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by rstuart4133 830 days ago
I also live in Brisbane, ie same area. Two examples of getting work done:

1. I was happing working in 36°C in November, but the temperature dropped to around 30°C after December and the humidity went up to near 100%. I got saturated in my own sweat on 50 meter walk to the work site. I worked outside for 1 hour stints, then retreated to aircon.

2. But not everyone could do that ... and in Brisbane, they died on the job. https://qnt.cfmeu.org/news/workers-walk-cross-river-rail-aft... I'm 64 and never head of seen of such a thing happening locally before. Remember, this is in Australia, a rich first world country, aircon everywhere, with some of the best medical resources on the planet (free).

On the news they were tell us we are seeing higher sustained humidity that Singapore, with higher temperatures. The government weather bureau predicted 20mm of rain over one night, and we got 200mm. Their explanation is while they have over 100 years of data, they had never seen this much moisture in the air before and so their models were untrained.

The Bureau said driver behind this is we get most of our moisture / rain fall from the Coral Sea, which is part of the Pacific. The El Nino on top of global warming has driven sea surface temperatures 1.5°C above normal. 1.5° - it sounds so small. What is terrifying is it is small. At the same time in Newfoundland the sea temperature was 8.5°C above normal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/28/ocean-temp... I guess the only reason people are still alive there in the average temperature is lower.