How Hot Can It Get, Literally? Scientists Weigh In (financialpost.com) 35
Four years of research following the 2021 western North American heat wave has revealed both the meteorological conditions that fuel extreme temperatures and evidence that heat has physical limits. The 2021 event "shocked everyone, including specialists working on the subject. People were completely stunned," said Robin Noyelle, a postdoctoral researcher in climate science at ETH Zurich.
Scientists now focus on temperature departures from local averages rather than absolute readings. The most anomalously warm temperature was recorded in Antarctica, where temperatures rose 39C above average in March 2022. North Pole temperatures surged 20C higher than normal in February, reaching the melting point in winter.
Research has identified five key factors that enable extreme heat: cloudless skies, high pressure, dark surfaces, lower altitudes, and lack of water. "Basically all of these conditions are met in Death Valley, but not in many other places in the world," said climate scientist Friederike Otto. Scientists insist that there are heat limits, though these upper bounds will rise with global warming, they caution.
Scientists now focus on temperature departures from local averages rather than absolute readings. The most anomalously warm temperature was recorded in Antarctica, where temperatures rose 39C above average in March 2022. North Pole temperatures surged 20C higher than normal in February, reaching the melting point in winter.
Research has identified five key factors that enable extreme heat: cloudless skies, high pressure, dark surfaces, lower altitudes, and lack of water. "Basically all of these conditions are met in Death Valley, but not in many other places in the world," said climate scientist Friederike Otto. Scientists insist that there are heat limits, though these upper bounds will rise with global warming, they caution.
How Hot Can It Get, Literally? (Score:2)
Not sure off the top of my head, but I'm pretty certain that it has something to do with Planck units.
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Maybe We Should Have Done Something About ManBearPig - South Park [youtube.com]
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And if it is our fault, there's nothing we can do about it.
All joking aside, there may be a day within my lifetime where this statement is true. Well, at least close to true - we will always be able to do something about it, but there will come a time when we can't bring ourselves back to pre-industrial-times temperatures within a reasonable period of time (say, 100 years) without causing some other massive harm.
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Pre-industrial lifestyle isn't as like as a post-Holocene epoch. A few mass extinctions will make neither industrial or pre-industrial lifestyles possible.
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That's what the automation, robotics and AI is for! Society will lose something like 7 billion people (that's gonna smell terrible) but the remaining ones (read rich folks) with have pretty much everything they need.
So as you see, this is just the plan working as intended.
Just below 0K (Score:2)
In this case, technically the hottest temperatures are negative kelvin ones when you have a population inversion and the higher energy states of a sys
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Nerdiest answer ever. I love it.
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In this case I believe the hottest temperature will be in the limit of approaching zero kelvin from below i.e. just below 0K
Hmm, sounds like you've caused an underflow on an unsigned value. I recommend restarting the simulation from the top and hoping it goes better on the next iteration.
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Given that perspective, the hottest possible temperature is when the air molecules are moving at about the speed of light.
Of course, nothing would hang around in that case.
How hot has it been before? (Score:2)
During the [Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum] [climate.gov], the global mean temperature appears to have risen by as much as 5-8ÂC (9-14ÂF) to an average temperature as high as 34ÂC (93ÂF). (Again, todayâ(TM)s global average is shy of 60ÂF.) At roughly the same time, paleoclimate data like fossilized phytoplankton and ocean sediments record a massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at least doubling or possibly even quadrupling the background concentrations.
The PETM is arguab
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On another note: Part of the reason that the K-T event was so catastrophic was that the asteroid landed on carbonate rocks on top of a vast coal bed. So once the atmosphere cleared, the world almost instantly swung from nuclear winter to global warm
Re: How hot has it been before? (Score:2)
Don't forget the permafrost right on the surface.
It's going to get Hotter (Score:2)
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Good one. :)
If we can't move the planet by then we've gone extinct too.
It Depends (Score:2)
It depends on your measure and your tolerances. Let's limit tolerance to human survival levels. Here again, it depends. Humidity can move the survivable temperature limit up or down quite a bit. But, on average humans start dying at 45C+ for extended periods.
Unfortunately our crops will die before 45C. Even special varieties of wheat don't like temperatures above 35C, So we'll likely starve before we all die from heat.
The current average global temperature is 15.5C Please plan accordingly.
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About crops: If climate change happens slowly enough, we can start farming in areas that are now too cold to farm in time to make up for areas that now produce but will be useless for farming later.
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You're assuming the soil is able to support those crops. Look at the Sand Hills of Nebraska. When settlers first saw them they thought, "Oh wow! Acre after acre of land we can plant for food!"
Turns out the ONLY thing which grows in them hills is the grass already there. That's why they raise cattle and bison.
There is no guarantee moving farms further north will be successful, let alone able to produce sufficient crops.
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Additionally, the farther you move from the equator towards the poles, the less surface area there is.
Re: It Depends (Score:2)
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In before the dumbass who says the poorest few millions will die - we already get that from freezing temperatures. Life in this cold, dark universe is hard but we've made it ~4 billions years in already. The on
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We've invented nanoscale architectures which can meaningfully mimic human intelligence, but we won't be able to figure out a way to keep crops a few degrees cooler?
Oh, we can figure out a way easily enough. Figuring out a way to do it that doesn't quintuple food prices is the more difficult part.
A lot of people don't realize how valuable "environmental services" (like crop-friendly weather) are to the economy until suddenly they don't have them anymore, and have to start spending money to try to reproduce those same conditions artificially. Building air-conditioned indoor farms is going to be hell of a lot of capital-intensive than just essentially planting seeds in
We'll burn to a crisp (Score:2)
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before climate change deniers or antinuclear scumbags ever admit they were wrong.
Support for nuclear power has been growing.
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-... [ans.org]
The term "climate change denier" is so vague as to be meaningless. Of course the climate changes, that can be proven with data extracted from geological and archeological digs. The question is of warming, not mere change, correct? Then once we determine if there is warming or not then the question is if this is somehow harmful. If it is harmful then is the matter on if human activity caused it, or perhaps if there is anything hu
Cloudless skies work both ways (Score:1)
Just because the sky is glowing with scattered blue light doesn't mean it's not cold space out beyond it.
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FWIW, Roman troops used that effect to make ice cream (well, really sherbets) in the Sahara. But that didn't cool down the days.
How Hot Can It Get, Literally? (Score:3)
Ask Venus.
Local data (Score:3)
Where I live (Kamloops, BC, Canada) the all-time high temperature record for a long time was 42C, set in July 1941. Most of southern B.C. set records that month. No air conditioning. Ugh! We demolished that record when it hit 47C in June 2021. I've never been so hot in my life...
The hottest we've been so far this summer was 36C. I expect to hit the Big Four Oh at least once, but the long-term forecast isn't promising.
...laura
Gee, I would never have guessed. (Score:2)
"Research has identified five key factors that enable extreme heat: cloudless skies, high pressure, dark surfaces, lower altitudes, and lack of water."
When I moved out west the first thing I noticed was the daily temperature swings were easily twice as much as in Wisconsin. Clear skies, dry, and high altitude made a big difference in highs and lows. Dressing for outdoors out west is much harder given 40 to 50 F temperature swings are normal.
Oddly enough, the coldest weather I had to be working outside was i
The 2nd-order effects are also important (Score:2)
(2/3)^2 the temp of Venus (Score:2)
No, physics wont save us. If we f^*k up the planet, it’ll get welp-our-species-is-boned hot.