It was 113° in Los Angeles yesterday. That’s an all-time record high since record-keeping began in 1877.
Here in Seattle we are experiencing “incredible humidity”—incredible in the sense of difficult to believe. Cliff Mass is also calling it “extraordinary.”
This summer, the Northeast broke records for heat. Here in Seattle it was cooler than normal, with the average from April to August being 58.9°; last summer, we had record-breaking heat. However:
Meteorologists caution against reading too much into the hot weather, saying such a short-term weather pattern alone cannot be interpreted as a sign of global climate change.
Note the word “alone”—all these broken records aside, climate change is a scientific fact. The weather will never be ordinary again. We are screwed.
The weather has never been ordinary.
Quentin Tarantino’s film editor died while hiking with her dog in Griffith Park in the extreme heat.
Well at least next summer we can cool off in one of the multitude of city wading pools. Oh wait, shit.
@1 is correct. I’ve been around for a lot more years than most of you people, and I haven’t seen “normal” weather yet.
Actually, if you wanted to be correct, it hit at LEAST 115 here in L.A. yesterday.
It is not possible to doubt that global warming is taking place, but the weather doesn’t really have anything to do with it. Global warming isn’t about record highs, it’s about subtle worldwide shifts that cause dramatic alterations in processes. In a sense, global warming DID cause these freak weather events, but not in the way you think — not because “everything is hotter”. They were caused by changes in the natural process that secretly rules our lives: Pacific Ocean winds and currents and upwellings.
Getting hung up on hot days is just as silly as getting hung up on the inevitable record freezes and snowfalls that will follow this winter, somewhere. The wingnuts and tea baggers like 5280 will latch onto those and say “ah hah!” but they’re just as wrong.
@5 From the LA Times article: “Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working…. Because of the snafu, officials said it’s possible Monday’s temperature actually was hotter than 113 — but they might never know.”
The heat broke their thermometer! Al Gore was right!!!
I’ve been around for many years, too, and much more concerning to me than the weird weather patterns lately is whatever the fuck is happening in the oceans.
Over the last few years vacationing on the Oregon coast, I’ve seen more and more seabirds washing up dead from starvation on the shore, because they fly out so far looking for food they become exhausted and just drop. I’m not talking one or two — I’ve seen beaches littered with bird corpses, so many that the main food source for gulls there almost seems to be dead gulls, terns and puffins.
Every time I go back east to New England, there’s a new story of some bizarre sea animal cited offshore, like the manatee (!) that turned up lost off the coast, or the stinging Portuguese men-of-war that had beaches closed off and on this summer all over Cape Cod (they just found freshwater jellyfish in Walden Pond this month!). Fish kills, algae blooms, dead and anoxic zones, changes in upwellings — it might be climactic shift, it might be pollution or it might be something else, but it’s scary…
Well, there it is. The seventh seal has been opened. The sun has turned as black as sackcloth, and the moon has become as blood. The seas are boiling and the skies are falling. We’ve hit it for six. The baby is going out with the bathwater. We’ve struck an own goal. The balloon has gone up. The lights have gone out. Time to begin beating each other over the heads with our own severed limbs. We’re about to endure Old Testament, real wrath of god stuff, fire and brimstone falling from the sky, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, and dogs and cats, living together.
Oh, and mass hysteria.
Nah, jk, I’m sure we’ll be fine.
Pointing to events such as this as evidence of global climate change is as silly as pointing to last winter’s record snowfall on the east coast as evidence against climate change. If we’re going to roll our eyes at the fools who say “It’s snowing; global warming is a hoax” we should also mock those who say “It’s hot; must be global warming.”
#6 was faster than I.
Only Dennis Quaide and Jake Gyllenhall can save us with the power of METEOROLOGY now.
@8, my understanding is, the dead zone off the coast of Oregon, caused by an unprecedented mass upwelling of deep cold water, is now larger than the chemically-induced one in the Gulf of Mexico.
When the fish are all gone, a third of the world’s population dies.
I was here (and in the hot, hot SF Valley) for yesterday’s scorcher. Pretty miserable – even with air-conditioning because homes here are made with little or no insulation. Walls and ceilings heat up giving the home an oven like feel. The sun sets and one still feels waves of heat. Then you get the electricity bill with a total that implies that you’ve been running a grow-op.
I’ll take Seattle’s rainy, gray, chilly summer any day over this crap. Why would anyone – other than an exhibitionist – choose to live in this inferno?
I signed up for Severe Storm Alerts from the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center. Just got my first local tornado watch since the tornadoes that came ripping through here a couple weeks ago.
Tornado watch. In mother-fucking New York fucking City? Tornado watch?! Again?!?
I realize it’s not unheard of, yadda, yadda, BUT it’s also pretty fucking atypical of the region. This, as they say, Kids, ain’t Kansas.
The net result of “global warming” is lots more energy available to storm systems, through the magic of water vapor, as well as changes to seasonal weather patterns that are driven by those energy flows.
Whatever semblance of equilibrium weather patterns had a hundred years ago has clearly shifted. It’s not done shifting, either. Yeah, it was never entirely predictable, but it’s getting predictably worse.
But, not to despair. We will find a way. We could always move underground and become Morlocks. And, think of all the tasty Eloi!
I thought the humidity felt thick today… It can make me feel sick.
As I understand it, we have passed through a relatively temperate period in Earth’s weather history. That things would change is inevitable. But add our pollution and it’s the speed of change that becomes an issue.
@6, 10 – you aren’t wrong, but on the other hand, as I’ve seen said by a climatologist about the huge fires that almost burned Russia to ashes this summer or the Pakistani flooding, “The occurrence of these extreme events is like rolling a loaded die. Rolling a six is like having a record-setting high temperature. With global warming, the die is loaded so that sixes come up increasingly more often — as if the numbers one, two and three were slowly being replaced with sixes.”
@18, Russia was pretty bad. But extreme effects can come from very subtle causes. We could have a fire that bad in British Columbia next year quite easily, because of a simple one- or two-degree rise in temperatures — enough to keep from killing off the pine borer beetle over the winter, which has already devastated BC’s forests, killing off unimaginable swathes and setting the perfect conditions for a major series of fires.
@6, 8, 10, 18
That all may be, but you’ll never convince the climate zombies like 1 & 4.
The first plot on Cliff Mass’s page is cool as hell; it’s like a fountain of humid slime shooting straight across the Pacific and into Washington.
Fnarf, those pine borer beetles are also scary.
Where I grew up, in MA, there was a would-be genetic engineer hobbyist named Étienne Trouvelot who had a plan to crossbreed the European gypsy moth with silkworms in the 1860s, who allowed a single cluster of gypsy moth eggs to mature and escape to the woods of New England. Since then, gypsy moths have been spreading to the west and south in the US, defoliating an average of a million acres a year (13 million in one year in the 1980s)…
This is probably all a result of gay marriage.
Or it might be a secret plot by the same people who destroyed wtc building 7.
At about 2 AM it finally cooled off enough that I could fall asleep (I’m in LA). I have been running around taking constant cold showers and leaving my hair wet and braided. My little air conditioner works in this heat like leaving the freezer door open on accident all day: which is to say, not very well.
@13:
Which leads to a bitter, but nonetheless pertinent true-ism: We are only fucking up the planet for ourselves and other species currently living on it. The planet itself, however, will eventually achieve a state of equilibrium again. It just might not do so while Homo Sapiens still exist in abnormally large numbers.
Earth is about 4.5 B years old; our sun won’t begin decaying significantly for roughly another 2.5 B years; plenty of time for the old girl to clean house and do some serious remodeling.
@20 Never said I didn’t believe in climate change. What I said is that there is no such think as ordinary weather. The climate is always changing. I am commenting on the legions of Cassandra’s screaming that the sky is falling. Like @15. He must be new to NY, cause if had any clue he would know that while rare, tornadoes blow through the tri-state region every year or two. Global warming will manifest itself in much different ways than the odd high or low temp. Or go ahead, freak out when ever a record gets broken.
A while back, my father from New York City visited.
Looking at all the manicured Seattlites in their moderate weather he commented “John, no one sweats around here”.
Guess he’s changing his tune now.
@26,
I lived in New York ten years ago, and tornado warnings were not that unusual in the summer. What was unusual was for a tornado to actually materialize.
http://www.tornadoproject.com/alltorns/n…
I worked at the Nature Conservancy for five years, and there is no doubt among the scientists there that yes, in fact, climate change is happening. The normal ranges of plants, animals and insects is demonstrably changing – typically moving more northward here on our continent. Stressed trees are producing more pollen, and succumbing to more frequently to insects and fungi and molds, etc.
As to @26 — no, I believe you are wrong. There IS such a thing as ordinary weather. We’ve had a 10,000 year run of relatively stable, predictable global weather patterns. Weather that built the glaciers worldwide (now melting away), weather that was predictable enough to allow us to create agriculture and build a gianormous global society.
Now those predictable weather patterns are changing for the more chaotic. Agriculture will suffer because we will be unable to predict freezes in summer, too much rain, drought, and unseasonable heat enough to protect huge fields of monocropped food-plants.
Like Russia’s decimated wheat crop and wheat export ban, you can easily expect that more nations will have to do the same. And you can guess the obvious results.
Perhaps we should expand our home Victory Gardens and P-Patches 10-20 fold in order to have a bit more around, in smaller batches that are easier to protect.
And then there’s drinking water…
@29,
Did you bother looking at your own link and noting that only ONE New York borough is listed there and it’s had ONE documented tornado in 90 years?
Jesus Christ.
@30
Look I’m not going to argue with because you are right. I think we are disagreeing on semantics perhaps. Yes the weather has been relatively calm for the last 10,000 years. But within that time period there are fluctuations. Sometimes pretty wild (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Y…) but par for the course nonetheless. That’s why I don’t get excited when Los Angeles breaks a heat record.
@31
1. You said NY and that’s what I gave you. Read your post and quit your bitching.
2. Also I said “tri-state” area in the post that you responded to. So to you it is odd to have a tornado in NYC but perfectly normal for tornadoes to hit in Suffolk and Nassau counties?
3. The chart is only to I think 1985, here is some more recent NYC tornado activity
http://nyc.gov/html/oem/html/hazards/wea…
I teach a workshop on information literacy. If you like I can help you use the internet to find all kinds of interesting facts!
I too thought the Cliff Mass plots were cool 😀 It certainly explains why my bed sheets were damp when i went to sleep last night.
Virtually every time I hear people talking about extreme heat and increased extreme weather patterns I hear people clarify that “this is not proof of global warming. You can’t say that any given extreme weather is caused by or indication of global warming. Global warming is a long term pattern and no single weather event should be thought of as proof.”
This is absolutely true.
Virtually every time it snows or gets cold I hear nothing but “SEE??!! SEE!?!?!?!?!?! Global warming is a hoax! It’s BS. There is no global warming and we know this for a fact because it still gets cold sometimes.”
Why is it those assholes are the only ones who get to use individual weather as proof of their idiotic claims? Why can’t we use hyperbole too?
History is rarely appreciated when it’s happening.
Weather is not climate.
@38: on the nail. It’s the difference between meteorology and climatology. Not that they aren’t linked, obviously…
So this is why I become drenched in sweat when riding my bike up only moderate inclines. I’m also endlessly fooled by the windows in my house: I look out, see a grim, gray sky, and put on a nice thick Pendleton only to curse myself when I step into the muggy outside.
@40 no, that’s hot flashes.
Anyone else notice that SLOG has Dan disease? All the top SLOG posts with the most responses are from Dan.