Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
30 C is what you’d probably consider a nice warm summer (86 F). 40 C is 104 F. I’ve seen mention of some places in Europe or Asia hitting 50 C, which is insane. Just add 18 more F to 104.
There’s talk of a possible new alltime record, old one was 40,5°c. There is also a forecast which says we will have a very high chance of setting a new nightly minimum record of 28°c on Wednesday night.
Three worst thing are the populist parties attempting to dress this up as “a summer as it used to be”. My childhood memories tell me that summers were maxing out somewhere in the 32°c, and we had a lot of heat thunderstorms cooling the evenings when reaching those temperatures.
Nowadays we don’t even get rain.
I often hear that line “it’s always been this way here” from people in my area too, knowing full well that most of them are transplants, probably pulling from maybe ten years experience here at best. Whereas I grew up in the 70s here, and know it was NOT like this.
So strange to me to see temperatures that are like a normal summer 30 years ago being seen as some end all scenario.
Do your homes not handle 40C+ weather? We run a single window AC that cools the whole house in the weather you describe.
Bait.
Not really. My house is from the 1960s and we were able to update it to handle 40C+ days consecutively.
The brick vs balloon frame argument isnt really bait. Stick frame is easy to update and make energy efficient. I think there is a real discussion to had about modernizing older homes in Europe to handle the future.
And people are doing that. HVAC installers are booked solid until the end of the year. It just really started from 2000 here where it was ramping up. Before 2010 we never reached 40°C. It took some time for people to confirm it was not a fluke and it really is changing rapidly. Europe is at 2.3°C warming now, so it’s going hard the last few years.
Our homes are built to isolate, and the apartment building i live in is older than most of the buildings currently existing in the US that are used as living space. It’s from the 1920s, and although it was modernized in the 2000s, the basic attributes don’t change. They were never built with heatwaves in mind, they were constructed to make sure you didn’t freeze to death in winter. A large percentage of available living spaces here are constructed this way.
A) there is no AC, and the European Window Style does not make it easy to retrofit, in addition to needing permits - these are historical buildings that are protected by law, preventing most permanent changes to the facade, and rentals are the default in Vienna, so you are messing with someone else’s property.
B) short bouts of heat are no issue because of the isolating attributes, but long term heat slowly seeps in, and it’s hard to cool the rooms back down again. I only open my windows after sunset and close them shortly after sunrise, while hanging cloth into them on the outside to prevent direct sun, but when the nights dont drop below 25°c, you can’t get the heat out fast enough.
C) Our infrastructure is only slowly catching up. Even things like older hospitals or care facilities dont have HVAC. At least nowadays most public transport has AC, but that is a pretty new thing.
So no, our infrastructure at large is not made to deal with long stretches of 40°c heat. It was made when we still had -25°c winters and 30°c were noteworthy.