Sunday, July 16, 2006
Half-way there:In the Los Angeles Times we read: (emp add) 110, 122 (!) and More Dog Days to Come
By David Kelly and Melissa Pamer
Times Staff Writers
July 16, 2006
Excessive heat, severe fire danger, record-breaking energy consumption and, on top of that, bad air and rising humidity made for a day of extremes in Southern California on Saturday, with little relief expected in coming days.
Scorching temperatures reached into the triple digits, with only a few degrees separating Los Angeles communities and far-flung desert locales: 104 in Burbank and 108 in Palmdale; 110 in Woodland Hills and 107 in Yucca Valley. As the temperature rose, air conditioners hummed, busting electricity usage records for a Saturday throughout most of Southern California.
Downtown Los Angeles hit 97, falling one degree short of the record set in 1886, and at 89 degrees, the weather station at UCLA broke its record by one point. Indio registered an all-time high of 122, and the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park broke its record with 108. Elsewhere, temperatures skirted just below records, but mugginess made it feel much hotter. 122° That's half way between freezing and boiling! Global warming: we're just getting started and it's going to be worse than you think.
posted by Quiddity at 7/16/2006 01:49:00 AM
6 comments
I am so glad I don't live in Southern California...
Of course, I will be visiting there next month... *sigh*
It is presently 92 degrees in Rochester, NY.
I don't think that this has much to do with global warming, though. Global warming predicts increases in temperature much further in the future, and of much smaller magnitude--say 2-11 degrees between 1990 and 2100.
That is extremely significant on a global scale, but we're not going to see a global 15-degree difference between the average high for that day (107) and this temperature (122).
But global warming may change weather patterns, which could alter local temperatures by this much.
Weather like this helps the cause, but in reality, it has virtually nothing to do with global warming.
Unfortunately, although global warming starts slowly, the models indicate temperatures can climb exponentially. We could be seeing the very begining. Get ready.
djmm
I once met with uggabogga. That was the name of a superhero at a holloween party i went to when i was a kid. he would come out and everyone would chant his name!!! hahaha and then he would put a wet sponge underneath blindfolded people! it was so funny......
Jeremy said...
It predicts a "relatively small" increase in average temperatures.
The ancillary effects will be increases in the "swing" and large changes in localized weather patterns though.
That's what you're seeing.
Actually, probably not. We're probably going to see a near-term (i.e. now-next decade) shift in the jet streams, but they shift all the time, and it's probably not going to be a shift to anything that we haven't seen before, just to something that we haven't seen last for quite so long.
The major changes that will lead to continual weather like this are the destruction of the North Atlantic Conveyor or the massive realignmemt of prevailing winds (as in, no more westerlies at our lattitude).
Uh, last time I looked, the boiling point of water was 212 degrees F--not 244 degrees.
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