India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/indias-hottest-district-banda-shuts-at-10-am-as-mercury-breaches-48-degrees-celsius-mark-101779240653594.html

by rustoo • 2 months ago

119 112 2 months ago

hindustantimes.com

SilverElfin• 2 months ago

They hit 119 degrees in freedom units, for those in the US

hartator• 2 months ago

I saw 118 in Austin. 119 is hot.

big_youth• 2 months ago

Record temp in austin is 112, and that was during that 2011 heat wave.

AlfieJones• 2 months ago

In the UK we don’t get temperatures like this, but it doesn’t take much heat before parts of the country start feeling completely unprepared for it

TMWNN• 2 months ago

Because air conditioning in homes is so rare in Europe and so widespread in the US, the gap between the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns. <https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...>

z3dd• 2 months ago

the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns.

This doesn't mean much on its own. People have to die from something eventually, if someone is living a longer life due to not dying for other reasons, they get older and are more susceptible to heat.

Svip• 2 months ago

Except that source article doesn't make that claim, only number of gun deaths. The best source[1] I could find on heatwave related deaths on short notice has the following summary:

Asia observed the highest heatwave-related mortality, accounting for 47.97% (85,611 deaths) of the global excess death, followed by Europe (37.23%, 66,443 deaths), the Americas (13.15%, 23,467deaths), Africa (1.61%, 2,881 deaths), and Oceania (0.05%, 83 deaths).

That of course muddles the picture by combining both American continents, though further down it quotes 9,666 for "Northern America" in table 1; though the Europe number also includes all of Russia. Those numbers are from 2023. Additionally, Europe has more than twice the population of North America. Without doing the maths, the gap claim sound about right; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it's due to a lack of air conditioning in Europe.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...

Broken_Hippo• 2 months ago

A lot of Europe rarely has a need for air conditioning. I'm in Norway, so I'm an exception - I generally only want it a couple weeks per year, if that. It'll be more widespread here, I think, but that is more because of the popularity of heat pumps, which come with some cooling.

Further south - England and Poland and all those coastal areas - are tempered by the ocean. Summers just aren't as hot.

Even further south - Italy and Greece - air conditioning is common. You know, because it is hot there. Further south = hotter summers = air conditioning. Further north = moderate summers = little cool air needed.

imp0cat• 2 months ago

It is no longer rare. You can see the AC units popping up almost everywhere nowadays, usually together with solar panels.

globular-toast• 2 months ago

Imagine how hot it would be if everyone in Europe did have AC. The few that can't afford it would have to suffer even more.

IshKebab• 2 months ago

Yeah but it's mostly old people who are near death anyway.

_ache_2• 2 months ago

Just an opinion. There is more AC in Asia and South Asia and more heat waves related deaths.

You number, approximately right but means nothing and the link AC => Less deaths by Heat Wave isn't supported by any fact.

Others factors like percent of the population > 70y, difference between usual temp / mean temperature in an heat wave and access to fresh and clean water should be more correlated than "AC implantation per hundred inhab".

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

The biggest problem is not how the heat affects people -- that can be partially mitigated with AC, etc. -- it's how it affects crops and livestock.

msy• 2 months ago

I wonder what the wet bulb temperature is, it feels like the day when we have our first true mass casualty event (as opposed to the longer, slower crisies caused by say european heatwaves in the last decade) caused by the climate crisis is getting close.

kulahan• 2 months ago

We’re looking at an unprecedented El Niño this year - the event may be closer than we think.

recursivecaveat• 2 months ago

I plugged in the "now" (11am there) numbers for Banda from a weather site (since the humidity is higher than in the afternoon) of 37C, 52% RH, 1001 MB of pressure into the US gov's calculator: https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_rh It says 28C for wet bulb. According to wikipedia 35C is where even young and healthy people die, but 70,000 people died in Europe in 2003 from a heat wave that topped out at 28C as well.

petesergeant• 2 months ago

but 70,000 people died in Europe in 2003

People die in Thailand from the cold at 10°C. There's a strong physiological acclimatization factor, plus the way dwellings are set up to handle the heat. Which is to say wet bulb temperatures of 28°C in Europe are incomparable in terms of fatality rates to the same temperatures in central India -- perhaps that was your point.

senectus1• 2 months ago

such an underrated concern.

hendler• 2 months ago

There's some interesting, sad, but hopeful science fiction about where this is headed.

Ministry for the Future: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...

Excerpt here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-ministry-for-the-futur...

xyzsparetimexyz• 2 months ago

The only good bit of the book is that first chapter

psb52• 2 months ago

"Pouring water over transformers". Does this actually do anything?

pinkmuffinere2• 2 months ago

Depending on the humidity, yes. The evaporation will cool them down, but if it gets humid enough it stops

fulafel6• 2 months ago

if it gets humid enough it stops

It won't stop if it's ventilated with outdoor ambient air:

40C air can hold 51 g of water per m3 of air. 60C air can hold 130 g of water per m3 of air [1]. The curve is exponential.

So, it works as long as the transformer is hotter than ambient air, even at the most humidest (100% RH). The transformer's heat will drop the relative humidity of the air near its surface, and the heated air can absorb more water again.

If the humidity is below 100% RH, what changes is that the evaporating water could cool it to below ambient air temperature, same effect as in swamp coolers.

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/maximum-moisture-content-...

raverbashing• 2 months ago

Yes I mean besides the risk of arcing and getting people shocked yes it should help cooling them down (through evaporative cooling)

kranner2• 2 months ago

That's the temperature at the weather station in shade.

The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).

cyanydeez2• 2 months ago

Today, in May. I'm pretty sure its going to get much worse. How so do you think we'll find out why zuckerberg thinks he can hide away on an island when the civilization he's decided to manipulate can't sustain.

kranner2• 2 months ago

The weather in North India has been very weird this year. Normally it's pleasant in March and starts warming up in April all the way to end June. This year it got June-hot in April but then cooled down again in early May. From running ACs in April to even turning ceiling fans off for a few days in May is unheard of.

fulafel6• 2 months ago

Humanity needs to be in a serious hurry to ramp down fossil fuel use and production to curb the megadeaths. Eg the US has been going in the opposite direction for a while, net exporter of oil since 2021.

rapsey6• 2 months ago

If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.

psb52• 2 months ago

Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.

sevenzero5• 2 months ago

Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.

f_allwein• 2 months ago

No.

Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc

ZeroGravitas5• 2 months ago

Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output.

They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster.

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.

fulafel6• 2 months ago

The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale.

We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.

Mashimo3• 2 months ago

germany now using huge amounts of coal.

I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/...

Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph.

Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.

sevenzero5• 2 months ago

Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel use right now it would be too little too late. We will witness water wars and mass migrations on a scale never seen before. We are very close to the RCP8.5 worst case scenario (not fully there yet) but you better make sure you enjoy your life while its still possible within this and the next few decades.

thinking_cactus• 2 months ago

No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.

From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.

Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.

Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.

fulafel6• 2 months ago

It won't be too little, it's still saving more people than died in wars and famines in the last 100 years.

I don't really understand this "too late" failure of judgement unless you're assuming there's some end of the world style event coming no matter what we do.

No, it's just enormous amounts of death and suffering proportional to the amount of oil and gas and coal we keep burning and digging up every day.

SupremumLimit• 2 months ago

This is a severely outdated view. Based on current policies, we're heading for something like 2.6 degrees of warming which I think is somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. It's still bad but nowhere close to RCP8.5 so your comment is indeed unhelpful doomerism. (RCP scenarios themselves are outdated and have been replaced by "socio-economic pathways" - SSP).

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/

bryanlarsen2• 2 months ago

Water wars? Desalination plants cost hundreds of millions. Wars cost trillions. We'll get water violence and water tyranny, but water wars are an idiotic idea. Most wars are idiotic ideas so we might still get one, but water will be just an invalid excuse.

31carmichael• 2 months ago

I'm already hiding under the bed.

kaliqt• 2 months ago

This has nothing to do with that.

gherkinnn• 2 months ago

Drill baby drill.

And to lighten the mood, the US has more yoga teachers than coal miners:

https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...

Someone2• 2 months ago

Makes sense. Coal mining can be automated, and that has been partly done. If coal mining still would be done mostly manually, there would be way more coal miners, or, more likely, coal mining would be unprofitable, and be a thing of the past,

Yoga teaching hasn’t been automated yet, and may never (a startup using robots to give yoga classes likely would be a hit on social media, and might initially be successful, but I am not sure that would last)

snapplebobapple• 2 months ago

Nah, needs to be in a hurry to develop much more efficient and cheaper ac and food crops that handle extremes better perhaps, but no hurry to curb oil use until an actually better product comes along. It is uncertain if actually better product will be much cheaper batteries to make renewables actually work or government getting out of the way so nuclear can actually innovate a cheaper default design but i hope its both and quickly.

belorn2• 2 months ago

Given the recent activity in the middle east, production is ramping down. There has never been clearer, both in terms of climate and national stability, that fossil fuels need to be removed from the grid and the transportation sector.

In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green".

In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric.

On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme).

This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs).

If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.

lopsotronic• 2 months ago

Far too late for that. It's going to take big industrial solutions, like the "L1 Space Parasol" (scary, better)[0] or the "Superdust Chemical Injection into the Upper Atmosphere" (less scary, dumber[1]). Or some scary bioengineering, which might be even dumber-er.

Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way.

The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great.

It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end.

[0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here.

[1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"

nomilk• 2 months ago

Wonder how much the removal of trees and bitumening/concreting of surface areas contributes to radiative heating from the sun which then increases the temp of surrounding air, especially on still days.

bob1029• 2 months ago

The Houston metroplex might be one of the best domestic examples of the urban heat island effect. They've got their own entire website about it. If you overlay the daily temperature curve of 77002 with any zip outside the beltway, the difference is incredible. The increased HVAC demand further compounds everything. Downtown Houston is truly hell during the hottest summer months. It can be 4am and your ac condenser will still be throwing the high pressure cutout switch.

https://www.h3at.org/

metalman• 2 months ago

The sattelite feed I use has an infrared channel, and Houston's ring and web road structure stands out from geocyncronous orbit, whereas Mexico city is invisible, hot but not like the heat island effect of what must be one of the greatest amounts of concrete on the planet.

https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/

alphabeta3r56• 2 months ago

In this specific case, the city is essentially bordering a desert.

nirui• 2 months ago

Extended read: A Super El Niño Is Increasingly Likely, And It Could Be Record Strong (https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2026-05-07-super-el-ni...)

If true, this summer and maybe winter maybe brutal.

leosanchez• 2 months ago

Currently living in Southern India. The heat is unbearable.

pickleglitch• 2 months ago

I expect at some point in my lifetime there will be places near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable by climate change. There will be a climate refugee crisis. The future is looking bleak.

OptionOfT• 2 months ago

As someone who lives in Phoenix, the 48C mark doesn't matter unless we know the humidity...

115C with 10% humidity (71.66F wet bulb) here is hot, but as long as you have water, you're better off here than in Florida with 85F at 90% humidity (87.46F wet bulb).

India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark

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