I realized that this summer, though hot, is most likely to be one of the coolest summers I experience in the rest of my life. What do you think of that?
Enjoying it while I can.
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
-Andy Bernard
I believe this heat may seem tolerable in comparison to future summers.
Ella and Cole said it best:
Yeah, don’t it always seem to go? You don’t know what you got 'til it’s gone.
mmm
The heat was hot and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound
Average to slightly cooler than normal in my part of Kentucky so far this summer, maybe one 90+ day.
The dryness (punctuated at intervals by sizable rains, but not often enough) is more of a concern.
For people in the Phoenix area, is 114F that much more intolerable than the usual 105F?
As someone who grew up in a place where 35C was hot, 40C was Hot, but 45 was HOT, yes you can tell the difference. And the survivability if things go wrong is quite different.
It is scary to me. I see another dust bowl event over several years of drought in the middle of America. Loss of food production, animal feed and grains for food.
The levels of heat in Arizona and Nevada are beyond anything I could tolerate.
It’s fairly mild by me, on Lake Michigan’s western shore. So far we’ve had the AC on only about 5 times, mainly at night to make sleeping more pleasant.
But go a 1/4 mile further inland and the heat gets unpleasant. Still, not worse than our typical summer in these parts. So far anyway.
I did spend a week in Tucson earlier this month, with highs hitting 110 every day. That was tedious, though the mornings and evenings were lovely.
I’m not happy about it; though here “too hot” is the upper 80’s and in the 90’s F, not (at least so far) 100+.
When I decided, years ago, where to settle down: part of the decision was that the Southeast was too warm for me, and I didn’t want to live in that climate. I wasn’t expecting that climate to move up here. We used to have very occasional days with highs in the upper 80’s/90’s and lows in the upper 60’s/70’s, which is a range in which I can’t cool the house enough by opening windows at night and closing them in the morning. An occasional day like that is tolerable. But now they happen for a large percentage of the summer and some of the spring and fall – gaah.
We have screwed ourselves; and, even if we manage to stop doing it, we’ll be living with the consequences for the rest of our lives and for at least the next couple of generations. There is apparently still a chance that those consequences may be something we, and most other species, can adapt to; but we’re not getting the 1970’s climate back any time soon.
It feels like the footsteps of doom, frankly. It hasn’t been exceedingly warm in this tiny corner of the planet but we’ve gotten about a year’s worth of precipitation in the last two months. There is massive devastation in New England due to flooding. Two inches this morning, on top of completely saturated soil. The major road between my house and my church was closed due to flooding this morning. Some billion dollars of agricultural damage.
People are dying of the heat, folks. Not just in countries filled with dark skinned poor people who don’t matter, but here, now, in the US. That’s what I think of the summer heat.
Let’s barbecue!
No! Bad Wonder Mutt!
frantically trying to get some other song stuck in my head
Yeah, around here it’s not the heat, it’s the wet heat that we’re getting. It’s overcast and raining all day today and there’s a tornado watch. I live a couple of hundred feet above sea level, but sea level is only a mile away and more local flooding is on the way.
Fairly normal in Montana so far… Wet and cool spring, above average snowpack last winter, now it’s getting into the eighties. Not too much smoke from Canadia. We might be having the only normal weather in the US.
Currently 78 degrees F at my house at 1pm today 7-16-23, just a few miles inland from the usually cold Pacific Ocean in Oregon. Will be higher inland. Was a lot hotter yesterday.
I am kind of liking that I now have California weather without having to move there. Normal weather might be 68 and misty cold.
Here in the midwest, Chicago area, it is been a quite cool summer. I don’t think we’ve hit 90 more than once. Works for me.
And I realize that the heat is something to comment on but it is a fact that many more people die of cold and do of heat.
I’m also in suburban Chicago; while, as @mundylion notes, it hasn’t been super-hot, we’ve been in the high 80s and low 90s a fair amount – and those temperatures are nearly always accompanied by significant humidity (dew points in the mid 60s and above). We’ve run our air conditioner for a fair amount of the summer.
What’s been more noteworthy has been the rain. May and June were both very dry, but since July started, we’ve gotten a lot of rain, including three different days on which we got well over an inch of rain in a fairly short period of time. This page has a chart of rainfall to date for the month, as measured at Midway Airport – halfway through the month, and we’re already at nearly 10" of rain, which is five times average for this point in July.
And, then, last week, we had three straight days (Wed-Fri) with significant severe weather outbreaks in the early evening, including quite a few tornadoes. That was exciting.
In upstate NY, the heat hasn’t been an issue – June was somewhat cooler than usual. The problem is rain. It’s been relentless that last few weeks, with flash flood warnings several times a week and downpours of 2-3 inches every few days.
Well, to be honest, despite probably setting an All-Time record (or very close, nearby city Tied it today) it hasn’t be all that bad. Only a few real scorchers so far, and most of May/June was actually pretty darn nice.
We’ll see…