Hot enough for you?

image from readywisconsin which details heat dangers

The weather prediction for the 4th of July is in triple digits; only 5 states out of 50 did not have temperatures in the 90s or above this week.  In western states like Colorado, forests are badly dehydrated from droughts, resulting in unprecedented modern amounts of fires that have cost at least 2 lives so far, and the destruction of square miles of territory and hundreds of homes.  Those fires have resulted in particulate matter in the air that in conjunction with our heat and humidity has made being outdoors dangerous for a number of groups of people.  It isn't doing animals any good either, when we have more than 3,100 records for highest temperatures recorded broken in just one month. The heat index in Minnesota for July 2, 2012, the summer equivalent to our wind chill factor expressing how the heat feels to our body as a rate of object temperature change, ranged between 105 and 108 over the most populated section of the state.  A heat index over 105 is very dangerous.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that Minnesota is the 3rd fastest warming state.  Climate change, and global warming are world wide events, but not all areas warm equally.  The difference between an individual hot or cold day is that the changes form a pattern.  In the case of man-made climate change, those patterns are stark and have not occurred in a similar period of time before.  Where such drastic climate changes have occurred in the past, due to other causes, the results have been severe and harsh in the impacts on the struggle for life.  While we have modern conveniences that mitigate how WE experience those events, like air conditioning, using our air conditioning only makes the larger problem worse --- and is no use at all when more violent storms shut down power, as has happened on the Eastern seaboard.

From Climate Central:

Our state-by-state analysis of warming over the past 100 years shows where it warmed the most and where it warmed the least. We found that no matter how much or how little a given state warmed over that 100-year period, the pace of warming in all regions accelerated dramatically starting in the 1970s, coinciding with the time when the effect of greenhouse gases began to overwhelm the other natural and human influences on climate at the global and continental scales.

We looked at average daily temperatures for the continental 48 states from 1912 to the present, and also from 1970 to the present and found:

• Over the past 100 years, the top 10 states warmed 60 times faster than the bottom 10 (0.26°F per decade vs. 0.004°F per decade), when looking at average mean temperatures. During this timeframe, 45 states showed warming trends, although 21 were not statistically significant. Three states experienced a slight cooling trend.
• Since 1970, warming began accelerating everywhere. The speed of warming across the lower 48 more than tripled, from 0.127°F per decade over the 100-year period, to 0.435°F per decade since 1970, while the gap between the fast and slowly warming states narrowed significantly; the 10 fastest warming states heated up just twice as fast, not 60 times as fast as the 10 slowest warming states (0.60°F vs. 0.30°F per decade). Over the past 42 years 17 states warmed more than half a degree F per decade.
• The states that have warmed the most — whether you look at the past 100 years or just the past 40 — include northern-tier states from Minnesota to Maine and the Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. Places that have warmed the least include Southeast states, like Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, along with parts of the central Midwest, like Iowa and Nebraska.

graph courtesy of Paul Douglas by way of Conservation Minnesota

I would encourage readers to follow the link to the site; the interactive map showing the rates of warming from 1912 to 2011, and from 1970 to 2011, is a persuasive and dramatic representation of that change. 

I'm in the process of reading a book from 2005, The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.  It describes the many ways in which the right, not only Republicans but conservatives generally, have attacked science.  It breaks down those groups into the religious right, and the ideological right funded by special interest groups such as big oil..  It shows how dishonest they are, how manipulative they are, and ultimately how dangerous they are to any attempt at a rational public policy or ANY policy debate.  In the interval since 2005, the indicators are that global warming, from largely man-made causes, may in fact be occurring more rapidly than originally predicted.