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Posted by PaulHoule 7/1/2025

Effectiveness of trees in reducing temperature, outdoor heat exposure in Vegas(iopscience.iop.org)
181 points | 147 commentspage 2
noobermin 7/2/2025|
I've only scanned the abstract but the conclusion seems too weak given the other stated findings. Sure given different metrics (air temp vs radiant heat) may give different stories for different trees, but that wouldn't lead me to conclude it needs to be evaluated on a "case by case basis" more so than the metric depends. That is not the same thing as "case by case basis."

They should be more proud of their findings. Why insult it out of the gate?

konsalexee 7/2/2025||
This is a repeating study, seeing this again and again, so not sure about its novelty.

In Europe we even assigned our first "Chief Heat Officer", which makes total sense.

nunodonato 7/2/2025|
what does he do?
konsalexee 7/2/2025||
*She

I have no clue

nunodonato 7/3/2025||
I guess she is... hot
onlypassingthru 7/2/2025||
> The selected tree species is Bur Oak, given that it is included in the SNWA Regional Plant (SNWA 2021) list, it is marked as a street tree in the list...

Who the hell is planting oaks in Vegas? Oaks are non native and moderately water intensive trees. If this study is based on oaks, it calls into question the validity of the data since this is a tree that absolutely does not belong in the Mojave desert.

ashoeafoot 7/2/2025|
oaks are at home in the Levante , syria, turkey Lebanon and spain - all partially desert places now, but oak foerested in the past.
onlypassingthru 7/2/2025||
Las Vegas averages ~4 inches of rain (a little more than 10 cms) per year with less than 2 days of precipitation per month, mostly in very short intense bursts. In June and July, when a tree needs it most because of the ever intensifying heat waves, the rains may not happen at all. Even the desert trees struggle in such an inhospitable environment and can be drought deciduous to conserve water (a notable desert adaptation among many). Without tons of water, an oak doesn't stand a chance.
sneak 7/2/2025||
The best way to produce shade in the Nevada desert is with solar panels.

The sky is rarely cloudy and solar just blasts all day every day here.

I covered my backyard in Vegas with ground panels and now I charge my EV off of a 100% off grid solar system. The sun provides enough energy in my small yard for 2-3x my driving needs.

pfdietz 7/2/2025|
Solar panels can be engineered to also optimize cooling, by selectively increasing their reflectivity at wavelengths that are neither useful for electricity production nor for radiation of their waste thermal energy.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/fan/publication/Li_ACSPhotoni...

"[...] we design a photonic cooler made of one- dimensional photonic films that can strongly radiate heat through its thermal emission while also significantly reflecting the solar spectrum in the sub-band-gap and ultraviolet regimes. We show that applying this photonic cooler to a solar panel can lower the cell temperature by over 5.7 °C."

westonplatter0 7/1/2025||
I remember seeing similar heat reduction claims in a more tropical, non desert env. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/green-corridors-medellin-c...
cgannett 7/2/2025||
I think that's why Alabama despite all its flaws doesn't have quite as much projected warming as other southern states: lots of trees.
kjkjadksj 7/2/2025|
Does it really look different than say MS or georgia or the carolinas though?
schaefer 7/2/2025||
As a matter of local trivia, today (2025.07.01) we had a wind storm in vegas that downed many trees. :)
gerdesj 7/1/2025||
I've just been presented with a captcha thingie asking me to select all things that can be picked up by a pair of chopsticks described as "the tool in the image"

Fuck off.

Then that vanished and another even more vapid effort appeared.

Fuck off.

If you need to piss around with this sort of nonsense, you probably shouldn't be entrusted with a website.

petesergeant 7/2/2025||
https://www.radware.com/products/bot-manager/

This seems to be the offending product being used, although the captchas themselves are standard hCaptcha.

out-of-ideas 7/1/2025||
i clicked the url and saw that first very weird looking captcha - then immediately closed the tab

looks like the archivers have trouble with it too; reminds me of the behavior of a virus with all the redirects lol

edit: for those with custom filterlists via ubo:

- ||iop.org

defrost 7/2/2025||
Archivers work fine for myself: https://archive.md/qUlES

There's also a direct PDF link https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ade17d/... that also prompts for captcha (unless you arrive there via the web version)

Looping redirects on archive.XX urls often traces back to the use of Cloudflare DNS resolver .. the archive folk have some beef with Cloudflare over (?) handling privacy (?) and loop redirects on connections that arrive via that path.

It's a new captcha type for myself also. Interesting as it requires spatial reasoning and a bridge of understanding between text request and objects in images - although it falls to the usual farm of human captcha solvers.

out-of-ideas 7/2/2025||
nice, well i am using quad9; archive.org had 503's too (edit: lol i wonder if it did complete for me but somehow something else caused a loop - i never went to the search prompt afterward)
EGreg 7/2/2025|
Is it just me, or has anyone also noticed that trees in southern climates closer to the equator (not jungles) have very few leaves and shade as opposed to trees in climates away from the equator (not tundras)?

What happens if you import northern US trees, the ones that produce a lot of shade, into southern states? Has this been tried?

It is also why there is very little shade in, say, Florida. Only occasional parts of the Martin Grade “scenic” highway look like a regular scene in the north.

lantry 7/2/2025||
The short answer is, they would die. The trees are the way they are because they've adapted to their environment. At a high level, trees in hot sunny areas will have smaller leaves because they can get enough sunlight from a smaller surface area, and smaller leaves lose less water.

But it is more complicated than that, of course. It's not just "how hot does it get", but also how much water is available, how windy it is, how cold it gets, and a million other environmental factors. That's why there is such a wide variety among the plants on earth.

(and yes, it has been tried. Check out the youtube channel "crime pays but botany doesn't")

shayway 7/2/2025||
Florida has plenty of shade, though you wouldn't know it considering our city planning. Anything that isn't too dense for humans is pure urban hellscape.
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