...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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
You can see it yourself at: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4680241,0.2185786,453m/data=... the same layout of buildings and the label "Wells Fireworks Factory" in the centre of it.
You can see it yourself[0] the fireworks factory was closed and abandoned in the 70s. A fairly important detail that was missed out!
Not sure what the motive behind your message was, but peoples' homes were indeed destroyed in these fires[1]!
[0]: https://www.remotelondon.com/wells-fireworks-factory-dartfor...
[1]: https://www.itv.com/news/london/2022-07-19/major-incident-de...
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation#/media/File:Water_...
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.
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.
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/basics/overheate...
Dead Comment
> 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%.
> 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.
https://tarmacdriveways.ie/key-differences-tarmac-vs-asphalt...
rainfall (you could probably spray the runway and it will cool down and be dry quickly…)
Length of day (we’re about 1 month past the summer solstice in the N. Hemisphere, and days are long in the northern latitudes)
Shade (unlikely on runways, they’re in the sun all day)
Wind (probably best anywhere on a runway unless it’s in a valley)
Cloud cover during the night: can’t radiate to the universe where it’s about -273C if clouds are in the way.
(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.)
Latitude of London, UK: 51.5° N
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.
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.
Yuma International/MCAS has roughly 540,000m^2 of runway (plus taxiways).
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.
Title says "melt" but the only quoted source in the article says "defect".
> The RAF didn’t specify why it suspended flights, but a spokesperson said “the runway has not melted” as early media reports indicated.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...
> The UK’s highest of 38.7C was recorded in Cambridge in July 2019.
This isn't remarkable.
>the record temperature of 100 degrees was reached at Greenwich on August 9
This was in 1911, from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/115352761/9911357
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).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_in_the_United_Kingdom
>Monthly Weather Report 1911
Last page (140):
>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.
> "following today’s high temperatures, a surface defect was identified on the runway" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490520549365719...
> "high surface temperatures caused a small section to lift" https://twitter.com/LDNLutonAirport/status/15490713790095114...
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?
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite
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.
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.
Maybe in the 40 years since, people have figured things out like don't pour gravel covered tar roads in the heat?
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.
It's still the cheapest way to resurface a road.
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.
Or they could keep their heads in the sand.
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.
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.
Climate change is here ...
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:
- https://twitter.com/rail_arri/status/1549039421525458945
- https://twitter.com/rail_arri/status/1549034924010655745
edit: and just minutes after I post this, I spot an instance in England from the weekend! https://twitter.com/networkrail/status/1548760985246261249/p...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-heat-in-uk-disrupts-air...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/18/uk-transport...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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"Network Rail said that its rails have a "stress-free" temperature of 27 degrees."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62182880
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In temperatures that reached 100 degrees, the fresh asphalt on Main Street, USA melted into a sticky tar that ensnared the high heels of some women
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/disneylands-disastrous-ope...
Disneyland was built with remarkable pace, with some of the original rides being closer to ‘industrial machinery with chairs attached’ than you might imagine!
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).
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.)
Alternative ways to cool the trains have been under investigation for decades, but there isn't an obvious solution.
[0]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Why_London_Undergr...
Small steps…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3069037.stm
Should they also get credits for all the progress oil has allowed us to make?
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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.
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