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I guess this is sort of a global warming debate. Or a comment on how the news media makes every weather event out to the the Worst, Most Unprecedented Event Ever. Don't get me wrong, the current heat wave is plenty nasty. But i want to keep it in perspective. I think we are quick to forget some of the brutal hot summers of the past. Some of the hottest summers that i remember on the East Coast were in the mid 1990s. We had 3 in a row that were hotter than hell. With the exception of 2002 and 2010, most of the summers in the past 15 years have fallen short of 1993, 1994, or 1995.
I am not sure i buy into the claims of summers getting hotter and hotter. Perhaps in the Midwest, but not everywhere else.
Hello? Remember 2009? It wasn't exactly a lifetime ago. IIRC, 2007 and 2008 were nothing to write home about.
Sometimes we get too caught up in the present. We simply live in a place prone to bouts of hot weather. That's not to diminish any records that have been broken, but I wouldn't make any climatic assumptions based on a few short years.
True. June 2004 was -2.7F below normal, July was -1.9F below normal, and August a tremendous -4.8F. Quite cool compared to recent summers.
It was also preceded by a cool May (-5.1F below normal), with a monthly maximum of only 70F/21C on two days, which was cooler than the monthly maximum for April (75F/24C).
July managed to hit 90F on one day.
August had a mean high of 68.7F, which has to be one of the coldest on record. There were four days that August with lows beneath or at 59F/15C, the coldest being August 10th featured a high of 53F (12C) - under cloudy skies. Brrrr....
In fact, September 2004 (59.1F) was a bit warmer than August (58.9F).
True. I remember it as being that way here too. Looking back at the actual records shows that that is kind of an exaggerated view, but we did only log eleven 80+F days that year, and three of them were in September. We had two cloudy days that didn't get out of the 50's in July and three days that didn't reach 60 in August, including a highly unusual maximum of 53 on August 10th. We did manage to hit 90F on one day in July.
What area are you talking about? I'm guessing you mean the U.S., but the lower 48 or the whole thing? And warmer since when?
The simplest answer is yes... but with a ton of qualifiers. Warmer summers than average, but maybe that warming already happened and we're just holding steady since then. Global temperature anomalies indicate that we are still warming, but narrowing that down to a single country, much less a single season, is far too complicated to give you a yes/no answer. The most solid evidence to me is that far more record highs are being broken (especially this summer, but also year-round) than record lows.
For the most part, the rhetoric about how warm this summer has been is not exaggeration. The most baffling part to me is that we're breaking temperature records left and right, but state all-time records all tend to be very old. I'm not sure if I have a good explanation for that... it can't all be faulty equipment or lack of standardization.
What area are you talking about? I'm guessing you mean the U.S., but the lower 48 or the whole thing? And warmer since when?
The simplest answer is yes... but with a ton of qualifiers. Warmer summers than average, but maybe that warming already happened and we're just holding steady since then. Global temperature anomalies indicate that we are still warming, but narrowing that down to a single country, much less a single season, is far too complicated to give you a yes/no answer. The most solid evidence to me is that far more record highs are being broken (especially this summer, but also year-round) than record lows.
For the most part, the rhetoric about how warm this summer has been is not exaggeration. The most baffling part to me is that we're breaking temperature records left and right, but state all-time records all tend to be very old. I'm not sure if I have a good explanation for that... it can't all be faulty equipment or lack of standardization.
That's exactly what I was going to say. The last six summers here have been relatively cool compared to the dry, sunny ones of much of the 90s/00s. All-time high rainfall and low sunshine records have been broken, but even when it's felt really cold we still haven't got near the all-time cold summer records of 100-300 years ago (I'm talking about historic Augusts in London which only got to 70F once, and most of the rest of the country not even that), and I'm not convinced we're still capable of it.
That's exactly what I was going to say. The last six summers here have been relatively cool compared to the dry, sunny ones of much of the 90s/00s. All-time high rainfall and low sunshine records have been broken, but even when it's felt really cold we still haven't got near the all-time cold summer records of 100-300 years ago (I'm talking about historic Augusts in London which only got to 70F once, and most of the rest of the country not even that), and I'm not convinced we're still capable of it.
Not to mention the several occasions when London (Camden Square) recorded summer night-time lows of around 3C or 4C in the late 19th century. The nearest we got in recent years is July 1993 when there were quite a few nights below 10C.
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