Once in 200-year heat wave

[reader]

From CNN

Workers move blocks of ice into a storage unit at a fresh market during heat wave conditions in Bangkok    
 

Every day, countless mopeds criss-cross the congested city of Hanoi, in Vietnam, with commuters traveling to work or motorbike taxis dropping off everything from parcels to cooked food and clients.

One of them is Phong, 42, who starts his shift at 5 a.m. to beat the rush hour, navigating the dense swarm of mopeds and drives for over 12 hours a day with little rest.

But an unprecedented heat wave that engulfed his country in the past two months has made Phong’s job even more arduous. To get through the heat of the day, he equipped himself with a hat, wet handkerchiefs and several bottles of water – precautions that provided little relief as recorded daytime temperatures soared to more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). 

The average May temperature in Hanoi is 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

“If I get a heatstroke, I would be forced to suspend driving to recover,” he told CNN. “But I cannot afford it.” 

Phong, who declined to give his surname, said he carries a tiny umbrella to protect his phone, the main tool he uses for work as a driver for the ride-hailing platform Grab, along with his bike. If the phone breaks, he misses out on much-needed income. “I was worried that the battery would overheat once exposed to the sun,” he said.

Nearby in the same city, sanitation worker Dinh Van Hung, 53, toils all day cleaning garbage from the bustling streets of Hanoi’s central Dong Da district.

Workers like them make up the backbone of many societies but are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, with dangerously high temperatures greatly impacting their health and the already precarious nature of their professions.

April and May are typically the hottest months of the year in Southeast Asia, as temperatures rise before monsoon rains bring some relief. But this year, they reached levels never experienced before in most countries of the region, including tourism hotspots Thailand and Vietnam. 

Thailand saw its hottest day in history at 45.4 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit) on April 15, while neighboring Laos topped out at 43.5 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit) for two consecutive days in May, and Vietnam’s all-time record was broken in early May with 44.2 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit), according to analysis of weather stations data by a climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera.

Herrera described it as “the most brutal never-ending heat wave” that has continued into June. On June 1, Vietnam broke the record for its hottest June day in history with 43.8 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) – with 29 days of the month to go.

In a recent report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international coalition of scientists said the April heat wave in Southeast Asia was a once-in-200-years event that would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

 

[Latbear4blk]

10 hours ago, reader said:

From CNN

Workers move blocks of ice into a storage unit at a fresh market during heat wave conditions in Bangkok    

If I order an ice home delivery in Bangkok, is one of the boys in the photo bringing my ice cubes?

[khaolakguy]

12 minutes ago, Latbear4blk said:

If I order an ice home delivery in Bangkok, is one of the boys in the photo bringing my ice cubes?

They'll not only bring the ice blocks but they will crack them into slivers between their thighs

[floridarob]

I think these events will happen more frequently than every 200. 100, etc.... years

[Latbear4blk]

1 hour ago, floridarob said:

I think these events will happen more frequently than every 200. 100, etc.... years

Some believe this is the new normal.

[PeterRS]

1 hour ago, Latbear4blk said:

Some believe this is the new normal.

All the experts seem to suggest this. What concerns me as much as the physical heat in our cities and countries is the melting of the polar ice caps. The inevitable rise in sea level will soon start causing havoc in our coastlines. Bangkok is just one city at risk and that's before we consider it rate of sinkage. We have already seen in several years bad flooding in the October period when flood waters from the north flow down the Chaophraya river and meet the annual rise in sea levels coming up from the Gulf. When you see sandbags not only at the riverside of the Shangri-La Hotel but also around its pool, you know something is wrong.

If I were much younger and had the funds, I wouldn't consider buying an apartment in much of coastal USA, Australia, Japan and a host of other countries. Even with its massively expensive coastal defences already in place, even The Netherlands would be far too risky. And the frightening thing for the next generations is there seems to be little evidence that the world if doing anything to enable it to cope.

[vinapu]

7 hours ago, Latbear4blk said:

If I order an ice home delivery in Bangkok, is one of the boys in the photo bringing my ice cubes?

By time it arrives from Hanoi that ice will be all melted

[Latbear4blk]

7 hours ago, PeterRS said:

All the experts seem to suggest this. What concerns me as much as the physical heat in our cities and countries is the melting of the polar ice caps. The inevitable rise in sea level will soon start causing havoc in our coastlines. Bangkok is just one city at risk and that's before we consider it rate of sinkage. We have already seen in several years bad flooding in the October period when flood waters from the north flow down the Chaophraya river and meet the annual rise in sea levels coming up from the Gulf. When you see sandbags not only at the riverside of the Shangri-La Hotel but also around its pool, you know something is wrong.

If I were much younger and had the funds, I wouldn't consider buying an apartment in much of coastal USA, Australia, Japan and a host of other countries. Even with its massively expensive coastal defences already in place, even The Netherlands would be far too risky. And the frightening thing for the next generations is there seems to be little evidence that the world if doing anything to enable it to cope.

Yes, the concern for melting polar ice caps and the rise of the sea level is perhaps the top one. But agriculture is being remapped worldwide, and wildfires are running havoc. The entire US East Coast is on an air quality alert because of the smoke coming from Canada. 

[PeterRS]

17 hours ago, Latbear4blk said:

The entire US East Coast is on an air quality alert because of the smoke coming from Canada. 

Some years ago I saw a tv programme about the possibility of a mega-tsunami hitting the US East Coast. Apparently one of the islands in the Canary Islands chain has a major fault line and the western edge of the main active volcano Cumbre Vieja could collapse into the sea. Much of the Canary Islands coastline is made up of massve steep cliffs. Were a collapse to happen, 1.5 trillion metric tons of earth would crash into the ocean. There is a paper about it in the Penn State/University of New Orleans site -

"models suggest that if it were to collapse it would generate a tsunami 1000 m high that would be 50 m when it arrived in Europe and along the eastern coast of the US. Because this scenario would be devastating to cities including New York, Boston, and Miami as well as coastal real estate in New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Florida, it has been rigorously investigated by scientists." 

The tv programme estimated the height of a tsunami reaching the US East Coast as nearer 100 m. Whichever it might be, the site does point out that not all scientists are in agreement, but it is one of any number of natural disasters that might just happen.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1609

[Latbear4blk]

5 hours ago, PeterRS said:

Some years ago I saw a tv programme about the possibility of a mega-tsunami hitting the US East Coast. Apparently one of the islands in the Canary Islands chain has a major fault line and the western edge of the main active volcano Cumbre Vieja could collapse into the sea. Much of the Canary Islands coastline is made up of massve steep cliffs. Were a collapse to happen, 1.5 trillion metric tons of earth would crash into the ocean. There is a paper about it in the Penn State/University of New Orleans site -

"models suggest that if it were to collapse it would generate a tsunami 1000 m high that would be 50 m when it arrived in Europe and along the eastern coast of the US. Because this scenario would be devastating to cities including New York, Boston, and Miami as well as coastal real estate in New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Florida, it has been rigorously investigated by scientists." 

The tv programme estimated the height of a tsunami reaching the US East Coast as nearer 100 m. Whichever it might be, the site does point out that not all scientists are in agreement, but it is one of any number of natural disasters that might just happen.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1609