A simple mistake that stuffed up world temperature records for 90 years

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/global-temperature-record-mistake/100244736

by adrian_mrd • 5 years ago

140 134 5 years ago

abc.net.au

dpkingma2• 5 years ago

Death Valley prides itself on being the hottest place on earth, based on the temperature record of 54.0 °C (air temp at 1.5m).

However, DV does not come out on top when looking at temperatures measured by satellites (EDIT: ground temperature, and less reliable.) From Wikipedia [1]: "The highest recorded temperature taken by a satellite is 66.8 °C (152.2 °F), which was measured in the Flaming Mountains of China in 2008. Other satellite measurements of ground temperature taken between 2003 and 2009, taken with the MODIS infrared spectroradiometer on the Aqua satellite, found a maximum temperature of 70.7 °C (159.3 °F), which was recorded in 2005 in the Lut Desert, Iran. The Lut Desert was also found to have the highest maximum temperature in 5 of the 7 years measured (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009). These measurements reflect averages over a large region and so are lower than the maximum point surface temperature." According to [2], the record is 80.8 °C at Lut Desert.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o... [2] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/aop/BAMS-D-2...

jandrese3• 5 years ago

Death Valley: The hottest place on Earth where people can survive long enough to keep a temperature station manned.

I am confused how 66.8C can be "the highest recorded temperature taken by a satellite", while the Aqua satellite found a maximum temperature of 80.8C.

phaemon2• 5 years ago

Imagine I was measuring the temperature in your home. I measured above your grill. Is that a good average for your home temperature?

bcrosby95• 5 years ago

You're comparing apples to oranges though. The 54.0 reading in Death Valley was measuring the temperature of the air - in particular, 1.5 meters above the ground. Satellites measure ground temperature - as in, temperature at the ground. Lots of things can affect ground temperature.

dpkingma2• 5 years ago

True, edited original comment to reflect this.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

You're comparing apples to oranges though. The 54.0 reading in Death Valley was measuring the temperature of the air - in particular, 1.5 meters above the ground. Satellites measure ground temperature - as in, temperature at the ground. Lots of things can affect ground temperature.

Exactly. I have a radio thermometer in my attic whose readings max out at 140°F. During the summer it's regularly maxed out, so the actual air temp is hotter still (and the actual surface temp of the roof must be even hotter than that). Outside air temp is nowhere near any of those temps.

albertgoeswoof• 5 years ago

I found it absolutely shocking that Furnace Creek has a (well-watered) golf course and a whole bunch of air conditioned hotel rooms, despite being in a clearly inhabitable location. Exiting a fully air conditioned room at 20 degrees into 45+ degrees heat feels like literally like opening a furnace door. The sheer waste of energy to keep that hotel cooled down to those temperatures and golf-course playable year-round is just ridiculous.

LeoPanthera4• 5 years ago

It might be a "waste" but it doesn't have to be damaging. Air conditioners (a special case of heat pumps) are extremely efficient and could easily be powered from a solar array. The hottest places in the world tend not to be short of sunlight.

Where they get the water from is another matter though. I always wondered how much you could scale up Air Well technology, which condenses water out of the air. I suspect the places that have lots of sunlight also don't have a lot of humidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)

thomasahle• 5 years ago

According to [1] Air conditioners use about 6% of all the electricity produced in the United States.

I guess that's less than I had imagined. And apparently it's not just because northern houses don't have AC, since apparently [2] 87% of houses do.

Edit: Then again a lot of energy is used by industry, so maybe 6% used by residential air conditioning is a lot. [3] suggest 17% of residential energy is AC.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling-systems/air-... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/air... [3]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Solar arrays you install in such an area can power useful activity elsewhere - and its not like we're at 100% renewable energy everywhere to obviate this. So The waste of energy _is_ damaging.

chemeng2• 5 years ago

Agree with your points. Also, your comment reminded me that habitable, unhabitable, inhabitable, uninhabitable, is one of the most confusing situations in the english language.

spidersouris• 5 years ago

Habitable and inhabitable mean the same, don't they? It's likely inflammable and flammable. Unhabitable doesn't exist though.

samatman• 5 years ago

I have more respect for that than I do for, say, Phoenix AZ.

It's quite the stunt to make a habitable vacation spot in the hottest place on Earth. There's only one Death Valley, and people want to see it. The golf course is... kinda pushing it, yeah, but I have respect for the sheer human ingenuity it takes to do something like that.

Phoenix is more of a case of putting a bunch of people where a bunch of people probably shouldn't be. It can probably be made energy-independent, there is a lot of sun to be harvested, but water is a different story.

tl;dr scale matters.

Pokepokalypse• 5 years ago

to be fair; Phoenix has (had) quite a bit of its own water via the Salt River. And there was also quite a lot of ground water (which is nearing depletion now). The controversial bit is that Phoenix also ties in to the Colorado River system, via canals, and THAT is consuming far more water than can be sustained. Most of it for growing crops (not sustaining the massive population) - and I think that if the current drought situation continues, they're going to have to stop growing cotton and lettuce out here. Which . . . is fine.

Sniffnoy• 5 years ago

Nitpick, you mean "uninhabitable". I think the reversal here might confuse some people.

rsync• 5 years ago

"The sheer waste of energy to keep that hotel cooled down to those temperatures and golf-course playable year-round is just ridiculous."

A similar temperature differential exists in Minnesota and Wisconsin (and elsewhere in the US) for months in the wintertime.

Unlike air-conditioning which can be powered by solar and wind produced electricity, most heating is done by directly burning fossil fuels on-site.

I think we should all be very cautious with our energy scorekeeping ...

aksss• 5 years ago

I agree with you about scorekeeping, but you did a weird comparison in your sentence about heating/cooling. You compared the potential of one with the reality of another. As in, AC can be powered by [renewable] electricity, but that most heating is [powered] by burning fossil fuels. It might be reasonable to ask how much AC actually is powered by renewables vs fossil fuels. Heating can also be done electrically, and therefore could be done with renewables. We all know that it's hella expensive at present to heat with electricity compared to natural gas, propane, or even wood in some places (at present).

ffffwe3rq352y3• 5 years ago

The only problem I have is that its in a national park. I feel like parks should be for everyone but the renting a room is really expensive so you have to be mostly well off to get one. I guess it feels like an eyesore that richer people can use while everyone else is forced to camp.

hartator• 5 years ago

The sheer waste of energy to keep that hotel cooled down to those temperatures

Actually warming up cold places in winter is more energy intensive than cooling down hot places. Nordic countries should not exist by that logic.

mistrial9• 5 years ago

I have to deeply question this.. it might take some research..

fouric• 5 years ago

This is false. Heat is an incredibly common type of waste energy, and far more common than waste "cold" (if such a thing exists at all), so most (if not all) heating devices are more efficient than cooling devices.

Furthermore, heat is related to entropy, which in a closed system can only increase. We have many devices that can generate heat where there was none previously (e.g. resistive heating elements) but none that can destroy heat, only shuffle it around somewhere else.

rootusrootus8• 5 years ago

According to this [0], the water comes from a natural spring. The electricity could be generated on site with solar panels. Doesn't seem that outlandish to me.

[0] https://www.greenlodgingnews.com/how-xanterras-furnace-creek....

rurp• 5 years ago

It's not readily apparent but pulling water out of the regular ecosystem in a desert environment like this is crushing to the local wildlife population. I spend a lot of time in the desert in this part of the country and it's tragic how many springs are dry these days due in large part to ground and spring water being taken for things like this golf course. I absolutely think that having a golf course like this is a terrible waste.

Not to mention that this is in a National Park; a place whose ostensible purpose is to protect and preserve nature! If you try camping outside of an official campground there (something totally fine and legal on the vast majority of public land) you'll get kicked out with a ticket. Meanwhile that same park is making a hard life even harder for local endangered plants and animals.

vondur2• 5 years ago

This is Las Vegas every summer. Out of a cooler, into an oven door being opened.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

King of the Hill:

Bobby: "111 degrees? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it? Oh my god, it's like standing on the sun!"
Peggy: "This city should not exist — it is a monument to man's arrogance."

okareaman• 5 years ago

Let me tell you about a place called Las Vegas

pnexk• 5 years ago

s0rce• 5 years ago

AC uses less energy than heating in very cold places. Cooling from 120F to 70F is a 50F delta. Warming from -30F to 70F is 100F.

robszumski• 5 years ago

I stayed for a night at Furnace Creek and it was "air conditioned" and the cold water was "cold". They're not cranking the industrial ACs here, it's just enough to be on the bearable end of the range for tourists that are not used to the heat. Air temp was 116 at the official station.

kevinpet• 5 years ago

This is a good illustration of a principle that when your sample contains the most extreme events you will find that measurement errors make up a much larger fraction of them than you would expect.

treeman79• 5 years ago

How about when gravity and earth spin are sufficient to affect world records.

https://xkcd.com/852/

sgt• 5 years ago

"Stuffed up" - had to be an Australian news article

DoreenMichele4• 5 years ago

I used to live just south of Death Valley. One summer, it was up around 115F every day for two weeks straight in July.

An occasional spike in temps to that level was not a big deal. The houses were built to some degree for that environment and had , for example, narrow windows with some kind of architectural detail I've never seen elsewhere that helped shade the windows.

But after days and days of such temperatures, the AC blowing cold air felt like a joke. The walls were hot. The floor was hot. The couch was hot.

You learn to eat different and live different in an environment like that. You make sure you get enough to drink. You teach the kids to stay hydrated. You teach everyone the importance of electrolytes.

I went for walks for exercise after dark when the temp dropped to 99F. There was precious little shade and I sunburned easily which is another serious health threat on top of the risk of heat prostration.

Desert cities of old were built to keep things tolerable at street level. City location was chosen for ability to mitigate the heat, typically a plateau a little above the surrounding terrain. Streets were oriented to maximize the cooling effect of prevailing winds. Buildings were designed to reflect heat rather than soak it up, among other things.

Humans used to work out in the weather much more consistently than we do these days and tended to primarily get around on foot. Now, we go from home to car to office to car to store to car, etc. We don't have the same relationship to the weather and we seem to have forgotten how to live with weather.

At least in the US. Maybe other places are a bit better about such things.

barrkel• 5 years ago

Houses - and especially high rise developments - are increasingly built according to global fashions or individualistic whims, divorced from regional styles which evolved with the local climate and available materials.

DoreenMichele4• 5 years ago

regional styles which evolved with the local climate and available materials.

That's often called vernacular architecture and it typically innately includes elements of passive solar design. Such building styles were well-suited to local climate with a minimum of energy-intensive cooling or heating because people simply couldn't afford it.

Additionally, we had cultural practices rooted in staying adequately warm or cool without counting on an HVAC system:

Tapestries on castle walls blocked drafts and provided insulation.

A "three dog night" was a night so cold, the upper classes let three of their large hunting dogs sleep with them to stay warm.

Siestas were naps taken during the hottest part of the day in place of working in the heat.

Buildings routinely had windows positioned to create a cross breeze if you opened them.

Windows routinely were positioned to provide adequate light for essential tasks without having to turn on any lights during the day.

Etc.

Now we build some awful little cardboard box and slap an HVAC system on it as if tech makes up for bad design. It doesn't.

atatatat2• 5 years ago

Is this why household mold is on an epidemic level rise?

fy20• 5 years ago

Well in a way houses are still built for the local climate, but the local climate has abundant cheap energy.

Building houses to be better insulated and able to tolerate extreme temperature events with just minor discomfort is possible[0], but it is also more expensive. If you spend $50,000 more to insulate a house to tolerate this, and it reduces the energy costs by $1,200/year, then financially it's not worth it [1]. Of course for the environment that's a big difference, but capitalism :-)

[0] I live in Northern Europe, in a house built to our pretty strict building standards, and we don't even turn on the heating until it goes below freezing outside. Yesterday we had highs of 32C (90F) - which is hot for here - and I was out so the AC was off. When I came home in the afternoon, our living room which directly faces south and has no shade other than decorative blinds was... 25C (77F).

[1] Average stock market returns over the last century are around 10% per year. Even if you conservatively half that, it still doesn't work out.

leephillips• 5 years ago

“in houses that look toward the south, the sun penetrates the portico in winter, while in summer the path of the sun is right over our heads, and above the roof, so that there is shade.”

That is Socrates himself, explaining the advantageous way to orient houses. The Greeks paid special attention to this during their energy crisis, when they had burned the available forest and the citizens were eyeing the olive groves.

magicalhippo2• 5 years ago

This reminds me of a story my dad used to tell. A friend of him was tasked by the wildlife protection agency to count the grouse population in the county every year.

What he did was to walk a given path through the mountains at the same time each year, and count how many grouse he saw along the way. This was then used by the agency to estimate the population.

One year he was unavailable, and as such he asked his friend to do it. He instructed him on the path, how to count and all that.

Later that year the local paper's headline stated "Dramatic increase in grouse population!"

Turned out his buddy didn't bother to do the long walk, and instead just came up with a number he submitted to the agency.

m-ee• 5 years ago

In high school we were supposed to do a similar project about squirrel populations. We got lazy, stopped doing the walks and just submitted numbers similar to the team that had done the same project the year before. I mention this to one of those older students at a party and he tells me they did the same thing.

magicalhippo2• 5 years ago

Heh yeah I can imagine. Big difference was that the grouse count was used to set the hunting quota...

stakkur• 5 years ago

We live in spaceships, hooked up to life support. Skyscrapers are nothing but sealed spaceships pumping in air and water and pumping out waste. Same for most homes.

lovecg• 5 years ago

I do like the idea of ground source heat pumps. If we all lived in caves hundreds of feet deep, the temperature would be near perfect year around. In a way, the heat pump “brings the cave to the surface”. There’s something very satisfying about this design, we’re not using technology to insulate ourselves from the Earth — we’re working directly with it.

legostormtroopr• 5 years ago

I am uncomfortable with historical meteorological revision. There is enough problem with climate change non-believers that retroactive "adjustment" of historical weather records is only going to fuel conspiracy theories - especially when they are adjusted down. There is more than enough evidence of climate change without revising past records - so why do it?

Especially given that this record requires that an un-identified person may have possibly made an error reading a thermometer. The evidence that this value is wrong is lacking.

AbrahamParangi2• 5 years ago

Personally, I think worrying about optics does more damage to the optics of science than not.

rytcio• 5 years ago

retroactive "adjustment" of historical weather records

Then maybe it's not a conspiracy theory?

A simple mistake that stuffed up world temperature records for 90 years

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