Temps (Page 1 of 2)

It was only 87 here, but the humidity was over the moon. How did you manage two posts, MJ? I can delete it if you want.

Bill

It's been raining and cool to cold much of the past few weeks. And I'm glad it has been, otherwise hotter temperatures would make the new indoor paint off-gas more intensely.

That's what those of us north of the border pray for - colder weather.

And you're only about 50 miles north of me. I heard we were supposed to be cooler, too... maybe it will be 105 today instead of 110. Wow, it's a scorcher. I've given up on my garden... can't keep it watered enough and everything is dying.

LOL!

I dunno.  We had a nasty spell--over100°F at Newark Airport--back around 1990 or so.

Remember, we measure temperature in 100s of thousands of places, but most of them have had measurements for less than 80 years, and very few places had reliable measurents before 150 years ago.  Just on that basis, we'd expect a few record temperatures on any given day somewhere.

So many of the alarmist predictions have failed to happen.  The seas did not boil away in 1988.  Deserts are shrinking, not increasing, because plants can get more CO2 while losing less water.  C3 food plant yields are up worldwide.  (C4 plants cannot benefit as much.)

And look at what governments are trying to do.  The Netherlands is shutting down farmers.  The UK is planning to.  Ignorant people think that grazing land can support crops instead.  If it could, crops would already be planted there.  Grazing land is suitable for grass, though after decades of fertilization by cattle waste, it may be able to support wheat.

Most famines today are the result of war or government mismanagement.  (Most.  Not all.)  Most droughts could have been managed with planning; ditto most floods, including those you don't hear about because they were managed.  Some projects were stopped by Greens who consider every acre sacred, and care less for human life, or the measures that raise human life above "nasty, brutish, and short."

Call it what you will, but this heat is unprecedented. I've lived in this same place for thirty years, and I've never experienced anything like this July. Since August is typically our hottest month, I'm dreading what's coming next.

Today was slightly better—"only" 105 degrees, a full five degrees cooler than yesterday's record-breaking 110. We're still looking at another night of thunderstorms with lightning and dangerous winds, which has become the nightly routine.

The only comparable year I can remember was 2007, when we went more than three months without rain. That summer, I watched our hay fields turn brown and crisp, leaving me scrambling to buy hay from south Georgia where they'd actually had rainfall. By summer's end, I was trucking hay in from Texas because the entire East Coast looked like it had been torched.

If this July is any indication of what August holds, we might be looking at 2007 all over again—or worse.

The temp topped out yesterday at 97. There's still a heat advisory for today, although the forecast is for a balmy 94 degrees.

Let's get technical! Good stuff. I've never heard of the Milankovitch cycles. Very good.

I try to be a pragmatist. I don't want to spit in the water and give it to my children. We need to be good stewards with what's been given to us.

We're a bit late for that, don't you think? Try to find a piece of land, a river, a lake, a tree, a crop, an animal, a teabag(!), etc. that isn't contaminated by micro-plastics or other industrial pollutants.

Years ago, I thought about writing a story about some chemical/pollutant/GMO crop/etc. that causes all the men on Earth to become sterile. That eventually morphed into the faulty vaccine in Archangel Syndrome that brought civilization to its knees. Good thing too, as the world was running out of trees for toilet paper. A disaster of biblical proportions was narrowly averted thanks to Professor Elroy Winkley and his time travel equation: N=jc^2.

All it would take to fix everything that's wrong with the Earth is a monstrous asteroid. I'll allow your imaginations to fill in the blanks. :-)