You will be. Because everywhere you look it’s a heat wave!
By late afternoon, temperatures at Midway Airport had reached 104 degrees, just one degree lower than the highest temperature ever recorded in the city, according to the National Weather Service.
Other parts of the Midwest also reached triple-digit temperatures. Temperatures hit 102 degrees in St. Louis and 101 in Iowa City, Iowa.
More after the break . . .
The skyrocketing temperatures prompted Chicago officials to implement an emergency response plan that was honed after 700 people died during a July 1995 heat wave. An automated calling system began contacting 40,000 elderly residents at 9 a.m. to inform them about the heat.
“If you looked at who died in 1995, it was not triathletes, it wasn’t people at ballparks, it wasn’t people at outdoor festivals, it was the elderly who were living alone,” said Dr. William Paul, acting commissioner of the city’s Department of Public Health.
Alabama temperatures climbed into the high 90s Monday in a continuing summer heat wave that has sent at least a few people to the hospital and produced a heat index that made it feel like 110 degrees in parts of west Alabama.
In neighboring Mississippi the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning Monday afternoon. A less severe heat advisory was issued for 12 counties in southwest Alabama.
. . . Jones said a high of 98 was recorded in Tuscaloosa over the weekend and that the mercury was expected to hit as high as 98 or 99 in parts of west or southwest Alabama Monday. He said the heat index would make it feel like it was 105 to 108 in most areas, but possibly as high as 110 to 115 in some places in west Alabama.
[June 26, 2005] The first official weekend of summer brought a scorching heat wave to the Northeast and Midwest, with temperatures climbing well into the 90s.
Boston reached a high of 95 degrees Saturday — the hottest the city has been since August 18, 2002 — and cracked the 90-degree mark again on Sunday. In response, city officials extended hours at some neighborhood pools to allow kids to keep cool.
In Michigan, temperatures on Sunday hit 94 in Battle Creek, 93 in Kalamazoo and 91 in Jackson. It’s the seventh-hottest June on record in the state, with an average temperature of 72.4 degrees — about 4 degrees above normal, the National Weather Service said.
Just outside Staff Sgt. Tom Murotake’s office, about 75 people — soldiers, their families and members of the community — splashed in the pool Saturday afternoon for an event perfect for the day’s weather: “Cooling off at Camp Roberts.”
But with temperatures hitting 111 degrees, Murotake hid in his air-conditioned office.
The last couple of days have been “beastly hot,” he said. “In my experience that’s somewhat normal for Camp Roberts.”
In Paso Robles, the National Weather Service recorded 103 degrees, marking the 12th straight day of above-100 temperatures. Last year at this time, temperatures were in the high 90s, according to the National Weather Service. One weather watcher recorded 105 degrees in Paso.
The owner of Cary Ice Co. said Monday he’s getting calls for up to 20 15-pound blocks of ice from Triangle residents who want to drop them into their swimming pools to cool down the water. That hasn’t happened in a few years, he said.
“It will cool down,” he said. “For how long is anyone’s guess.
“Like I tell them, if you’ve got 50,000 gallons of water and you’re trying to cool down, you know what you’re up against there.”
Indeed. Many areas of the state hit the upper 90s Monday and could top 100 degrees later this week.
. . . The forecast called for 103 degrees Tuesday and 101 Wednesday in the Triangle. If those forecasts hold, the temperatures would break the previous records set in 1949 for those dates by a few degrees, said Mike Strickler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Raleigh.
. . . In addition to 90-plus temperatures, the heat will combine with high humidity to produce heat indices _ or how it feels _ of 105 degrees to 110 degrees.
A heat wave that has been breaking records across the U.S. west is about to hit Washington.
. . . Parts of 23 states issued heat advisories this weekend, and hundreds of cities shattered temperature records.
The heat forced airlines to cancel flights, led cities to open cooling centres and distribute water, and raised the danger from wildfires.
“We’re absolutely having a hotter summer than normal. This is something that we actually saw coming for a while,” said climatologist Jeffrey Schultz of Weather 2000, a meteorological consulting firm.
“I feel like I’m breathing in a furnace,” a man in Atlanta said.
In Denver, another man said you “feel like you have three suns shining on you.
More than 150 high-temperature records were set in the January-to-April period this year, according to Dr Geoff Love, Director of Meteorology. The wide range of climate records include nation-wide averages, state averages and maximum and minimum temperatures for many places.
Following a warm start to the year – particularly in the northern half of the continent – Australia recorded a January-to-April mean temperature of 26.9 degrees Celsius, the highest on record since at least 1950 (the earliest year for which all-of-Australia mean temperatures can currently be estimated). The record mean temperature is 1.14 degrees above the average. The previous record, set in 1998, was 0.96 degrees above average, and 1998 went on to be Australia’s warmest year on record.
[From a 1996 Seminar by the US Global Change Research Program]
According to a recently released report from the World Meteorological Organization, the estimated global mean surface air temperature for 1995 was the highest since reliable temperature records began in 1861. The previous warmest year was 1990, which was just before the Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption that has suppressed temperatures for the past several years. The warmth in 1995, unlike that for 1990, could not be attributed to an El Nino because the average Equatorial Pacific Ocean temperature anomalies were near the 1961-90 average. Instead, the warmth was evident over other regions, including the North Atlantic Ocean, where sea surface temperatures were more than 1°C warmer in an area centered around the Azores. In addition, parts of Siberia were more that 3°C warmer than the 1961-1990 period. However, as would be expected because of year-to-year variations, the warmth was not uniform; Greenland, the northwest Atlantic Ocean, and the mid-latitudes of the North Pacific Ocean were actually cooler than average in 1995.
[From the National Research Council Report in 2000]
WASHINGTON — Despite differences in temperature data, strong evidence exists to show that the warming of the Earth’s surface is “undoubtedly real,” and that surface temperatures in the past two decades have risen at a rate substantially greater than average for the past 100 years, says a new report by the National Research Council of the National Academies.
HOW HOT IS HOT?
HOTTEST DECADES?
The 1980s turn out to be the hottest decade on record, with seven of the eight warmest years recorded up to 1990. Even the coldest years in the 1980s were warmer than the warmest years of the 1880s.
The 1980’s were the hottest decade on record…until the 1990’s.
The 1990’s were the warmest decade in at least 1,000 years.
The five hottest years on record all have occurred since 1997, and the 10 hottest since 1990.
Depending on who you ask, the hottest year on record used to be 1995 or 1997; but everyone agrees 1998 is the new record-holder, and by a big margin.
While 1998 remains the warmest year on record, 2002 surpassed 2001 to earn the number-two spot
The year 2003, marked by a sweltering summer and drought across large swaths of the planet, was the third hottest in nearly 150 years, the United Nations weather agency said Tuesday.
2004 is 4th hottest year for world since 1861, U.N. report says.
A weak El Nino and human-made greenhouse gases could make 2005 the warmest year since records started being kept in the late 1800s, NASA scientists said this week. “There has been a strong warming trend over the past 30 years, a trend that has been shown to be due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, based in New York.
Well, any rise in temperatures must be the result of natural forces. I’m sure human activity had nothing to do with it. Or did it?
For the last 420,000 years, until the beginning of the industrial revolution (~1750), this cycle of carbon exchange was in a quasi-stable equilibrium, i.e., the continual release and uptake of carbon kept CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere fluctuating between 180 ppm (parts per million) and 280 ppm. Since 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 31%, to a present level of 367 ppm. This increase in the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels and large-scale deforestation and land-use change. These human activities have forced the carbon cycle out of the state of equilibrium and out of the known range of variation.
Repeat after me: Global Warming is REAL.
Thank you and have a Good Morning.