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Posted by PaulHoule 3 days ago

Effectiveness of trees in reducing temperature, outdoor heat exposure in Vegas(iopscience.iop.org)
137 points | 105 commentspage 2
schaefer 2 days ago|
As a matter of local trivia, today (2025.07.01) we had a wind storm in vegas that downed many trees. :)
defrost 2 days ago||
Related:

Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees (npr.org) 21 days ago | 143 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231151

Nights in Las Vegas Are Becoming Dangerously Hot (nytimes.com) 10 months ago | 1 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41223831

gerdesj 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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)
sneak 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago|
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."

jgord 2 days ago||
any group strategy to push back against the overuse of whole-page captchas ?

Do we all need to run an AI browser plugin now that auto-fills cloudflare captchas ?

EGreg 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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 2 days ago||
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.
matthewfcarlson 2 days ago|
Surprise surprise, vegetation is way better than concrete when it comes to being comfortable in a city
pvorb 2 days ago||
Not building your city in the desert is also a good idea when it comes to being a comfortable city.
davidw 2 days ago|||
It costs less to cool than to heat, by and large. And deserts have a lot of sunshine that can be converted into electricity for cooling...
pvorb 2 days ago||
But lack of water will become a huge problem when your city is growing that fast in a heating climate.

Edit: And cooling only works inside buildings or cars. Part of a comfortable city is being able to go outside and have a social life outside of a casino.

margalabargala 2 days ago|||
Municipal uses like drinking, showering, and watering ornamental plants is a tiny pct of desert water use. Most of it is crop irrigation, because if you can will water into existence then crops grow great in sunny deserts.

If the US' alfalfa exports to Saudi Arabia went down by 10%, we would never have a municipal water shortage in the American West in the next century.

Dig1t 2 days ago||||
Lack of water is a political problem. We have vast oceans which can be desalinated. Israel gets 85% of its water from desalination, they have gone from water shortages to having a water surplus.

We pump oil via pipelines vast distances, we can do the same with water.

We have virtually unlimited energy locked in Uranium which could power desalination plants, or heck you could power them with solar.

There’s plenty of water for the whole planet. There’s also plenty of clean energy (see nuclear and solar point earlier). But tapping these resources requires a functional government or at least a bureaucracy willing to allow companies to build.

SpicyUme 2 days ago||||
There are people pushing for more shade in cities as an adaptation for a warming world. There is some crossover with the push for a reduction in cars and generally reducing the footprint of streets. Looking at old cities in hot climates I can see how this could make sense.

For Las Vegas, Cottonwoods are native and grow pretty quickly. Like many poplars they were used to grow shelterbelts.

AnimalMuppet 2 days ago|||
I don't think anybody ever moved to Vegas expecting to be able to have a street life.
helpfulclippy 2 days ago||
I used to hang out with my friends and neighbors outside all the time in Las Vegas.

...just not so much in May-August.

bigd34lh3r3 2 days ago||
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toast0 2 days ago|||
That's a great idea, but hard for the city of Las Vegas to implement. Clark County doesn't have any ability to build a city not in a desert either. The state of Nevada doesn't have much of anywhere to put a non-desert city either.

Very few municipalities are willing to deny new residents, either. It wouldn't be anywhere on my list of viable places to live, but population growth in the Las Vegas metro area has been consistently large since 1910 until recently (only 10% growth from 2010 to 2020). The municipalities should likely invest in livability and comfort where possible.