⊠forecast for Saturday
OMG.   Â
⊠forecast for tomorrow
126Âș, but itâs a dry heat, right?
âThe pressure was so intense that you felt it in your ears. We could hear the roof coming apart and smashing into another building. Windows breaking, flooding.â
⊠itâs true, we should probably look at the âapparent temperatureâ map instead
but it wonât have such big numbers in Death Valley
It got up to 97° heat index here today, and 99% humidity (though not at the same time - peak heat = minimum humidity). Weâre set to hit 100% humidity at 10pm, but by then itâll be down to 73°.
It was kind of magical, walked out and my glasses fogged up. Took a walk through the yard with the stray cat and all the plants were moist and it was like you could hear/feel them growing. Meanwhile itâs bright and sunny and raining, with a rainbow off in the east, lightning flashing and thunder rolling in from down south. My neighborâs house looked like it was on fire, because the sun was shining right on the roof and the rain that hit just puffed away in little clouds of steam.
Some of the yankees around here really arenât used to this heat and humidity though.
Derek Jeeter?
Nah, further north, New England. Land of a special type of weirdos. Home of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and people who shovel snow in shorts and a t-shirt.
⊠is it more apocalyptic to have a heat index of 116° in one place or 114° in three places
I think the real apocalyptic part is when the lows are over 85, so a body canât ever cool down, and starts the day overheated only to get even hotter.
Kim Stanley Robinsonâs Ministry for the Future begins with a really harrowing description of that. The book itself is optimistic, because he is, but the start is hard to read.
⊠all I know is itâs really gross out right now
From one air-conditioned space to another a mile away is a big sweaty ordeal
Hurricane Beryl accumulated strength quickly due to unseasonably warm water, while at the same time, extreme heat is expected to break some records in Death Valley. For our climate segment of the week, Bob Henson, meteorologist, journalist, regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections and author of The Thinking Personâs Guide to Climate Change â(American Meteorological Society, 2019), discusses how global warming is factoring into extreme weather events and how scientists are considering changing the scales in with which these events are measured.
Something I learned from this segment:
The warmest summer on record (in New York City) was 1966, and some of your listeners may remember the song Summer in the City , which came out that very summer, and really captured probably how it felt that summer.
I remember!
Hot town, summer in the city,
back of my neck gettinâ dirty and gritty,
cool cat, looking for a kitty,
gonna look in every corner of the city.
All around people looking half dead
walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head
But at night itâs a different world
go out and find a girl
come on come on and dance all night
despite the heat itâll be all right
And babe, donât you know itâs a pity
The days canât be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city
Great song. I donât remember the rest.
I do!
And Iâll bet you could sing along no problem if the song came on right now.