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Earth

Death Valley Sets Record For Hottest September Day On the Planet 111

Death Valley set a new record for the hottest September day anywhere on the planet when its Furnace Creek thermometer hit 127 degrees on Thursday. CBS News reports: While the heat may send people seeking shade at a, say, a Los Angeles-area golf course, it actually draws the tourists to Death Valley, where scorching temperatures can sometimes surprise them. "The ground heats up, we've measured temperatures of 201 as far as ground temperatures. The ground is then radiating heat back up into the air," Death Valley National Park spokeswoman Abby Wines said.

But the heat wave is just in its third day Friday, and is expected to last through Labor Day, so setting another record is still a possibility. However, it's unlikely the park will break the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth -- 134 degrees recorded in Death Valley on July 10, 1913.
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Death Valley Sets Record For Hottest September Day On the Planet

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  • Units (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday September 03, 2022 @05:16AM (#62848731) Homepage Journal

    Given this is an international site, can you please at least give the units? I assumed it's not Celsius.

    Even better, please give units in both systems.

    • Just looked up the best, most-recent reference as to why The US isn't metric yet and this was it:

      https://petitions.obamawhiteho... [archives.gov]

      tldr; No one is stopping anyone from using either Imperial or Metric, officially the choice is a voluntary thing, (although I'm sure Agencies like NASA impose their own requirements, given a classic, historical screw-up [wikipedia.org]).

      • Just looked up the best, most-recent reference as to why The US isn't metric yet and this was it:

        https://petitions.obamawhiteho... [archives.gov]

        tldr; No one is stopping anyone from using either Imperial or Metric, officially the choice is a voluntary thing, (although I'm sure Agencies like NASA impose their own requirements, given a classic, historical screw-up [wikipedia.org]).

        Yes, the short answer is that the U.S. has never had an official system of measurement. What the U.S. uses is called the United States customary system (USCS or USC) which is a "system" made up of what ever units were in common use when the nation was founded. In the 19th Century the Bureau of Standards (now the NIST), which provides for the legal definitions of these units, made the sensible decision to redefine them in terms of the Metric System so that it did not need to maintain its own standards from s

        • Your comment is super informative, given the multiple failures to launch this past week, plus taking whatever happens next into consideration.

        • Nope, the customary pound is a unit of force, defined as one slug-foot per second-squared. There is a bastard pound-mass unit that is the mirror image of the kilogram-force but it is not commonly used. Note: A slug is quite heavy, weighing about 32.2lb in normal Earth gravity. Don't drop one on your toes.
    • Given this is an international site, can you please at least give the units? I assumed it's not Celsius.

      Even better, please give units in both systems.

      Considering this is the 21st Century and we now have a multitude of information at our fingertips, it might behoove people to take advantage of this capability.

    • Canadian here.

      When it comes to the Americans the "F" in the temperature measurement stands for "Freedom" units.
      • When it comes to the Americans the "F" in the temperature measurement stands for "Freedom" units. Flag

        When it comes to the American system of units, the "F" stands for something a bit more blunt than "Freedom".

    • Given this is an international site, can you please at least give the units? I assumed it's not Celsius.

      Even better, please give units in both systems.

      I absolutely agree. The article should have just said 587 degrees Rankine.

    • Does 127/134C make any sense whatsoever??
      • Does 127/134C make any sense whatsoever??

        Obviously not.

        But 127/134F are meaningless numbers to me, just like 52.8/56.7C are meaningless numbers to you.

        It would have been easy enough to give both numbers in the summary.

    • Oh, fer pete's sake. Maybe you should demand that the site also say everything in Mandarin as well.

    • This is an American site... but international visitors are still welcome, even if you can't think in more than one scale.

      Most people with a science or math or computer background can do multiple scales natively.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yep, can I please have that in non-stupid units and with the units actually declared?

    • What sort of moron would hear that the air temps are reported as 127 and 134 and think conceivably they might be Celsius?

      Answer: apparently someone too lazy to do math or look it up - literally type "127f in c " in Google.

    • Just convert it in your head. It's no big deal.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03, 2022 @05:26AM (#62848739)

    127 deg F = 52.7778 deg C
    134 deg F = 56.6667 deg C

    • by starless ( 60879 ) on Saturday September 03, 2022 @08:37AM (#62848953)

      Although normal people don't need temperatures given to 1/10,000 of a degree C.
      (Particularly when the original numbers are rounded to the nearest degree F.)

      • Although normal people don't need temperatures given to 1/10,000 of a degree C. (Particularly when the original numbers are rounded to the nearest degree F.)

        The post is genius. Normal people don’t care about significant figures but it legitimately made me angry.

  • by R80_JR ( 1094843 ) on Saturday September 03, 2022 @07:33AM (#62848859)
    The thermometer at Furnace Creek does not meet the National Weather Service standards for siting or shielding from direct/indirect radiation. It is not an official reporting station.
  • in Death Valley until they come up with real plans to deal with climate change. Then release them on license [prisonersfamilies.org] thus bringing them back if/when they do not implement their promises.

    • in Death Valley until they come up with real plans to deal with climate change.

      It wouldn't work. If politicians came up with a real plan to stop emitting CO2 into the air (ie, nuclear + no more gasoline vehicles ), they would be voted out of office.

    • With all the hot air those guys produce, it would likely read 227F.
  • I thought climate was not weather. But in news reporting every extreme weather event is reported internationally because this is implicitly evidence of a "climate crisis".

    Some time ago the banshees screaming about global warming got tired of explaining how the reports of extreme cold weather events were not counter evidence of global warming. The typical response was some variation on "weather is not climate". That got turned into the argument against a climate crisis by every report of extreme high temp

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      For the non-stupid, a mass of points forms a larger picture. I can see that you never had that experience...

      • Not only that, but for the stupid, a mass of points forms a cloud, therefore it's not precise enough to be evidence. Just adding more points to it only adds to their 'evidence' by making it less precise.
      • So, you are saying that the weather is the climate?

        Weather is in fact the climate. We define the climate of an area as the averages of the weather over something like 10 or 20 years. We can't measure climate change by singular events, but yet that is precisely what the climate crisis banshees are doing. They scream the loudest when there's some extreme weather event. That's not helping after years of admonishment by these same banshees not so long ago that weather is not climate.

        If we are to establish t

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          So, you are saying that the weather is the climate?

          Weather is in fact the climate.

          Make a decision about your stance.

          News reporting an instance of extreme climate is just news reporting things. But news reporting extreme climate more and more often can be and indicator of a trend.

          • Make a decision about your stance.

            I believe I already did, climate is weather averaged over time. I'm using the definition of climate as can be found in any dictionary. We see outlier extremes in weather all the time because of our ability to observe weather with incredible precision and our ability to communicate widely and quickly, and while some weather extremes are newsworthy for one reason or another it is rather tiresome that each and every extreme is implicitly or explicitly evidence of a climate crisis.

            News reporting an instance of extreme climate is just news reporting things.

            No, it is not. A new record

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Well, those that do not understand statistics will forever misinterpret them and try to explain them away. You certainly qualify.

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky

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