effect is real; it gets hotter, and stay hotter longer. I was leaving for my daily walks in summer when it dropped to 97°F at around midnight.
If you watch the radar during monsoon season, you'll see the city's heat island cuts through large storm systems like a knife through butter, so the monsoon rains rarely make it here now. With the population growth, the ozone has gotten worse in the summer and the temperature inversions trapping PM2.5 worse in the winter.
Exposure to particulates and ozone are bad for your health. I do not recommend Phoenix for these reasons.
EDIT: I wanted to add, every day I saw our poor USPS postal worker practically melting in that old contraption they call a vehicle. I hope they find a way to keep them cool soon.
Phoenix has been a concrete jungle for as long as I can remember. It’s consistently hotter than Tucson despite being 100 miles north and only 1000 feet lower in elevation.
I sometimes wonder how much the city could do to help itself by drastically changing its urban planning process.
Add trees (mesquite does well in Tucson) where possible. Cover any blacktop with solar. Use highly reflective/white paints or rock for exposed surfaces. Implement reasonable public transit… except it’s notoriously hard to design for such sprawl.
Another fun idea would be to dig deep and create large subsurface buildings to reduce AC usage.
There are so many buildings in the southwest that are built to withstand the temperature differences 100 years ago. Seems like a new standard needs to be adopted.
Unfortunately much of Phoenix is covered with a hard layer of soil known as caliche that is expensive to dig through, meaning that most houses don’t even have basements. But if it saves a lot of money on cooling it might be worth it.
Developers don't care about cost of operation, only cost to build. If there weren't efficiency rules in building codes developers would still be building houses with paper walls here for $750K.
Wonder if adding ~8 feet (a typical basement dig depth) of fill could be less expensive? After basement floor is built? Perhaps a development could be planned around this. Or, the lower floor of entire neighborhoods could be turned into basements, with stories added as desired. Areas of cities have been raised in similar manner, for different reasons, eg after a flood in Sacramento, after a fire in Seattle.
Burying a basement layer above existing grade is interesting. I hadn’t considered the possibility of backfill to create more thermal mass but it makes sense to me. It would require importing a fair amount of material though. I would need to understand where that material comes from and the overall impact it would have to do it at scale.
I agree this is the right idea, but you may have seen other commenters in this thread talking about how Phoenix is fine because you can just go from your AC car to your AC garage without having to walk in the heat. Imagine how people like this will react when you tell them they'll have to walk to a train stop!
This sounds like the DFW metroplex as well, only it's referred as a dome or cap around here. The same thing can be seen where lines of thunderstorms barrel through until it hits the metroplex. Once it hits the west side, it starts to break up, and then regain strength on the east side.
We also get the weather alerts basically saying to not breathe outside.
China has done a good job cleaning up pollution in its major cities, but it has not solved the heat problem, if anything this summer was the hottest ever in southern China.
I prefer this heuristic, since after taking the 32 difference, it’s just halving and adding 10%, which is very easily and quickly done mentally (as compared to (5/9)
Here in Brisbane we get wicked humidity, which means that even 27C can be disgusting. As a child I lived in the Wimmera, which is quite dry, and 35C was nice.
A more notable version of the same idea, which includes more unrhymed lines, is double dactyl (XXXA XXXA). Though this is more for poetry/limerick, and not for mnemonics.
> Heatwaves loom as a growing threat to humanity in a warming climate. This summer alone, in the northern hemisphere, thousands have died during extreme heat events. It's driving researchers to find out more about the point when heat turns deadly.
I really like watching Brad Lancaster in Tuscon Arizona. He's been showing how to harvest rain and plant trees in the desert. He's shown with his methods how he's able to drastically reduce the temperature in such a hot environment. Phoenix is around 500 sq miles, and I bet 95% of it is paved.
People have the wrong mindset about climate. Instead of complain that this year is the hottest year on record, they should take solace that this will be the coolest year they ever experience!
Does anyone here know why we have barely had any hurricanes or tropical storms this year despite the record heat? NOAA was expecting this to be a very active year due to the record temperatures, but it’s been extremely quiet.
> So despite the perception that this season has been slow to start, it actually has not been. In fact, 2024 is in rarefied air in terms of ACE to date. This perception might have to do with storm inflation, or the idea that we are naming more storms today than we did, say, 20 or 30 years ago. In 2020, basically the benchmark for recent historically active seasons, today marked the formation date for Hurricane Laura, the 12th named storm of the season. Here we are in 2024 sitting at five, and it’s no wonder the perception is skewed. Despite having more than twice as many storms to this point in 2020, we only had half the ACE (26 vs. 55 this year).
> We’ve had a “bang for our buck” season so far with quality storms over quantity as, say, in 2020. And while we are in a lull now, the setup is probably going to change in 7 to 10 days to allow things to crank up in September. Never call it a bust. If it is one, we can discuss why in November.
>> And while we are in a lull now, the setup is probably going to change in 7 to 10 days to allow things to crank up in September. Never call it a bust.
Check the date. This was written more than 7 to 10 days ago. It's already wrong.
If someone predicts "X will happen in the next 7 to 10 days" and 7 to 10 days later (or 15 days later, in this case), X does not happen, their prediction is not "still relevant", it's wrong.
The sources you are reading made predictions that turned out not to be true. Do you update your confidence in the sources you are reading in that case? Or do something else...
The "X" here is that "setup is probably going to change in 7 to 10 days to allow things to crank up in September", not that "we'll definitely see more cyclones in September".
You're grading a weather forecaster pass/fail on a prediction that didn't make. Which, I guess is your prerogative...
If a forecaster says that there's a 90% chance of rain and it doesn't rain, that doesn't mean they were wrong and doesn't mean that the forecast was useless.
Eh it's not that bad, lived in Phoenix for 25 years so I'm used to it... vacation weather for 7 months of the year. Great access to nature. There's always trade-offs no matter where you live.
'In a first' over what, the past 150 years? Less than that?
The hysteria about 'climate change' - when almost all frames of reference are less than 1% of mankind's existence, a time span representing .0017% of the history of the planet - really tends to reflect badly on the progenitors of said hysteria.
Spoiler alert: the micro-climate everywhere is constantly changing and has been doing so for billions of years. Places get hotter, colder, drier, wetter, more arid, more humid, and any combination of those; some places become ocean, others desert. The earth's macro-climate is also constantly changing, with or without human inputs. A few billion years ago the planet was a ball of molten lava without an atmosphere. Humans were neither the cause of that, nor the reason the earth is no longer that way.
This sort of temporally short sighted thinking and the screeching that accompanies it really is peak collective narcissism.
You're going to die in XX years but if I stab you in the heart you're going to die instantly, the result is the same, which apparently is all you care about so I assume you wouldn't mind the stabbing part, I just made it faster.
It really isn't rocket science: nature exists and influences climate, but we also exist and influence nature, hence we also influence climate, natural climate change AND human made climate change can both exist simultaneously.
Just look at the cause of regular climate change, if we influence the same variables we will get the same results ... but faster
Nobody denies the climate has always changed. The issue is with human induced climate change is the rate of change.
It’s the difference between bringing a car from 100mph to a gentle stop and slamming it into a brick wall. The rate of change we’ve introduced doesn’t give ecosystems or species the time they need to adapt.
I've got a BSc and I'm fully acquainted with the arguments for man-made climate change, as well as the proposed solutions.
Even if one concedes that the climate is 'rapidly changing' solely or primarily because of man-made action, it doesn't follow that those changes will lead to catastrophe for people everywhere, particularly those in the first world.
Having said that, Phoenix hitting 100 degrees for 100 days in a row doesn't support 'rapid climate' change occurring when the reference is the past 150 years. To put it another way, suppose the planet is warming (for whatever reason) - eventually we would get 100 days of 100 degrees in Phoenix, right? Who are you to say that it's rapid or unnatural? Cycles happen - neither of us can say this didn't also happen 500/1000/2000/10,000 years ago. I live in Melbourne and the winter we just had (here in the southern hemisphere) was the coldest I can remember. The year before was mild. Variance happens, in both the short term and the long term. Hysteria is laughable.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take care to pollute as little as is reasonably possible, but promulgating wholesale societal change is never going to get the Green left (or whatever they prefer to be called) what they want.
Not so much 'screw them' as much as pointing out that the hysteria surrounding 'climate change' is not proportional to the impact it will have on the very people who are being hysterical about it.
I'm all for trying to minimise pollution and greenhouse gases and for using renewables where it's reasonable and economically feasible. I'm not in favour of dismantling a system because of something that won't really affect my society all that much.
Comparing Melbourne's weather to global patterns is a stretch. For non-Australians, Melbourne weather is the subject of the song "Four seasons in one day".
I know subtlety is quite difficult for certain people, but you should consider the difference between narcissism and a lack of empathy. Turns out they aren't at all the same thing so it isn't even subtle.
You have a BSc, but you use the word "variance" describing Melbourne weather. Variance is a statistical measure, which you _surely_ met in your degree. What you observe in Melbourne is variation, which is a different matter all together. This strongly suggests you do not truely understand the issues, and are repeating things told to you.
Another example is where you say we know about 0.17% (or something, no tabs here) percent of Earth's history. Well, history begins about 5000yrs ago. I believe we know quite a bit about the last 5k years. We also know quite a lot about prehistoric climates - before history. We have reliable estimates of rates of change of global temperature, and of CO2 concentrations, and we have no evidence of greater rates of global warming than now.
'the fact or quality of being different, divergent, or inconsistent: her light tone was at variance with her sudden trembling.'
That is the first entry for variance; I was not referring to its technical statistical meaning (this should have been obvious).
Recorded history and history are also two very different things - surely this is also obvious. The thermometer was invented in the 1700s. It's entirely possible that the area we now call Phoenix had 100+ days of 100 degree heat multiple times over the past millennium but we wouldn't necessarily know about it.
Even by the most pessimistic projections 'climate change' (to the extent it exists) isn't going to result in catastrophe for the first world, and certainly nothing approaching an extinction event globally.
> 'climate change' (to the extent it exists) isn't going to result in catastrophe for the first world
I feel like in your mind climate change is +3 degrees on your local thermometer and you skip all the other side effects like literal billions of people migrating north because their environment literally can't support human life anymore
You went from "it doesn't exist" to "maybe it exists but it won't impact me", you took a big step already
Variance in Science is the square of the standard deviation. Since you are talking about a scientific issue, and discussing measurements, and since you claim to have a BSc it is reasonable to expect the word to be used in a technical context.
All history is recorded history BY DEFINITION.
You shouldn't be waving your degree around, you plainly are not a scientist.
As to your understanding of this, consider tossing a coin, and getting heads. For one coin it's a 1/2 chance. For 2 in a row it's 1/4. For 100 the chance is 1/(2^100) which is about 10^-30, a vanishingly small chance.
Now let's take the last 100 years of climate data from phoenix, we can estimate the chance of any day being over 100F from the data, and from that the chance of 100 days straight of over 100F.
Given that less than half of the time it's over 100F in Phoenix, the odds of having 100 days in a row over 100F is less than 10^-30.
This is 1st year science. Your very first data analysis course.
Variance as used in statistics is esoteric and technical and no reasonable person would expect it to be used as a technical or esoteric term unless the surrounding context required it. Given the generality of my original comment and the clear lack of any indication that I was using the term in its statistical sense, you are way off the mark.
Less pedantically, the problem with your example is that you have (really rather hilariously) taken the past century as your reference point, and that’s exactly (no really, EXACTLY) the problem. For all you know 1900-2000 was atypical. The fact that you couldn’t see the irony in what you were thinking before you typed it all out is telling.
Not sure what else to tell you.
You are correct that I’m not a scientist by profession, though - I have a BSc and an LLB from a G8 school. I don’t use my BSc professionally. That fact has no bearing on my ability to use words for their plain meaning, though, or to understand basic scoentific concepts.
You dragged up a sad talking point from the 1970s that not even professional climate denialists like (I can name at least four) bother with anymore. It's presented as some kind of unique fresh hot take and begs the question as to whether you're simply trolling for a reaction or are genuinely that ignorant of the debate.
It literally screams I can't be bothered making an anti-AGW case and reeks of laziness.
You do better.
Try "the urban heat island corrupt the data" or "it's the clouds, man" (a favourite of old nobel prize in semiconductor technologists that struggle to stay relevant).
Your position is boring, it's the "why worry about immigration, billions of years ago the earth was molten and there weren't even Mexicans, let alone borders or humans" of insouciance.
It's the one hand clap of the dullard too busy with their other hand.
I think it’s a fair argument that measuring temps in the middle of urban areas does not produce the most reliable data. The people saying it’s a conspiracy are clearly wrong, but the people saying the data is iron-clad and as reliable as Newton’s laws are also full of it.
I run my own weather monitoring equipment as a hobby and throw it in a time series database and see completely different results in air temperature, +/- a few degrees based on what side of the yard the measurement is taken on.
In a world where we are splitting hairs over 1-2c the microclimates present in an urban area matter. Things like reflections, landscaping, buildings, the presence or reduction of haze from local pollution and a million other factors make this data super dirty. And not only is the problem collecting reliable data in the present, but correcting data that was taken 30, 40, or 50 years ago with less sophisticated technology.
> I think it’s a fair argument that measuring temps in the middle of urban areas does not produce the most reliable data.
It was absolutely a fair point 30 odd years ago when it was first seriously raised and hammered in a number of sponsered AGW denialists blogs.
It was a serious enough point that an American climate skeptic physicists looked very hard and seriously at the data to determine if this was a valid argument against the claims of rising tempreture some 16+ years ago (IIRC). *
The result of that, and many other such studies, was that climate scientists were handling geospatial tempreture data correctly and not overweighting the tempreture of large non urban areas with readings from small constrained urban areas.
Today we are more certain given the constellation of MODIS and other satellites that continuously orbit the planet every hour and a half in precessing paths that cover the globe and return both ground level and atmosphereic depth tempreture measurements.
> I run my own weather monitoring equipment as a hobby
Good on you. I recall the instructions given to us in 1980 when setting official Bureau Met weather stations all across Australia and how to standardise and normalise instrument placement. In high school and university mathematics we also looked at the central limit theorem and the differences between single readings and pooled readings, etc.
* This was a particularly famous and well documented bit of climate debate history in the USofA theatre, I leave you to look up the details. FWiW it was "debunked" multiple earlier times, eg in Geophys Letter 1999 [1] and ranks as a standing oft repeated "climate myth" [2]
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