Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
1-100 Celsius is about water freezing —> boiling and I’ve always been confused about why it’s so eminently logical to understand the weather by that scale.
1-100 Fahrenheit, meanwhile, is a really reasonable approximation of the habitable range of temperatures.
And you just showed this by having to establish for everyone that the upper bound of habitability is 37C. A completely random number anyone would forget.
No one “forgets” temperatures dude, 17°C might be meaningless to you but to me it’s just shirt and light jacket weather. Nobody forgets what the body temperature in Celsius is. It’s two digits, your brain can do it.
Fahrenheit simply puts the human at the center where physical phenomena like water freezing and boiling happen at “random” points on its scale, while Celsius takes two simple, constant (as long as you’re not on a mountain), verifiable points based on physics, where the temperature of a human body falls on a “random” place on it.
The point is very simple: if you have an unlabeled thermometer and need to calibrate it, you stick it in freezing water, mark 0, stick it in boiling water, mark 100, divide into equal segments, and it will be exactly right. If you want to do the same for Fahrenheit, you need another reference thermometer. (Unless you happen to have the same unspecified mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride that Fahrenheit supposedly originally used to mark the 0 point)
I appreciate the elegance of your field calibration, but it will not be “exactly right.” The boiling point of water is readable repeatable but sensitive to altitude and the contents of the water. Freezing is also sensitive to salt and mineral content, but even more basically: where’s this “freezing water” you can stick your thermometer into, that’s reliably == 0 degrees? Ice keeps getting colder, and melted water can be any temperature above 0.
Good in theory, but even if field calibration were a real need, it’s not very exact. And anyway, if you can work all that out, you can do it for F or C. Since no one will every forget 212 and 32, as you point out.
A substance undergoing phase change will hold its temperature until the change is complete. That means that once water starts freezing, it will be 0°C until it is all ice. Same goes for ice thawing. Yes only pure H2O will freeze at exactly 0°, but unless you deliberately put some shit in it it will be very, very, very close. Boiling is a bit more sensitive, but still a lot less than the natural variance between body temperatures in normal conditions.
You’re taking the procedure literally, but it was just to get a point across. Also, using the freezing and water boiling points of water was used to define Fahrenheit too for most of the 20th century.
I am sorry, but you are wrong, however you are not wrong at what you might expect me to call you out on.
There is nothing inherently superior with F for “habitable” temps, both C and F works fine for that, for me who is used to C, talking about body temps of 37 makes sense to me, for me 98.6 seems completely wrong.
It all boils down to what we are used to.
It’s funny how it’s supposed to be great to measure “human temperatures”, yet 98.6 is normal and 100 is a fever.
I agree that celcius is better, but this is a terrible point. This would be a biological reaction. Different topic.
You may be shocked to discover that we can also measure the temperature of water in F.
Your talking right and wrong is beside the point. No one scale is superior for any use, strictly speaking. The pint is that 1-100 in F relates in an intuitive way to the range of human habitation. That’s a more intuitive thing to base a scale on in my opinion. Now tell me my opinion is wrong, I dare ya!
I’d much rather know if I should expect ice or wet pavement outside than whatever 1 degree F is. What’s the difference to me, functionally, between 0 and 1 degrees F?
And 100 degrees F could be a nice day or an absolute hell depending on humidity. So it’s still not useful.
You just think it makes more sense because it’s what you are used to.
I explained it in objective terms. Human habitability range. We’re in a thread about weather exceeding what humans can withstand. That point is pretty easy to remember in F, as if the scale were determined by the extremes we can withstand, a fairly relevant range, regardless of what anyone is “used to.”
Fahrenheit wanted repeatable, laboratory-friendly reference points, not abstract physics.
These were the anchor points:
They could have chosen 100 °F for the human body, but then the math works out oddly for other common calculations (e.g., the freezing point of water is ~33.33). They went with 96 because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, and 4 (perfect for halving, quartering, and thirding with 18th-century tools). This placed the freezing point of water at exactly 1/3 the way up to the top anchor of 96.
It’s a system designed for convenience with ancient tools and ways-of-life. The boiling point of water wasn’t used because it was too difficult to reliably reproduce at the time.
What stands out here is that this does not necessarily model after some kind of “habitability zone.” Such a zone is only prescribed post-hoc, with the conventional understanding of Fahrenheit -> comfortability conveniently engrained in your intuitive reflex already.
The truth is, habitability changes based on factors like humidity too. I’ve experienced 120F that wasn’t so bad, dare I say it was a “nice toasty summer.” In contrast, I’ve experienced 75F with very high humidity and I wanted to die.
I agree that Celsius’ definability and reference points are more sensible.
All I ever say on this is that F has its appeal in everyday usability terms, because of how nicely 0-100 encapsulates our comfort zone. Not that it’s designed that way, it just happens to work nicely.
And whenever I say this much, people (not you) begin screaming at me about how I need to live my life by water’s phases changes :/
Yeah. I see your point that it’s a good rule of thumb, given it should as the human body temperature sits so close to 100F and that’s upper bound used. I see your point.
Boiling water hard to reliably reproduce? What?
I like the idea that it’s hard to boil water, but easy to find a person whose body temperature is exactly the same as the reference point.
Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too. It’s really not very easy at all to get any quantity of water to 100C stably and consistently throughout. Not easy enough to be a foundational reference, with the tools of a century or two ago. Boiling is also sensitive to altitude and pressure changes, and may be shifted slightly based on the mineral content of the water. It is in fact not dead simple.
No it won’t, who told you that? That’s not how thermodynamics works
As a temperature that could be consistently referenced with then-modern technology, yeah. You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.