Essay by Eric Worrall
They forgot to say “Evacuate everyone south of that line…”. Apparently the green electricity of the future will be too unreliable to depend on air conditioning.
When homes already hit 40°C inside, it’s better to draw on residents’ local know-howthan plan for climate change from above
Published: February 23, 2024 10.18am AEDT
Abby Mellick Lopes Associate Professor, Design Studies, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney
Cameron Tonkinwise Professor, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
Stephen Healy Associate Professor, Human Geography and Urban Studies School of Social Sciences/ Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney UniversityWeather extremes driven by climate change hit low-income communities harder. The reasons include poor housing and lack of access to safe and comfortable public spaces. This makes “climate readiness” a pressing issue for governments, city planners and emergency services in fast-growing areas such as Western Sydney.
…
Last summer was relatively mild, but we recorded temperatures as high as 40°C inside some homes. Recalling a heatwave in 2019, one resident said: “The clay had cracks in the grass that you could almost twist your ankles.”
…
Official responses to climate extremes typically rely on a retreat indoors. These “last resort” shelters depend in most cases on a reliable electricity supply, which can be cut during heatwaves.
There have been efforts, but not in Australia, to establish a “passive survivability” building code. The aim is to ensure homes remain tolerably cool during a heatwave (or warm during a cold snap) even if power is cut for a number of days.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/when-homes-already-hit-40-c-inside-its-better-to-draw-on-residents-local-know-how-than-plan-for-climate-change-from-above-221870
Too bad the professors didn’t push for reliable nuclear power, or for replacing or upgrading Australia’s fleet of aging fossil fuel electricity plants. A big surplus of reliable electricity located close to the city would massively reduce the risk of blackouts.
700 miles closer to the equator, we Queenslanders are already living this predicted 104F Sydney climate apocalypse. I’m happy to share the life saving strategies we have developed. When the temperature hits 104F, we find some convenient shade and drink an ice cold beer. If the first beer doesn’t work, we drink a second beer. After this we go for a swim, or maybe fire up the BBQ.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
University of Technology, Sydney must be a very progressive school.
Other places UTS = “up to sh1t”
But it is their sacred duty to sweat for the sake of Gaia!
The most obvious solution is to move somewhere they can catch a sea breeze. But Australia has a really strange problem, we have vast tracts of empty land, but most people are packed into a handful of big cities. Even if we ignore the desert, there are still a lot of places people could live and work which don’t involve being packed in like sardines, but most people ignore this option for some reason.
But “sprawl” is another evil to the Green Blob. Decent transport violates their religion.
Sydney greens especially are a bit special, they think growing vegetables in the basement under grow lamps is saving the planet by reducing food miles. I don’t know what their attitude to transport is.
Doublethink is a needed concept for a Green.
Practice not concept. The concept being had might cause stress between it and the practice.
Only 40C inside? Luxury! These bloated egoes should know the sub-economic houses built in Sydney, nay Australia, don’t have insulation and are of poor design … designed by their colleagues who graduated from their faculties.
Notwithstanding, there’s substantial immigration of these unfortunate southerners to Queensland to the north, substantially warmer and very humid.
Except Perth…urban sprawl and low population density makes public infrastructure costly and sparse. Buses and trains run so far apart and too far from home they’re not patronised as much. We therfore rely on cars and roads.
I’m firmly of the opinion that ‘managed’ urban sprawl is good and promotes health and growth (ref US geographer Wendell Cox). The unholy devotion that Australian academic plannners have in forcing people into high density vertical rabbit warrens because they have romantic dream of some northern hemisphere major cities that are centuries old is irresponsible. Our cities do not have adequate recreation spaces and our climate does not suit such a style of living.
Very much like Canberra. Except the imbeciles ruling Canberra decided to force people onto trains instead of letting them get about how they wanted (busses, by the way, weren’t pure and socialist enough for them).
Yes we have vast tracts of land. But It’s all about jobs and the economy.
Also the second obvious solution would be better construction and insulation.
Unfortunately my experience of Australian building standards, particularly in the past, is that they are woefully inadequate for the climate. We have gone for the cheap options . .
Or you could just buy yourself a old school glass max and min thermometer and place it in a shaded area with a free flow of air, and then you too will soon begin to realize just what a crock of shite the AWS claims about daily Max temps really are.
Yes its that easy to call the claims of these clowns out.
“”…residents’ local know-how…””
Or…. ways of knowing. Sometimes it’s applicable. : )
They must be referring to a handheld paper fan. Works in all conditions and has the added advantage of exercising the wrist.
I think the idiot greens get plenty of exercise using their wrists 😉
South Park.
Never watched it much but I loved the episode about the rainforest.
Also the one where they burnt down a Walmart(?) and then continued to burn down the stores that replaced it.
Meanwhile, the price of their food increased!
(That episode was Pre-Biden.)
The rainforest episode was hilarious, greens coming face to face with real nature and learning to appreciate bulldozers. I don’t remember watching the Walmart episode, I’ll look it up.
I looked it up.
“Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes“
Season 8, Episode 9
That’s warm, but I live in East Texas. Summers are hotter than that with very high humidity. Yet, we survive.
I remember visiting a calcining factory along the Houston ship channel in August (big hot gas fired rotary furnaces). I was in a business suit and thought I might die right there from heat and humidity.
At least the time I had to be in Phoenix in a suit in August at 125F with shoes sinking into softened parking lot asphalt it was a dry heat.
I love hot weather, nice lakes nearby, the fun of summer, bring it on!
And bikinis on women!!
Or preferably.. not !
Yeah. No matter how nice the bikini, it always looks better on the floor!
Ooooh, no… I prefer to have something left to the imagination. Reality often disappoints.
And central Texas.
My brother’s wedding in San Antonio in June during a hot spell had us testing folding metal chairs before sitting in them during a wedding service with 108°F temperatures.
I was amused that it was hotter in Texas than my cousin’s wedding in Henderson Nevada during late April. Though, same with the folding metal chairs, test before sitting.
Luckily, my visits to Phoenix were during winter.
My step-sister lives in Tucson where temperature can get a mite toasty.
I searched out a magazine in the American West titled “Desert Magazine”. Mostly to find descriptions and directions to good rock hunting areas.
The magazine often included stories from the past, including surviving 130°F temperatures during the 1930s. Good advice like staying near shady moisture during the heat of the day. One article described sleeping during midday heat under the truck they were driving around.
Most of the hot weather they described was well before compressed freon air conditioners where a vehicle’s air conditioning meant open windows with the fly windows opened so it directed outside air into the cab. Don’t see those windows much anymore.
Can I suggest a more practical, economical and effective response to Sydney summer weather anxiety –
issue people with cups full of concrete with the words –
“Harden Up Buttercup” written on them.
And for some instructive reading while they down their brew, they could gain an insight in to the 1896 heatwave –
https://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/
As usual, Queensland leads the World in developing life-saving climate technology based on readily available materials and facilities like drinking cold beer in the shade and swimming in water.
Indeed, we are a state of innovators.
With the exception of our incompetent state government. As they say, full of piz and wind.
I had a look at the UTS Architecture and Building building on Google Earth and it appears to use old fashioned air-conditioning with condensers on the roof instead of the very latest technology in “last resort” shelters and “passive survivability”.
Of course if the Australian government would stop distorting the market with mandates and subsidies and get out of the way electricity would be cheap and reliable as it used to be, blackouts during heat waves would be averted and even people with modest means could afford to run their air conditioning.
I thinks it’s a bit like air travel to climate conferences. The important people reluctantly accept the need for personal rule breaking for the sake of the planet.
Regrettably, once prices go up, they rarely go back down. Obama got his wish, electricity will remain expensive for some time to come.
I often wonder why people chose to live in places where temperatures can regularly exceed 40C.
I couldn’t do it. It sounds like hell on earth.
Sydney does NOT regularly exceed 40C…
Maybe once, twice every year or so…. some years, not at all.
Western suburbs like Penrith have created an urban heat sink where air can stagnate below the escarpment. Sometimes does get very warm for a few days at a time.
The MacMansions which take up the entire house block don’t allow for passive cooling, either.
500m² blocks with 499m² house footprint !
Now you are talking hell on Earth !
There are a lot of those in the housing developments around Narellan. Oran Park used to be a nice motor racing circuit, now it’s roof-to-roof McMansions
It’s a matter of getting acclimatised.
If you’re used to hot summers, it’s nothing exceptional. If you’ve been in a milder climate, it knocks you flat for a while until you get used to it again.
I lived in New Orleans for years.
When I arrived fresh from Pennsylvania wearing a wool suit, starched shirts and tie, every day was suffering from humidity and heat.
After a couple of years listening to locals, switching to open collar short sleeve shirts with minimal starch and no jacket acclimation it was really nice and comfortable most days of the year.
When I accepted a job in Washington DC, it was nonstop chapped lips, uncomfortable shirts and jackets during windless stifling July and August summers. Getting more used to that weather took more years than two.
Most days in New Orleans or anyplace along the Gulf of Mexico, there was wind even on the hottest days.
Watching Washington DC leaves hang downward without any movement became a little depressing and brought memories of good friends, soft breezes, coffee and beignets for lunch.
Having that breeze works wonders. The older style homes in hotter areas of Australia were made of weatherboard, had a corrugated iron roof, high ceilings and verandahs all around. The end result was that there was almost always a breeze somewhere.
Bloody freezing in winter away from the open fire, but quite pleasant in summer.
Only the “Elite” with a sufficiently high ‘social credit score’ will be authorized to use air conditioning or electric lights. The lowly hoi polloi will live short, brutish lives of manual toil in the poorly yielding organic gardens.
Meanwhile, In China
That is after a very cold December 2023…
No wonder they are building so many COAL FIRED power plants. 🙂
Thank you China, for feeding the world, plant life.
nb, both images from https://realclimatescience.com/
‘Cold snap’? They really are reaching on that one, aren’t they? One, maybe two days would be a ‘snap’, but not as long as this.
in my first job in 1959, I worked in a factory in Sydney where steel wire was galvanised by pulling it through a bath of molten Zinc ( temperature around 600C). To ensure that the coating was uniform, after emerging from the zinc bath, the wires were drawn between pads of asbestos which wiped off the excess and put it bak into the zinc bath. One poor sod had to sit over the bath of molten Zinc and tend the wipers tightening them down or adjusting them. Surprisingly since it was before global warming had been invented, we had the odd week of heat waves in summer but even then but I don’t remember anyone dying on this job. It was a great job during winter but not so good during summer.
For what it is worth, here is the actual raw data of Tmax each day, curated by the Bureau of Meteorology and available for free download from their web site Climate Data Online. Sydney Observatory is one of the high quality stations.
The number of days above 100F each year has not changed there in the last 100 years.
End of arguments.
Geoff S
Geoff, using data to destroy their arguments will get you into trouble!!
Steve,
Yes, that is the fun.
My poor mind cannot devise a better way than the use of actual data in the simplest presentations.. Geoff S.
“Sydney Observatory is one of the high quality stations.”
Say What ?????
A small yard with walls all around it in the middle of a spiral of heavy traffic next to 6-8 lane highway heading over the Harbour Bridge ???
No “hotter and hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick profile there. In fact, just the opposite, as the chart shows it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today.
Where do climate alarmists get their Hockey Stick profiles? Not from the data.
Models. When you have tuned your model to the desired effect (ie – hotter) then you no longer need such primitive ideas like ‘data’.
That’s a pretty accurate description of what the data charlatans do.
I don’t trust anything the BOM ‘curates’. Show me the real data. BTW, we don’t call it ‘fudging’ anymore. It’s ‘homogenized’.
Yep they use all the really badly urban effected measurements to destroy any reality in the data less effected rural sites.
Sydney should beware the coming influx of Singaporeans in search of cooler climes.
Weather extremes driven by climate change
Really? Would these be as unproven as the extreme weather claim made by MetOrifice activist Claire Nasir on the BBC that when FOI’d revealed a lack of data?
Punkah ceiling ‘fans’ have been around for centuries. Moving the air around helps. But who the heck in ‘modern’ Sydney has them installed, and can afford a wallah to operate them.
The wallahs are running the place.
That’s ‘wally’ not ‘wallah’
“driven by climate change”
Excuse my ignorance but isn’t ‘climate’ accepted as a calculation, an average of 30 years of weather?
If so, then it cannot be a ‘driver’ of anything.
The rest of the quotes remind me of ads on TV for almost every new device where they show the stupid, uncoordinated, clumsy person attempting and failing to perform a simple task and the new device making life so much easier.
How did we survive these temps before air conditioners were the norm?
Last summer was relatively mild,
Cause… CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!
I wonder if they proof read their own copy before posting.
In the mid 1990s, Virginia temperatures reached over 100°F temperatures. Specifically 103°F one day and 104°F the next day.
I spent most of those days under my jacked up car removing the muffler and pipes from the exhaust manifold back to the bumper.
A lot of the time was using the collapsible jack to raise the front of the car, lower it, then raise the rear I only had two jack stands.
Actually, all of one day and a good portion of the next day were removing pipes, hangers and connectors.
It only took me a few hours in the afternoon to install the new pipes, quality connectors and new rubber hangers.
It was just another couple of days off.
I had hoped to be finished early and get some fishing in, but no such luck.
I did go buy a reciprocating saw to cut out the complex pipes around the catalytic converter so I could remove the adjacent connectors with a chisel while upright.
A few years later, my brother and I collected rocks in various Nevada washes and gullies while the temps were over 115°F. We used lots of water, both to keep hydrated and to spray our clothes for natural air conditioning.
It was much better than sweating at his house where his swamp cooler wasn’t cooling that kind of heat much.
One can always tell when people who live in fossil fueled air conditioning most of the time try to frighten people, including many who live and work outside with scary heat scenarios.