This morning on Twitter, The Washington Post whined that “Today is going to be very hot in D.C.”
I followed the link. You know what they think is “very hot?”
They were expecting it to be between 97 and 102. (OK, actually it turned out to be 104 there; but that wasn’t what was forecast this morning.) Really. What we would consider to be middlin’ warm here in Famously Hot Columbia, SC. A good day for seersucker, perhaps, but no use complaining…
So I reTweeted that, adding the message, “Oh, yeah? Well, it’s going to be 107 here, you wimps…”
As it turns out, I was being modest, as you can see from the actual screenshot from my phone this afternoon.
Earlier, on NPR, I had heard someone marveling over how hot it was supposed to be in various places across the country. No mention of Columbia. And none of the forecasts cited were as hot as it was supposed to get here.
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All time record for Columbia, on any day, ever.
Brad,
Guess what? It IS very hot in Washington, D.C., today, and saying so isn’t whining, not when the National Weather Service issues an Excessive Heat Warning for the District. http://wxch.nl/OKSWVc) “Very hot” seems pretty accurate to me.
Besides, it was 118 degrees in Sulaibiya, Kuwait, today.
Who’s the wimp, now?
Best,
Jeff
Given their record on other issues this week, it’s the perfect time for Retropublicans to claim that global warming is a hoax.
My daughter texted me Wednesday that the drivers in Seattle were having trouble driving in morning traffic because the sun was in their eyes according the KING-TV Traffic report.
Two years ago when we were out there they were opening libraries and spray pools for the 85-degree “heat wave.”
Right.
@Joanne,
Does Seattle have a “Manhattenhenge” type event?
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/resources/starstruck/manhattanhenge/
@Joanne–I was quite miserable during a low 80s heat wave in London–the buildings are built to avoid drafts, not increase ventilation, and there is no A/C. It’s also humid. At least we are civilized here in famously hot Cola!
Burl – What about the Democrats who don’t believe in global warming?
Have you been talking to bud again?
Not sure about the “-henge” part, but they did celebrate the Solstice while I was out there.
“Burl – What about the Democrats who don’t believe in global warming?”
Point taken. There are idiots in every party.
Well, considering that the previous SC record highs were set in 1925 and 1954, I’d say that there’s hardly an established warming trend.
Could all this hot air be the result of all the blowhards at the Statehouse?
@Silence – you know you can’t enter that information into the discussion… it’s only current data that matters when discussing global warming.
If the government could just DO something to control the weather!
Well, considering the USDA gardening zones have been moved a half-step hotter, I’d say we have global warming…
Also, the hottest summer last year, hottest winter, and hottest spring.
It’s more accurately described as climate change–freakier weather over all—harsher storms, for example.
OK, I should have been more specific. Obviously our global greenhouse gas emissions reach the sun, and increase the sun’s energy output and sunspot activity. Just like they our activity caused the Medieval Warm Period from about 950-1250 and the subsequent Little Ice Age.
I’ll bet that both of those periods would have moved the USDA gardening zones around, too.
Kathryn is right — “global warming” was always a mischaracterization. We’re having climate change with extreme swings thanks to greenhousing.
Around here you’re only allowed to listen to NPR and Al Gore on matters involving weather.
That reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to write about here. In his books 1491 and 1493, Charles Mann reveals something most of us are unaware of — that the virgin wilderness that Europeans thought they found here, with its Adam-like native peoples living in such harmony with nature, is a huge misconception.
He presents evidence that Indians across both North and South America shaped the landscape, from the Great Plains to the Amazon rain forest, by planting what was advantageous for them to plant and burning off what wasn’t useful to them. Indian burning for agricultural purposes was on a grand scale. Even much of the Amazon was not so thickly forested when Columbus arrived.
But by the time Europeans first visited the area, smallpox and other Euro diseases had swept the continent and killed off the Indians who kept the forest burned back. This was the case across the Americas. The huge comeback of forests that occurred caused global cooling from about 1550 to 1850, at which point European deforestation restored the balance.
Very interesting.
@Silence–thing is, back when there weren’t a lot of permanent settlements on the edge of the ocean, or below sea level, it was easy to move inland. Not so much now.
There are no reputable experts in the field who do not believe that climate change is upon us. You don’t have to listen to NPR or Al Gore–just something other than Faux News….
@Brad – Or the sun went through a period of low solar activity – the Spörer, Monder and Dalton Minimums – from about 1460-1830.
Of course, from 1883-1888 things really cooled down quite a bit, after Krakatoa erupted.
All sorts of explanations have been offered. I just like Mann’s because it is so mind-blowing.
Actually, it’s not Mann’s. What he does is pull together the conclusions of others based on new research over the past couple of decades. The result is one challenge after another to what we THOUGHT we knew about the America that Columbus found — and even what happened after he found it.
The most dramatic shift in thinking came about as researchers determined that before European, and to some extent African, diseases swept the Americas — usually far out ahead of the actual physical settlement of Europeans (because the diseases migrated faster than they did) — there were many times as many Indians as has been supposed for most of our history. It’s just that by the time Europeans actually encountered their societies face-to-face, most of them were already wiped out.
The second most dramatic finding, to my thinking, is that these huge populations weren’t just tiptoeing over the landscape in soft moccasins, loath to change the state of nature. They actually shaped their environment deliberately and dramatically.
And Jeff, while I’ve got you — where’s that Dole story? And don’t tell me it was too hot in D.C. to write it…
@ Kathryn – I’m not disputing that the climate changes, but I do dispute the rate and magnitude that might be anthropogenic. The climate has been changing since long before we got here, and it’ll be changing long after we’re gone. There’s been some pretty extreme climate events in the distant past.
@Brad – I haven’t read the Mann books, but I have read that the aboriginal Americans were engaging in wholesale landscape modification, mainly via slash and burn, and that they were not the picture of low impact conservation that Iron Eyes Cody would have us believe.
Like Kathryn said, you don’t have to listen to NPR or Al Gore to know climate change is real. Walk on over to USC and talk to any scientist there. The evidence is irrefutable in the peer reviewed science literature – rather than publications of outliers that those who don’t want to believe hunt and peck to find. My husband is an analytical chemist, so I end up hanging around scientists a good bit. Go talk to a real scientist. We have plenty right here in Columbia. See what they think.
The planet never had 7 billion souls pumping prodigious amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently there is more CO2 than at any time in the last 400,000 years. Since most climatoligists agree that global warming is both real and man-made it seems a bit naive to try and argue the point. Sort of like arguing that the earth is flat.
Dole who?
@Silence–let me expand my statement then–no reputable expert does not believe that climate change is upon us and that it is caused largely by man.
“The planet never had 7 billion souls pumping prodigious amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere”
What we need is a good world-wide plague. I hear we’re only two or three strains away from an asian bird flu that will be immune to all currently available medicines. I’m not worried, Mother Nature has a way with handling overpopulation of any species.
Mother Nature has a way with handling overpopulation of any species.
-SD II
Which is a good argument for easy access to contraception so we don’t have to deal with the horrors of a mass die off.