Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India

Reminds me of the opening to "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In that book, a wet bulb event (high humidity and high temp) in India pushes infrastructure past the breaking point, the grid goes down, AC systems still running on generators are overloaded and overcrowded and fail, the water temp goes over body temp, and millions die.

The positive cultural/societal reaction to the disaster strained my suspension of disbelief pretty hard, as is typical of KSR novels in my experience, but the idea of a heat wave causing a massive catastrophe (and the poignant description of attempting to live through it) stuck with me.

"But global warming is a hoax. And even if it wasn't it's not our fault. People couldn't be the cause. And even if it is our fault there's nothing we could do about it."

We have broken our world for the greed of a few. History will not be kind to us.

I wonder if the government might consider reversing the circadian cycle and tell people to work in the night and sleep in the day. At this point its better because IIUC many animal's reproductive system shuts down at such high temperatures.

And I would not discount this govt considering it given that far less rational, crazier, things have happened in the past like for instance randomly cancelling high denomination cash notes.

> Poor people don't have the luxury of worrying about the heat

Just.. damn man

> For eight or nine days, temperatures of 47-48C continued without a break

Wasn't sure if the night time temps stayed that hot due to some factor but it appears that's the daytime high.

> Overnight temperatures remain around 30C.

We know that cutting down trees increases heat and intensifies drought but we continue to do it, how bad do things need to get before we reverse course?

Lots of chatter about global warming / climate change in the thread, but that's not what the piece is actually about per se?

> They have lived with heat for generations. What worries researchers is not that the district is hot, but that it is becoming hotter, for longer, in a landscape losing the trees and water that once helped keep temperatures in check.

So there are two base claims, and then another building on top:

- the pattern in which the heat exhibits has changed / is changing, not the "amount of heat" so to speak (temperatures have always been about this miserably hot there)

- the developments in the area have changed the landscape significantly over the years (a change in vegetation coverage and infrastructure)

- that the latter is causing the former (and implying that if it was undone, this phenomenon would also resolve)

A half-hearted "search" "confirmed" to me the developments and the change in landscape plenty convincingly enough, but not the heat pattern changes (data access troubles). It'd seem to me that just like the locals report, this year is exceptional. The correlation between the amount of overall landscape change and the heat pattern changes further seem rather loose, although I'm sure the relationship is nonlinear.

Even aside from that though, the conclusion doesn't automatically hold up. It's entirely believable, as the phenomenon itself is well established afaik, but that's not the same as it being correct in this case. I guess such an analysis would be research paper material though, not a BBC news article, so maybe my expectations are a bit misplaced.

What I find bizarre is the word "siesta" doesn't appear in this article.

People have been working around the hot summer hours in Southern Europe for centuries. Until recent times it was part of the culture.

47 celsius is 116.6 fahrenheit.

Destroy tree to build datacenters

Why is there a billion people in India if these conditions exist?

It has less space than USA and almost triple the population.

Its never made sense to me why the birthrate was so high in countries with deadly living conditions, meanwhile the population in the United States with excellent conditions is declining.

If you are reading this in your climate controlled northern hemisphere room, be reminded that the people suffering this are not just going to disappear, and they will need to live somewhere, somehow, and they will be more motivated than you will ever be. If you love your "western comfort" so much, the best thing you can do is to make sure other people than yourselves can also have a bare minimum of living conditions.

> But what made this summer's episode unusual was its persistence.

But, but—it's not summer in the Nothern Hemisphere yet.

I wonder if data centres are as bad as cities for urban heat island effect

Welcome to the future! What a lovely world we've created for ourselves!

AI (Compute/GPU) has always been first citizen on this planet. Cradle to Grave in AC environment. Humans, yeah, they'll live in the heat. Or not.

We must spend trillions of dollars on AI as if we are going to be extinct. Meanwhile, nobody has any money for massively increasing clean energy, which is possible now, just deploy solar (dirt cheap) everywhere, use EVs to dump excess production during the day.

Datacenters are subsidized everywhere (just like fossil fuels), and they get the best and first cuts of everything. Google is building a mega DC in Vizag, India, with massive incentives from Govt.