...and before the rest of you jump in saying this is regular in your country, please note that it is NOT regular here in the UK. Today, the UK has seen the highest temperature in ITS recorded history.
I saw the second video yesterday, but I found it interesting when watching it, because I also was looking at Google Maps to see where it was.
https://youtu.be/TjBV4R18ICY?t=255 (4m15 on your [1]) shows a lot of destroyed buildings and we're left to imagine that these are houses as it later cuts to images of houses and fire engines. But actually, if you look on Google Maps, you can see that it's actually a fireworks factory, a fairly important detail that was missed out.
Oh good find. I know nothing about the history of the fireworks factory, but assumed it was still in use if it's labelled on Google Maps. It seemed likely that with such a use, this area would in fact be at higher risk than the surrounding grassland, and I wondered if maybe that was the source of the initial fire.
And yes, I had seen later footage of actual houses destroyed, and it wasn't my intention to take away from that, I just saw something that seemed interesting and overlooked. But, if the site has been abandoned for half a century, that is unlikely, so my speculation is moot.
But a lawn fire is not directly temperature related, is it? I suspect the grass has dried from lack of rain, such that some small spark that would ordinarily have fizzled has taken hold.
As a former wildland fire fighter, I can assure you that temperature (and wind and relative humidity) have a HUGE effect on fire behavior. Furthermore temperature and relative humidity (not so much wind) have a huge impact on ignition. My training emphasized this quite heavily, but I thought the effect was exaggerated until I experienced it first hand.
In the Western US, construction, mining, forestry, etc. industries are well aware of the fire risk from routine work (construction equipment, off road vehicle traffic, chain saw work, etc.). In "red flag" conditions, there are fire watch policies. For example in forestry work, my crew would have to cease chain saw work late in the morning and stand a fire watch for 30 minutes before leaving the work site.
So as I watch the news about these fires, my first thought is ignitions: routine activities (parking a vehicle on grass, driving construction equipment, discarding a cigarette) that would be unlikely to cause a fire in normal (backward looking) UK weather conditions. My next thought is that once a fire has started, it is likely to burn hot and fast. Hotter and faster than I suspect fire fighters in London are accustomed to.
As an aside, I have been trying to figure out a good source for weather data. I see plenty of sources for temperature, but I am curious about the wind speeds and relative humidity. From the photos I am seeing, it looks like wind speeds are over 10 mph.
In Australia during droughts there are reminders to not throw cigarette butts out the window of cars.
Lightning also plays a large role in starting fires, but I also recall, as a child, being told that rubbish (litter) such as bottles and cans can reflect the harsh sunlight in a focused way and cause an ember.
I recall not buying a diesel mazda car because it had a disclaimer about not parking on long grass because of the danger of starting a fire. Apparently, mazda finally made it to recall status:
It was very strange this afternoon to have such a strong wind (29mph here, not in London) that was so hot (39C) I have never felt anything like it in the UK, it was like standing in front of a giant hairdryer.
We felt the same in the Peak District. Hot wind blowing. Then a little after the heatwave Peak it suddenly flipped to “cold, regular” wind. Surreal experience.
> But a lawn fire is not directly temperature related, is it?
The rate of evaporation is directly related to the temperature. Even ignoring additional factors affecting evaporation like wind and topographic variance in dryness, the vapor pressure of water (the biggest contributor to evaporation rate) at 40C is an order of magnitude higher than it is at 20C:
Sufficient subsequent days of high heat and low humidity will dry out a lawn very quickly, as grass is a plant that is not adapted to retain moisture very well.
With hot/dry enough conditions for a sufficient period of time and a bit of kinetic energy in the form of wind, grass that isn't watered quickly becomes flammable, which is why it is usually where large fires first take hold.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Weather patterns like droughts are exacerbated by climate change. Heat waves are known to make it easier for fires to catch and spread. Heat waves are more common now due to climate change. Thus climate change makes fires more likely/common. It’s pretty straightforward.
Yeah the jet stream is clearly slowing down because the temperature difference with the arctic is lower than before. But to be honest I don’t care much about my karma here. Thanks for the nice answer in any case
That’s a good point though. Many tell lobbies are at work, but I think many people can’t take such a harsh change, and I can understand that. We have to focus on changing step by step. The level at which renewables are taking over in many countries is giving me hope.
The ‘lawn fire’ that burned a village today started in a compost heap. Heat was categorically a factor.
Together with the heat the compost pile spontaneously ignited. They went to get a hose to douse the smolder, but by the time they got back wind blew embers into dry grass, and woosh.
A rare combination of events can cause a compost pile to catch fire. These all must be met before the occasion arises.
- The first is dry, unattended material with pockets of debris mixed throughout that aren’t uniform.
- Next, the pile must be large and insulated with limited airflow.
- And, finally, improper moisture distribution throughout the pile.
Key to preventing any issues is proper maintenance of your organic matter to prevent hot compost bins or piles.
While the right wing media in the UK ignored the climate crisis in their coverage and instead focused on the “positive” side with front pages full of children eating ice cream and people at the beach.
It really isn’t. People commonly think that the climate warming by a degree means that the weather warms up by a degree.
However, there’s a good 100 miles of air above us, and that mass of air warming by a degree means that it can now retain a LOT more humidity before it starts precipitating as rain.
This means coastal areas get drier and hotter, while mountaineous areas get much more rainfall (and more of it as water instead of snow), as well as flooding, mudslides, etc.
The automated weather broadcast at Yuma airport in Arizona reports the runway temperature. Yuma is a joint civilian/military use airport and some fast jets have a surface temperature limit for their tires. I was there doing some flight test work once and it was reporting 160F, it wasn't even a super hot day.
> The rate at which an object can reflect solar radiation is called its albedo [source: Budikova]. The bigger the albedo something has, the better it reflects radiation. Traditional asphalt has a low albedo, which means it reflects radiation poorly and instead absorbs it.
Asphalt has an albedo of ~0.05 - which means it absorbs ~95% of solar radiation. Tarmac is ~0.1 - which means ~90%.
I didn't know there was a difference between the two!
> Asphalt is a mixture of aggregates and bitumen that needs up to two days before it completely cures. Whereas, Tarmac is a combination of crushed stone and tar that cures quickly.
Can you clarify how night cloud cover factors in? Do clouds really substantially reduce the radiative cooling capacity? Is that by functionally reflecting radiation back at the source (the earth)?
Broadly yes. It's why deserts have such extreme temperature fluctuations between day and night. No clouds are part of the reason, as well as very little humidity to serve the same heat-retaining/heat-reflecting role.
On my first time in the Nevada desert I was astonished to find that I needed a jacket at dawn to stay warm, after all kinds of daytime heat. Looking at Elko NV's weather this week, it's got highs of 99F/37C and overnight lows of 61F/16C
37C high earlier today and 16C low later tonight are coincidentally the exact numbers for my city in the UK. Which isn't of course anything like a desert, though the whole country is in the middle of a heatwave (and last night didn't drop below 20c).
Radiation is a function of the temperature delta between two points.
The sky around where clouds are might be around -20C, while outer space is at -273C or so, so you get much more radiative heat loss in the latter state (clear sky).
(This is also why you’ll see gardeners try to cover their plants when there’s a “frost warning” even though the temperatures won’t be going below freezing).
And from the opposite perspective, the sun is really far away but incredibly hot, so it transfers heat to us, and more as you get closer (and less as you get further away).
Actually saw it mentioned that albedo isn't directly connected to colour (and in particular since it's thermal radiation it'll be towards the IR side of the spectrum) there might be alternatives to "nuke flash white" paint colour.
It's only directly related in the visible spectrum, which is a slice that contains around 50% of the spectrum that the sun throws out, by energy. I would imagine the actual color would be something near orange.
I'm not sure that's true? Maybe it depends on the location but LHR is asphalt, CDG is asphalt, AMS is asphalt, YYZ is asphalt... Only when you look at hotter climates do concrete runways appear common.
The most cost effective mirrors to cover a large fraction of the Earth and reflect back the sun's heat are... the polar ice caps. Which we are melting because of climate change.
This is one of the main reasons people are so worried about it being "too late" to fix climate change. There are positive feedback loops like this where a little increased heat causes even more rise in temperature.
Practically, high albedo materials (essentially they reflect a lot of light but aren't necessarily mirrors because they do scatter the direction of that light) can reduce building's HVAC energy consumption. They can also effect city level microclimate (mitigating the heat island effect).
It takes a lot of high albedo area to effect the overall climate. For example, melting ice caps do decrease the albedo of parts of the Earth, accelerating climate change. Large scale increases to Earth's albedo in the form of space mirrors were seriously considered as options for global warming mitigation as late as the Obama administration. However, the risks of unintended modifications to the environment (e.g. crop failures, unpredictable weather) are generally considered too great. At present, space mirrors, with an estimated lifetime cost of $5 trillion for 50 years of cooling, could be a decent "last resort" option compared to the possibility of spending hundreds of trillions upfront to permanently solve the problem with carbon capture (although cost estimates vary widely based on the amount of CO2 that needs to be captured).
Other options include stratospheric aerosol injection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...) which could minimize the effects of climate change for as little as $55 billion/year, and marine cloud brightening (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening), which could cost as little as $5 billion/year. Possible side effects might include ozone depletion and acid rain for aerosols. Marine cloud brightening could cause weather changes.
So yes, you could manipulate albedo but it will always come with side effects and costs.
Some of the side effects are common to all kinds of solar radiation management (SRM) - geoengineering that makes the Earth more reflective in some way or another.
Greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation emitted by the Earth and heat the atmosphere as well as the surface. SRM geoengineering just changes how much energy the Earth absorbs from the sun (which has the strongest effect at the surface).
If GHGs increase, but you use SRM to keep the surface temperature fixed, you still end up heating the atmosphere. This means in a geoengineered world, you have less rain.
A reduction in rain might be more important to some countries than others - not everyone would want the same amount of geoengineering.
Yes, in other words: the darker a thing is, the darker it is. Is someone here actually suprised by the everyday phenomenon that dark objects get hotter than light-colored ones?
(Edit: I apologize for the uncalled for smugness. But "albedo" is not some special physical quantity, it's literally a measure of how light/dark colored a material is. "Alba" is Latin for "white". Although granted, albedo is usually measured across the whole spectrum, not only the visible part.)
Not necessarily true. It depends on the object's optical properties.
I well remember working on my parents' car in Phoenix summers. The chromed wrenches on our driveway surface got to instant-blister temperatures. Tools with black surfaces were uncomfortable to pick up, but were usable.
The chromed tools had a lower absorption of sunlight than the black tools, but their IR radiation coefficient was even lower. So equilibrium temperature (at which radiated energy = incident energy) was much higher for the chromed tools.
But according to GP's numbers, tarmac is less dark than asphalt so should get less hot than asphalt. But those numbers are suspect and probably only refer to very fresh asphalt/tarmac; the albedo aka "lightness" of worn asphalt is something like 0.3.
With a clear sky, you're radiating (based on your own temperature) out to the blackness of space, which is radiating back at 4 Kelvin. Which is to say, it's contributing basically nothing. You're just giving up heat to the cosmos.
With a cloudy sky, you're radiating (based on your own temperature) out to the bottoms of the clouds, which are reflecting your radiation back to someone else on the ground, and their own heat is reflecting back to you. And such. The cloud looks white in the daytime because it's very reflective, so it acts like a mylar blanket to hold the heat in.
> At night, when cloud coverage increases, downwelling infrared radiation also increases. So, clouds act like space heaters, emitting energy towards the ground. Blankets only limit the transfer of heat energy away from your skin(convection).
I live near a grape growing are, and they have wind turbines to blow air on cool nights slightly above freezing because the radiation from the ground to to sky can be enough to frost-damage their crops.
So they turn them on the blow the stagnant warmer ambient air around and mitigate that.
The difference between "not surprised" and "understand why" is vast. For example we (humanity) still don't understand _why_ gravity works despite not being surprised by its existence.
Yes, but GP's quote was not an explanation, it was literally saying that "light objects reflect more light". Albedo literally means "whiteness" ie. how light something is.
> Traditional asphalt has a low albedo, which means it reflects radiation poorly and instead absorbs it
Seems like a pretty good high level explanation of why that matters. Darker objects absorb energy instead of reflecting it. I'm sure there's more to it than that when you get into details.
Luton is all asphalt. The long runway at Yuma is concrete and the shorter ones are part asphalt part concrete. And they likely chose the asphalt formulation appropriately given that they’re in the middle of a desert.
I would expect their asphalt being a lot harder and more heat resistant than the one that let my motorcycle fall multiple times in the past years because it melt during summer heat. I clearly wouldn't expect airplanes wheels to "sink" into asphalt like my bike stand, but they need a strong grip when braking during landings which I doubt a much softer surface would offer. Not an expert though, just speculating.
You're right of course, what I wondered was if the asphalt could become so soft that it loses consistency; some of it surely adheres to the tires, but what if it would do that by detaching from the runway?
However, I'm certainly biased for having seen asphalt so softened by summer heat that I could leave my tracks just by walking on it.
Have Yuma temperatures actually changed that much? A quick check suggests that the level of change is much smaller than that in the UK. Climate change has increased the extremes in the UK quite significantly in the last 40 years. It's a case that the changes in extremes are not accounted for in UK planning whereas Yuma is known to be consistently very hot.
I buy the 71 C ground temperature; ground temperatures can be 25-35 C hotter than the ambient air temperature, which is what gets recorded. This is also why rails buckle more than you'd expect: on a 40 C day, you're likely to see the rails heating up to 60-65 (as in, if you touch them, your finger will burn).
Also I'm sorry but the UK bloody loves a bit of weather melodrama. Climate change is a big problem but the specific effect of it on the UK in particular has honestly not been very bad at all yet. Tarmac has been melting in the heat here longer than I've been alive, which makes me suspect we use weak, crappy British tarmac. This was a little bit hotter than previous heatwaves, which is bad, but felt about the same and has also been really short - not sure what to make of that. However we scarcely get a weekend here without some "most (x) ever in (y)" fuss and haven't in 40 years which is really getting quite tiresome and making it harder to respect the real problems. I'll worry about it when I'm done drinking gin in the rain.
Not just the UK. It's been over 100º a lot of days here in Texas, and people from other places in the U.S. keep asking me how it feels, like it's a brand new and shocking experience. But from a perceptual perspective, it's normal. My perceiving brain doesn't do sophisticated statistics. It isn't a scientist. My brain's reaction to 100º+ weather is, well, this sucks but it's a familiar, age-old kind of suck. I spent time outdoors in 100+º weather every summer growing up, so I just don't make a gut connection between a string of hot days and my sense of fear and urgency about global warming.
> really getting quite tiresome and making it harder to respect the real problems
I agree that it trivializes and undermines the real problem of global warming. People have this false implicit assumption that if global warming is real it must be possible to immediately perceive it, and instead of challenging that, we keep trying to inject drama and danger into familiar experiences, and it just rings false. On a subconscious level, I suspect we all know it's silly. Also, what happens if it's not this hot next year? After spending 2022 essentially telling people that they can directly perceive global climate trends by walking outside, what will they think if the summer of 2023 is relatively cool?
I'm probably wrong, I'm not an expert in public opinion, it just feels false.
The hottest temperature ever recorded here isn't some niche thing like most rainy April for 5 years. Also maybe the fact that there's constantly new unusual weather should tell us something.
To be clear they are talking about the air temperature rather than runway temperature and I've added the latitude so you can understand why it's a big deal that London has hit 40 degrees.
That’s weird, some cursory searches show a definite upward trend for quite some time, i do find these weird sites where they consistently pick outliers in a dishonest manner. It really wouldn’t be worth engaging with them though
The Phoenix airport has to close down during peak temperatures on summer days because it exceeds the maximum operating temperature of the airplanes. Pretty cool.
Any reason that airports in super-hot places like that, don't run heat-transfer coils under their runways, to cool them down with a heat pump like a skating rink does? Runways aren't an order-of-magnitude larger in surface area than skating rinks, so it's not cost. And they wouldn't even need to turn on the heat pump for 3/4ths of the year. Do we just not know how to create heat-transfer coils that wouldn't break from the stress of planes landing "on" them?
Your comment fascinates me. A normal ice hockey rink is 1,800 square meters. The biggest indoor ice rink in the US is the Schwan Super Rink = 28,000 sqm which consists of 8 separate rinks.
Yuma's 4 runways total 543,000 sqm. At midday those runways are absorbing 543MW of energy from the Sun. So that might require 100-200KW of electricity to run the heat pumps. And then you still need somewhere to dump the heat.
In short, I think the reason they don't cool runways is due to the cost.
There's a ton of comments on HN like this. A quick brainstormed "why don't they just.." as if cooling a runway, building a subway, conducting space travel or doing anything else bound by physics is as trivial just because it is conceptually simple. Might as well ask why you can't ski in your backyard in London because after all it is trivial to add some pipes to your refrigerator.
Also I don't know of any skating rinks that operate outdoors in summer, or to use a more favourable example, something like lowering a surface temperature from 20C to -5C (an ice rink, indoors) vs lowering a surface temperature from 80C to 55C (an assumption for a runway, outdoors). Even Dubai, a major transport hub, much hotter than UK even this week, with cheapish energy costs, little public debate uses other mitigations such as runway materials and scheduling many takeoffs for 2-5AM (there are many costs due to high temperature besides runway degradation).
Then we wonder why when it's hot, it's really bloody hot at airports. Is that sum really right? that an airportsworth of tarmac is like a whole power station pumping its entire output into ground heat? because it looks right to me and it seems like the easy, sensible option is just to rip up the airport...
Isn't a large part of electricity production around making things hot to drive turbines?
Airplanes are very heavy so this may not be physically possible, but if you could run coolant pipes under runways, couldn't that captured heat be used in energy production elsewhere?
Yes. You could heat fluid and use it to generate electricity as you can assume the runway is hotter than the ambient air. But if you look at other solar thermal power stations [0] you can see that they generally use concentrators to get the working fluid very hot for more efficient operation. So a runway based system probably wouldn't be economical even if it were good reuse of space.
Hm. An Olympic ice rink is 30mx60m, or 1800m^2. The "largest ice arena complex in the world" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwan_Super_Rink) is 28,000m^2 but has 8 Olympic ice rink, sort of.
Yuma International/MCAS has roughly 540,000m^2 of runway (plus taxiways).
> Runways aren't an order-of-magnitude larger in surface area than skating rinks,
International hockey rinks are 30m by 60m. My local airport, which isn't that big as far as these things go, has two runways each of size 45m by 2200m. That's 55x larger per runway.
Based on my experience with how airport operations work I suspect they noticed a defect on lesser pavement or a service vehicle with higher ground pressure than an aircraft left a dent somewhere on the runway and they then concluded that they should stop bouncing object that weigh tens of thousands of pounds off of the runway until it hardens back up lest ruts form there.
> The runway also “melted” at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather.
That word "melted" seems unjustified. CNBC reports:
> The RAF didn’t specify why it suspended flights, but a spokesperson said “the runway has not melted” as early media reports indicated.
I wish we had a pithy term for people underplaying exceptional events (complacency-mongering?) to show off how unflappable they are, because it would be nice to use it in this case.
Temperature records being broken are, by definition, exceptional events. In this case, the UK's temperature record was broken by 1.5C, which is a huge increase.
> This was in 1911
Cherry-picking a data point. There's a very significant trend of hotter days and record breaking occurring in the past few years. One outlier in a century of data doesn't mean very much (and your source of a paragraph from an Australian newspaper in 1911 seems to get the value wrong).
The 38.7C and the 100F were also each one measurement. Also it's not just one measurement, at least 33 places broke the all time temperature record of the whole country today (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282)
Yes, the trend is in higher maximum temperatures on individual outlier hot days. That doesn't make it insignificant, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I'm objecting to the sensationalism and overtly incorrect account of the temperature being 40C and the runway melting. What good does that do? "Approaching" 40C isn't 40C. Depending on who you ask, it was 38C there. I guess it's also approaching 50C, why not...
Where are you finding this trend data? It's not in any of these materials. Please share if you have it. I've seen all sorts of trends, but they always start after the last cycle, when it was very hot in '30s.
I'm not sure if you're just being disingenuous but the title says 'as temperatures in UK near 40°C', not specifically at the location of the runway, which I guess is overtly incorrect in the sense that it's an understatement, as it exceeded 40C at multiple places today.
>Heathrow Airport was the first place to break the 40C mark, hitting 40.2C at 12:50 BST but several other places also passed 40C during the afternoon, including Gringley on the Hill in Nottinghamshire and St James's Park, Kew Gardens and Northolt - all in London.
I think you missed my point. To spell it out: a modern Australian news outlet should be easily able to report accurate data. In 1911 they presumably relied on the telegraph (small "t") and human transcription, leading to a high probability of errors.
And, indeed, an error seems to have occurred in this case. The maximum recorded temperature for that year was actually 36.7 °C (98.1 °F) [0]. This was presumably due to errors in transcription, rounding errors, or (ironically) deliberate sensationalism.
Are you, perhaps, unaware that these are in different units? 38.7C is 102F. The UK switched in the 60s to centigrade[0]. I'd also be suspicious of the accuracy and method of temperature collection in 1911.. the Met Office didn't start collecting data until 1914, and of the source accuracy.. Wikipedia[1] seems to suggest 98F (36.7C) and in another town. It certainly was extremely hot that August in 1911... especially without modern conveniences.
What's your point? That this is unreliable reporting?
I'll take your word for it that the met office didn't start collecting temperature data until 1914. Countless other entities didn't either, and none of them were cited either. In what year did Wikipedia start collecting temperature data?
I imagine his point was that there is no reason to believe a disputed 100f peak temperature during the notorious 1911 heatwave makes today's 104.5f temperature advance on 2019's 101.6f peak in a country that does a lot of weather reporting unremarkable and unworthy of media coverage. Unless one was using the wrong Fahrenheit/Celsius conversion factor and somehow didn't realise the claimed 1911 temperature was smaller...
>In England 90° was exceeded on several days, the hottest being AUGUST 9th, 97° at Camden Square, London, Wokingham and Hillington, 98° at Raunds, and 100° at Greenwich (in the Glaisher screen; the value recorded in the Stevenson screen was 97°), the highest ever recorded in this country.
AFAIK Stevenson screens are now the standard, and Glaisher stands tend to record higher maximums, so the 100 isn't directly comparable.
My question - how does the composition of the surface compare with that in other parts of the world that are hotter - Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the American southwest? Is there some code or regulation that helps these hotter places avoid this problem, and if so, should the UK government adopt them?
Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. I knew one of the civil engineers who worked on the special blend of cement the used, and from what I remember of what he told me, it is much thicker than I expected, and has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement to make it more durable. The freeze-thaw cycle is still rough on the cement, in 2007 $11 million of cement slabs had to be replaced due to that. The airport as a whole has 15,000 20-square-foot slabs across its multiple runways.
Of course, one could still have buckling with cement if the expansion joints are too close together for the expansion of adjoining slabs over a certain temperature. Perhaps this is what actually happened here?
> Here in Denver, at least, our runways are all made of cement instead of tarmac. [...] has other stuff in it compared even to highway-grade cement
That's something that looks so different about (some/many?) American roads that I never twigged about until you said that. Roads are tarmac here too, not just runways. For some reason it didn't occur to me reading other comments about hotter places not using tarmac that it'd effect roads for cars too.
I am from the Denver region and from personal experience I know the area has a lot of Bentonite clays [0] which can expand as water is absorbed and contract as it dries. My neighborhood was built on land with a lot of this clay and our streets are wavy and our driveways are cracked to hell. I imagine they deal with similar issues at DIA.
My neighborhood is the same. The ground and site prep out at DIA the Civil Engineer friend told me about took things like that into account.
I for one have had much of the cement replaced around my house (some more than once) and when I had the driveway redone, explicitly asked them to mitigate against the clay with whatever they had that made sense. I forget what all they had extra in the proposal that I approved (it was 10+ yrs ago) but my new driveway isn't having any issue while some neighbor's new ones are already cracked again.
I'm guessing the composition is dictated by local average conditions. It rains a lot in the UK and freezing ground temperatures are common in the winter too.
I lived in Spain for a while and non-average weather such as a day of heavy rainfall can result in disaster movie-style scenarios. It's all relative.
I would have guessed local outlier conditions with a bit of padding rather than averages, but I suppose those latent optimizations get progressively more expensive.
The article mentioned a section "buckled" - this is the more likely outcome. When designing roads/runways, engineers design for the most likely thermal range. This is then used to determine how much expansion to account for. You'll see this most commonly on bridges, with sections of "teeth" that allow for large expansion/contraction ranges, since the bridge can't expand in the same way a ground road can.
In this case, its likely more a matter of runways needing more precision, and therefore the design allowance on the range of extreme temps being much lower. I'm sure a civil engineer could explain better.
Aha, so perhaps the press got it wrong by saying it "melted" - maybe it actually buckled. They might have it confused with common roads that are actually softening and "melting" rather than buckling.
Growing up in a very country part of Texas, the road in front of my house changed over the years as the county would upgrade it. One upgrade in the 80s was a tar base with gravel rocks. During the summer when it would get 100+, the tar would melt and get stuck to everything. It is the primary reason I quit running around barefoot as a kid. I ran along the road with the melted tar, and learned a life lesson. Not only was the hot tar painful, it was extremely unpleasant to remove.
Maybe in the 40 years since, people have figured things out like don't pour gravel covered tar roads in the heat?
Chip seal is still very common. I suspect that the reason you may have seen it evolve at a particular location is that the usage pattern of the road changed. Everything from gravel to asphalt to tarmac to concrete makes sense depending on what kind (and volume) of traffic a particular road sees.
This is exactly what happened. When my parents built the house and moved in, there were only a handful of houses. As more houses built and more traffic came from that, the county went through the upgrade process much like in Sims games.
That tar was often waste product, perhaps for processes that aren’t happening.
Not sure about your area, but in mine GE “donated” waste oil to counties for use on roads. Much of it was contaminated with nasty stuff and there are cancer clusters along these roads as the crushed stone and dust would get ground down and become airborne.
Thaks for that. Now that's a thought that's going to fester. None of the neighbors that I knew from back then nor anyone in my family got cancer, so probably shouldn't let it fester too long though. Phew
I didn't mean the physical act of pouring hot tar when making the road. I meany don't pour as in don't use that material in places where it regularly, almost set a calendar to it, getting hot enough to melt the material.
I misread your comment and thought you were chasing the road crew and burning yourself on freshly laid tar. After re-reading I see that it was melted by the sun.
As well as making concrete runways the best thing the UK government could do is adopt a "war footing" where it comes to climate change.
I use the term war footing because the impact of climate change is going to be on the order of a major war. And also because the response required for the decarbonisation required is going to be a significant portion of GDP.
I've flown through Dubai a few times, and I think most of their flights are early in the morning or at night. I don't know if that's for the runway or for the tires (or just heat in general), but I wonder if those factors played into things in the UK?
It's for air temperature. Warm air is considerably less dense, which raises the takeoff and landing speed of planes (for a given weight), up to unsafe levels, in addition to requiring a longer runway.
I don't know if that's for the runway or for the tires (or just heat in general), but I wonder if those factors played into things in the UK?
Some afternoon and evening flights are sometimes cancelled at LAS if it's over 110°. Something to do with the expansion of the fuel due to the heat, and long-distance jets can't get enough on board.
It's in the local newspaper there occasionally, and should be Googleable.
If you use a cold weather composition in hot weather, you get melting asphault like this. If you use a warm weather composition in cold weather, you get cracks and potholes earlier than normal. Your composition is typically defined by climate conditions, not weather extremes.
Thank you - good explanation - the problem, then, is that there is no "one <type> fits all" solution for tarmac. It's just a case of the runway being built for different conditions. In other words, mother nature (global warming) violated the design requirements.
American highways use a PG rating system for the bitumen in the asphalt. You can read about it here: https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/cst/tips/faq_pg.p.... Short story is yes, places where it is expected to become very hot do use asphalt that doesn't rut under higher temperatures. The only exception I know of it Death Valley, which technically requires PG 76-10, but uses 70-10 just because California deemed it wouldn't be worth it to manufacture the extra grade just for one place that doesn't see much traffic. So I guess the highways just sometimes melt in Death Valley, too.
I do recall being a kid going on road trips through these deserts and noticing some of the highways were red and seemed to be made of something different. This was before the switch to the PG rating system. My dad claimed it had something to do with not melting the tire rubber of the vehicles on those roads, but I have no clue what his source was and I can't find any information about these highways, if they even still exist.
Its about building a surface that will also survive the winter and the summer. Its a tricky problem to solve. We could probably replace this with tarmac that could survive much hotter temps, but would just crack and break in the winter when its gets too cold.
There's a similar story happening with our rail lines. The story seems to be that the materials we used in the UK are not stressed to deal with 40 degree heat. They never thought it would be an issue in the UK. Whereas many European railway lines were made to deal with 40-45 degree heat. I'm guessing it's the same for runway tarmac or whatever it is ...
It's not so much the materials - modern rail, especially for high speed trains is laid in long continuously welded sections. The track is pre-tensioned so that at cold temperatures as it tries to shrink it is under significant tension and as it warms it becomes less tensioned. The question is what temperature to tension it to - at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures). They could tension for a higher temperature, but then you risk rails cracking in very cold weather. So in the end it's a compromise, but one that was made without expecting the current 40C temperatures.
> at some temperature it is no longer under tension and above that it becomes in compression and then you have risk of the rails buckling. If I recall correctly, in England the track is tensioned for 27C (a typical hot summers day temperatures)
While the basic gist is correct, a certain amount of compression is fine, too, because the trackbed can resist a certain amount of sideways buckling force, especially once the track has settled in a bit. It's only when the buckling forces caused by the temperature expansion and resultant compression exceed the sideways resistance of the trackbed that you get buckling.
Besides, rail temperatures on a hot summer day in the sun will definitively be higher than 27 °C – that value just happens to be the neutral temperature between maximum allowable compression and maximum allowable tension, whatever those temperatures exactly are.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/why-rails-buckle-in-br... says “rail can actually be up to 20 degrees higher.” and “For some of our track, such high temperatures are more than our track is designed to cope with”, so it depends on the track, but can be around 50°C.
A rail that’s in the shade for most of the day will get less hot, so I expect location also influences at what air temperature track will buckle.
Yes, exactly. And once it's in compression even at higher temperatures it will often be fine if left alone. This is why railway companies impose speed restrictions when it gets hot - they don't want the dynamic load of a passing train to exceed the ability of the track bed to resist buckling. Running at low speeds helps in this respect.
> There's a similar story happening with our rail lines
No, there's a similar story happening with everyone's rail lines. There's a curious thing bout Britain where the British press love a hysterical "here's an example of Broken Britain!" headline, and Europe and America quite enjoy seeing the UK getting any sort of comeuppance (and normally I wouldn't begrudge them this, there have been a lot of insane goings on in the UK of late).
But the only instance I've seen of this - not announcements of restricted services or reduced speeds as a precaution or due to reduce damage in overhead lines, actual buckling - today has been in Spain:
> This isn't the place to debate it, but we're currently a rudderless, borderline second world country.
You are teetering on the brink of alliance with the Soviet Union? (The first/second/third world thing originally referred to cold war alignment: first and second were US and Soviet spheres, third non-aligned; later first- and third-world got adopted as synonyms for “developed“ and “less developed”, but second-world is never used in that economic sense.)
That may be, but by and large the loudest voices who make those complaints are usually just whining about immigrants, things being "too woke", the colour of their passport or whatever the flavour of the month target of hate is. They've little interest in looking at making people's lives better, they only seem interested in personal grievances
They could have planned for upgrading infrastructure to cope with expected warming trends beginning 35 years ago or so, but that would have entailed admitting that the science of atmospheric CO2's effect on climate had essentially been settled since 1980.
Send BP and Shell the bill for the infrastructure upgrade, since they spent so much time and effort on science denialism in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s.
The great irony is that BP and Shell did plan for global warming and did upgrade their infrastructure accordingly. Even back in the 80s, they build their ocean drilling rigs to be high above the water knowing full well that they were causing the icebergs to melt and the water level to rise. They just kind of forgot to let us rubes know about it.
Are you sure about the oil rigs? The thing with ocean is that there tend to be waves. They are designed to survive once-in-1.000-year storms or worse, especially since the Draupner E platform got hit by a huge rogue wave in 1995.
Sea level rise is measured in millimeters per year. When a platform is already 20-30 meters above the sea, the handful of centimeters of sea level rise over its lifespan is completely insignificant.
Don't blame "the public". This wasn't some conscious informed choice by millions of people. The public sucks the glass teat of mass media, and the interests controlling it did not want to present global warming as a problem.
In fact, this state of affairs has not even changed that significantly.
Of course the public was (and is!!) the culprit. Only the individual "footprint" is so small that almost nobody does something.
Real structural changes are hard to enforce. There is always something more pressing, just look e.g. at the 100 billion Germany spends on war (how many trees that would give?). As a politician it would be the end of the career if you tried to enforce something really drastic (and so nobody does it, incl. "the greens").
As you were writing this post, did you have a source for this, or was this hearsay? Not asking you to look for a source now, just curious about the quality of information in HN.
The direct quote from the complaint (found here on page 5: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/show_...) would be:
Meanwhile, beginning in the
mid-1980s, Exxon and other major oil and gas companies,
including Mobil and Shell, took actions to protect their own
business assets from the impacts of climate change, including
raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines
from coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and
roads in the warming Arctic)
Gunshot wounds are caused by the impact of the bullet, not the pulling of the trigger. To say I killed that guy is ridiculous.
edit: at least someone who sells bullets or guns has the excuse that they can be used for sports or entertainment. If you pull oil out of the ground, it's meant to be burned, made into plastic, or put outside to roast in the sun.
Bad comparison. Here's the comparison you should have made to be in line with my comparison:
The people murdered with guns are murdered by people, not by the manufacturers of the guns.
Doesn't mean that gun manufacturers are nice people, but at least we wouldn't be making ridiculous statements and we could communicate what we actually mean accurately so that we can have a productive discussion.
Are you seriously arguing that two of the largest oil and gas companies in the world have no hand in contributing to global warming? Over a 27 year period, they are collectively responsible for producing 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions:
Sadly to this day there are people who have been politicized into disbelieving the science, which has been very clear for a long time.
I fear for our ability to deal with the problems of humanity when so much of our politics is easily fooled people fighting ideological wars for the benefit of others.
There are also some that think that only God can control the weather, so if the world is warming that is His will; and that the end of the world is imminent, and will be the greatest moment in the history of the universe for the faithful.
I'd bet that probably 20% of the voter base believes exactly that, and that 10% think that not believing that should be grounds for deportation or imprisonment.
And these politicians putting their money where their mouth is means that you disbelieve the science?
When people like Joe Manchin refuse to take climate action, due to his investments in fossil fuels, doesn't that make you think we should take climate action?
Interesting how you want to turn the argument around while the lawns in UK started burning. What for? Did he itched your political indoctrination?
It is sad that people needs to choose sides in these things. Wish you had more possibilities to choose from.
'All possible'? What are all possible temperatures? I think you've answered your own question, if you think about it: a line has to be drawn somewhere, you have to do some sort of statistical analysis, chance of circumstances occuring which this would not cope with <x%, yeah ok good enough, that sort of thing. That's engineering.
I mean like, a lot of European countries have colder winters and hotter summers than the UK. So why are our rail tracks always broken in snow or in heat?
I'm pretty sure it comes down to cost. Steel rail has to meet certain wear and strength requirements as well as be reasonably inexpensive to manufacture. And there is not likely an alloy that will accomplish that and not expand in the heat.
In the US, the typical construction method is welded rail. AFAIK there is no allowance for expansion, at least on straight sections. Perhaps curved sections can move a bit to allow for expansion but move too much and the train goes off the tracks.
I fully agree. In addition charge back all dividends paid as global warming was long a scientific fact. Profits always must come with responsibilities. Time that people who profited are paying their bills.
The main reason for this was that they just laid the asphalt too late and it didn’t set in time.
Disneyland was built with remarkable pace, with some of the original rides being closer to ‘industrial machinery with chairs attached’ than you might imagine!
Much of the London tube doesn't have AC. Talk about lack of planning. Pretty sure all lines of the NYC Subway had ac 25+ years ago and they're notorious for drawing out project timelines.
Little consolation when you're waiting 15 minutes for the R train on the sweltering platform, ugh.
But yeah – sadly London's system used to be pretty cool, but the clay interior has acted like a battery, slowly absorbing the heat, and it simply can't absorb any more. It's a massive engineering problem (and oversight).
To be fair, that’s been a work in progress for years, and some lines do have AC. It’s not like they haven’t been planning for it at all.
IIRC a big difficulty is that the tunnels are extremely narrow, so it’s just difficult to get any extra equipment in there. (I wouldn’t have thought that’s insurmountable, though, so there’s probably more to it than that.)
Space in the deep tube tunnels is really tight[0] (making it tricky to fit on-train air con radiators) and there's insufficient air circulation in the to clear the extra heat emissions in any case. They're working on both, but (unlike the shallower cut-and-cover lines and the NY Subway, both of which have saner tunnel sizes) it's decidedly non-trivial.
Yeah, that's true. Expect that will change with the next set of new trains, as with the newish S Stock on the subsurface lines. Not all mainline trains have AC either, though I think it's been nearly universal on new trains from the 90s onwards.
Its much harder on the tube, as where do you dump the hot air? Back into the tunnel? London's clay has basically baked around the tube and is a really good insulator. Its not a particularly easy problem to solve.
The tube is for the dirty working class, AC is for the elite. A few weak people dying in London is no big deal - that's how life in London always worked.
No, they extract and sell oil and they happen to do it at a profit. This is not the same as being compensated or billed for things that resulted from the use of that oil.
I expect that much infrastructure designed for a previous set of worst case scenarios is going to experience failures, especially older and poorly maintained infrastructure.
Hopefully many of them can be managed like when the event occurs. However, some of them like seawalls may fail during single catastrophic weather events.
I live in the southern part of India and a city by the sea. Summer temps here routinely cross 40°C each year for several days or weeks. There are other parts of India that get 1-1.5°C higher temps. I am surprised by the destruction caused by the high temps and the fires in and around London.
What seems to be the driving factor for this apart from the obvious record-setting high temp?
Usually, when infrastructure is built without extremes in mind, it won't withstand them. Where I live, it's an annual joke that during the heavy rain of the year, a lot of things break, flooding occurs, etc. That's because heavy rain is relatively rare, so most infrastructure isn't really built to handle the peaks very well.
The headline is correct as written. There is an abbreviated grammar common in English newspaper headlines (at least in UK and seemingly Australia). "($thing_x occurs) as ($thing_y occurs)" means "$thing_x occurs, because of or related to $thing_y occurring".
So you might also see a headline like "Dortmund's title hopes fade as Lewandowski scores hat-trick" => "Dortmund's chances of winning the Bundesliga became narrower, after Bayern won and Robert Lewandowski scored three goals (possibly against Dortmund)"
It's something native speakers often don't realise, but there's a lot of really specific stuff for healdines
X as Y is perfectly fine, but the article headline still and the HN title previously read X has Y. That is what I was wondering about, whether this is some strange headline shortcut.
A later sentence in the article is formed similarly and correctly uses "as" - "The runway also 'melted' at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather."
Let's say "Runway melts" is X and Y is "temperatures in the UK near 40". "X as Y" says that these two things are happening at the same time. That makes sense. "X has Y" is incoherent.
I think this matters because some people on hackernews are not native English users. They may be legitimately confused or misled by typos that a native speaker would unconsciously correct.
As in, "melted runway at London Luton airport has gained sentience, named itself The Global Warming, and is holding the rest of the UK as hostage with its super-area-heating power; negotiations are ongoing"?
Yuma International (discussed above) has 540,000m^2 of runways. Assume a depth of 0.1m of cooling, that is 54,000m^3. The density of asphalt is 2322kg/m^3, so we have 310^9kg. The specific heat of asphalt is 900 J/kgK, so that'd be 310^12J to get rid of 1 K degree. The specific heat of water is 4184J/kgC. If I assume the water goes from nearly freezing to nearly boiling and have my algebra right, that's about 6,000,000kg of water or about 6000m^3 of water, all to lower the asphalt by 1 degree. That's about 2.5 standard bulk units of water (Olympic swimming pools).
By comparison, 2.5cm of rain on the same runway area is about 13,500m^3 (?) of water.
I think it's doable. Anybody got some spare garden hoses? :-)
I wouldn't be surprised, there are a lot of different asphalt mixes out there for different scenario. Idk specifically about temperature, but would't be surprised.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting quite a few flamewar comments, unfortunately. Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we end up having to ban such accounts.
This is an idiotic comment. As a British person, for most of my lifetime it was a shock to get 30+ temperatures in the UK and if you got multiple 30+ days in a row it was newsworthy. Also, 99.99% of people in the UK don't have fans at home, let alone AC, it simply has never been needed.
So yes, a 40 degrees C day in the UK is insane news, especially given it's about a degree and a half hotter than the previous all-time record!
Tell that to the people whose homes have been destroyed. or perhaps all the people that have died in these conditions. It's not typical in the UK. Imagine if you had to emergency evacuate your home for some natural disaster that you'd never have imagined was possible where you live. Would you really be so cavalier? Would you really say this?
Wow, really insightful comment right here, brilliant observation.
Do you all get it? The commenter is pointing out how we have seasons in the uk, and they are absolutely unchanged, this is all totally normal in the uk!
Brilliant!
Melted presumably doesn't mean "liquified," it means "the heat was sufficient to push the integrity of the runway beyond its safe operating parameters."
And it probably wasn't just 40C; it was probably much hotter, since it's black tarmac.
"Tarmac", the stuff we coat roads on here gets very soft in the summer.
When I was a child (90s), my dad lost a finger when we were replacing the alloys on his VW Corrado and the jack sank into the tarmac and collapsed dropping the car, he pulled his arm out just quick enough to _only_ lose a finger.
I'll never forget how dismissive my mum was when I said "mum, come quick, dad's cut his finger off, it's on the floor".
Fun story aside, the tarmac / road covering we use here do "melt" at relatively low temperatures.
No, the runway melts at a much higher temperature, but as it turns out pavement gets much hotter than air temperature on hot days; various sites I can find siting a very rough guide as 35°C air temperature to 65°C pavement temperature.
It is more likely the black tarmac used to fill in cracks in said runways, and I’m almost certain you’ve stepped in that on a hot day at some point in your life and know that it gets soft. No reason to be skeptical based on a hot headline take.
Failure or going temporarily out of use does not necessarily imply bad engineering.
Engineering also has to assess the cost of a solution and weigh this against the risk and impact of any failures.
In this case the prior on risk of a ‘melting event’ may have gone up since the runway was designed. The impact of closing for one day in x years may also have been explicitly deemed acceptable.
Illustrating that design isn't always 7-sigma availability, There's a shopping mall parking garage near here that is essentially the river bank. When the river runs a high flood, the waters are intended to inundate a lot of parking spaces, to avoid overly-confining those waters. And it's deep enough that some of the parked cars float. Also this parking garage replaced a surface parking lot that was doing the same thing. The second level of the parking garage is not supposed to be inundated, so the garage is a lot taller than it would have been for the same capacity. One can see flood stains on the walls of the first level.
The alternative would have been to build levees to confine the waters to a channel, and hope the channel was deep enough.
Yep and not just homes, power grid, roads ... everything. People joke that the south of England "shuts down" when there's snow, and while there are services that suffer it's never quite like how badly Texas collapsed during their big storm.
When there are extreme weather events that you've not planned, designed and built your infrastructure for, you're basically at the mercy of mother nature. In the UK's case that's extremely hot weather, in Texas' case that was extreme cold
It's one of London's six airports, primarily used for discount holiday flights. Hardly safety-critical.
Besides, this is literally the first time ever it has reached temperatures this high - and it has been open for 84 years. I bet they also "failed to design" for hurricanes, cataclysmic floods, and volcanoes!
As I understand you are engineering for a range of temperatures with problems to be found outside either end of the range (though I imagine it’s also possible to engineer for wider or narrower ranges to some extent, with appropriate cost implications).
Coping with higher maximum temperatures means more cracking and damage at very low temperatures, so it is not necessarily a case of just building in more buffer at the top end but a trade off between the cost and frequency of events like this and the cost of dealing with the effects of winter.
Given that this had literally never happened before and the frequency of similarly hot events was also lower in the past, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the trade-off landed where it did, even if it may well be in for a rethink now.
When these designs were made, 40 °C in the UK was a once-in-5,000-years event. Now, it seems to be about 1 in 30 years (we don't have enough data to be sure).
Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, because that's usually in the operating range--it's the rails and machinery and confined spaces hitting 60+ that fucks everything up.
New York considered shutting down its subways in July 2011 when it was "only" 40.5. Why? Because the underground stations were hitting 50, which (esp. in New York humidity) is dangerous for the most heat-sensitive people.
I'm sorry, but that's a whackadoodle approach to engineering. 40C is well within the range of expected temperatures, and the men who designed it failed epically. There have been heatwaves in the UK since 1911 where the temp approaches 40C.
I doubt it's a once every few decades event anymore. It got to 38 in several places in the country a few years ago. It seems to get up to the mid 30s every year now.
The problem is these temperatures are quite a bit higher than ever previously recorded, and go beyond the reasonable scenarios for which they were built. I’m sure sure newer UK infra is designed for higher temperatures but this is new territory and unfortunately probably just a taste of what’s coming.
Worth also adding this wasn’t as bad as it sounds- only a small patch was faulty and fixed within a few hours. For bigger problems see the various wildfires and also widespread breakdowns in chilled food storages. I also hate to think how barn animals are faring.
> The problem is these temperatures are quite a bit higher than ever previously recorded, and go beyond the reasonable scenarios for which they were built.
Exactly. I remember talk in the press about the default asphalt composition for the roads where I am (Romania) being changed to handle higher temperatures like 15 years ago. We're a lot more to the south and got warmer faster than the UK.
Toronto is interesting in that it has to deal with a fairly extreme range of temperatures between summer and winter, in the UK the spread is much more narrow (or at least, it was).
1) Toronto airport was built to withstand these temperatures as we have reached them before. Basically it is within the expected design parameters. UK's airport is experiencing temperatures outside its normal range.
Building infra is a lot of cost/benefit analysis. Building runways to experience the wide temperature range Toronto faces is very costly.
2) A lot of our infrastructure has been impacted by "extreme heat" as well.
How many times has GO transit issued "reduced speed" notifications due to track temperatures?
The components of concrete melt, and they melt not long after steel does. You’d have entirely melted concrete before 2,000 deg C, depending on what’s in it. When rock melts, it becomes a material quite familiar to you. Cement melts sooner, and those are the two main components.
We’re not talking about that, though, as the issue at this airport is squishiness of tarmac.
> “I can’t believe how those southerners can’t handle 1 below freezing and half an inch of snow, it’s not even that cold”…
> Because infrastructure is built in a local context, where materials, designs et cetera are chosen on what is/was normal. I’m genuinely curious: do you really not understand this?
Seems many people in this thread have trouble understanding that most of the infrastructure we build is built for the people living there under the conditions they normally experience, not for "freak" outliers like this.
Similar to how if there is snow in southern Europe, most infrastructure shuts down while in Russia they run trains through snowstorms. But if it gets tiny bit too hot in Siberia, the trains shut down while in southern Europe they survive no matter how hot it gets.
As others have said, why did Texas have so many problems when it got cold?
Taking our infra, designed for your temps and stating "others should have this too" doesn't make sense.
I live just outside Toronto (Ontario). When you were struggling with a brief cold snap which cost 246 lives because it was -19C, large and heavily populated parts of Canada faced -40C and no one died?
"Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather, leading to widespread power outages"
why wasn't it winterized?
Because statistics show it was a controlled gamble NOT do to this. UK airport is the same deal.
They could use different (and more expensive) materials, but they gambled it wouldn't be needed, much as why Texas didn't winterize the equipment.
Remember that time in Texas all our infrastructure shutdown because it got cold here?
Next, you seem to be completely clueless on aggregate mixes, your mix will be a balance of rock and tar meant to survive a temperature range. Texas mixes will be more aggregate. The problem is this make it less flexible in cold weather and it would degrade far faster. So great you'd design a runway to survive Texas heat that occurs once every few decades versus the cold winters that happen every year.
Roads... I grew up in Texas but moved to Germany in my 20's. I went back for Christmas after a few months of flying on the Autobahns, and was really concerned that I'd slip up and catch a monster speeding ticket while visiting home and cruising on those long, straight, relatively empty rural highways.
That was a ridiculous worry, because there are enough random, unmarked road problems that I was nervous just doing the limit sometimes on roads like TX 36, the main highway between Central Texas and Abilene. Even I-35 between Waco and Austin seemed dodgy in spots. Things that would get marked "Straßenschaden" ("road damage") and have dropped speed limits in Germany were completely unmarked. This was in 2004, and the last time I was back (pre-Covid), it wasn't better.
More likely, someone decided to amp up the drama trying to get more clicks.
The media coverage of the heatwave has veered between upbeat excitement and scaremongering - but never about the real issue of climate change. Just about a runway with a bit of a chip in it
I don’t understand, sure it’s hot for London, but not that hot (100F). Not even close to as hot as it gets frequently in the deserts (Vegas, AZ) and south here in America. Yet, runways are melting and the media is absolutely freaking out. It’s 100 degrees, not that big of a deal.
“I can’t believe how those southerners can’t handle 1 below freezing and half an inch of snow, it’s not even that cold”…
Because infrastructure is built in a local context, where materials, designs et cetera are chosen on what is/was normal.
I’m genuinely curious: do you really not understand this?
I don't understand, sure it's cold for Texas, but not that cold (0F). Not even as close to as cold it gets frequently in the tundra (Winnipeg, Saskatoon) and north there in Canada. Yet pipes are freezing and the media is absolutely freaking out. It's 0 degrees, not that big a deal.
Point being, a place has all it's infrastructure designed for the climate it's in, not a different place's climate.
It is literally the hottest that the UK has ever been in recorded history. It is roughly the same temperature as the high in Tucson today. It is very hot.
You can build infrastructure for this heat. The UK does not have that. This is why runways are melting and the media is freaking out.
Not a civil engineer, but everywhere uses different materials spec'ed to withstand the environmental factors that occur there. You live in Arizona which uses asphalt that should tolerate expected weather conditions in Arizona. It si probably a different asphalt than what gets used in Maine and a different asphalt that gets used in Florida because all three of those place need infrastructure that accounts for different weather conditions.
There isn't really a one size fits all answer, each material has its pros and cons that works best for different conditions.
Interestingly boring. Idaho has a podcast about their roadway system. If you listen to enough episodes, one thing you learn is Idaho uses different kind of asphalt in different areas of the state. Why is that? Some part of the state have the high desert climate and other parts of the state have a more colder and mountainous climate.
Stuff gets made out of different things in different climates. In Arizona it's not a big deal because the engineers expected 40 celsius as a regular occurrence and chose material compositions to withstand it. In the UK, they didn't, and we're seeing the consequences. 40 celsius has never happened in recorded British history. The previous record was 37.something.
I imagine Arizona infrastructure would fail pretty rapidly if temperatures somehow dropped to -30 celsius, and there would be Novosibirskians wondering what the big deal was.
You've also never heard of the runways frost heaving in the hottest and most humid parts of the US. Things tend to be engineered for the climate they experience the vast majority of the time.
The parts where its been hot and humid since the turn of the century? Where they knew back in the 30s and 40s and used the appropriate additives in the asphalt/concrete to handle those temperature ranges?
We can't change this infrastructure immediately, it was built for English summers which used to mean 30 in the air, 50-60 ground temp. Now we're pushing 40 air and 80 ground...
Aside - us oldsters from the 1900s need to stop referring to ~1900 as "The turn of the century". We're at a point where ~2000 will start (maybe is) being referred to as "The turn of the century" due to it turning in to the current century at that time.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but to say it was nearly 40 Celsius when the recorded temp was 38 C is an exaggeration. When I lived in New Mexico, it would hit 40 C for a couple days at a time in the summer. That sucked. Where I'm at in the Midwest, the temp hits 38 C for a couple of days at a time in the summer. It's a big difference in what kind of precautions you need to take.
I realize they don't have the infrastructure to deal with the heat the way we do, but tell me that and then tell me the actual temperature reading. Don't round up 2 degrees C like it doesn't matter.
Be thankful they're giving out a temperature within 10 F of the actual observation. Where I live the TV news has stopped giving out temperature at all and just reports the "feels like" humidex index, a made-up number that makes everyone feel smug about how well they're bearing the load of global warming.
I've never heard it called a humidex index, just heat index. It's pretty invaluable here where the humidity gets high enough that your sweat doesn't evaporate. In the desert, I just had to wear sunscreen and keep drinking water. In the Midwest, it can be 10 degrees cooler and you have to stop and find somewhere to cool down regularly. Your body just can't dump heat with that much moisture in the air.
Seeing people's homes destroyed is so tragic, particularly as I bet they would never have thought this would be an issue here in the UK.
Sky News have some astounding[0] footage[1]:
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP7GF8xS5g
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBV4R18ICY
...and before the rest of you jump in saying this is regular in your country, please note that it is NOT regular here in the UK. Today, the UK has seen the highest temperature in ITS recorded history.