If this were January, extreme hot temperatures across the country would be news. But it’s not. It’s mid-summer. Get over it. Nothing here but a plot by the news media to scare people half silly in order to keep them glued to their TVs so they can watch more commercials. I say, be sensible, stay hydrated and go about your business.
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@Mark Hottest June in history. Projections show increasing number of 95+ days. That's increasing beyond record hot days. Fire season in CA is now year 'round. Snows of Kilimanjaro are no more. And it's a media hoax?
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Climate change is a Chinese hoax! Let’s all go back to sleep.
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Right now in Ottawa, it is only 28 degrees. Oh! I forgot to mention it is 28 degrees Celsius not fahrenheit. In fahrenheit it is now 82.4 degrees in Ottawa. As Trevor Noah of the Daily Show said so well, may be if you said that it is 40 C instead of 104 F , it could make you feel cooler.
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Here in Florida, it’s just July. But overall the country is experiencing records in so many weather categories.
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Whose blood is it in those bloodsicles?
Also, who cleaned up the eggs and bacon on the street? Anyone?
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Another way to distract yourself from the heat: watch The Icelandic mystery “Trapped,” on Amazon Prime. Lots and lots of snow. Blowing snow (like...blizzard plus hurricane snow). Icelandic townspeople saying, with no ease of alarm, that the weather looks “really bad.” A partial corpse pulled from the frigid sea. A ferry captained by an untrustworthy Dane. A dodgy Lithuanian. A frozen corpse in the snow. More snow. Endless snow. You will be cold. I promise.
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"My phone said the temperature was 95 degrees in St. Louis but felt like 107. "
Your phone lied. The degree-expressed heat index is as bogus—as scientifically meaningless—as is the degree-expressed wind-chill factor. Both are real phenomena (humidity in summer heat and strong winds in winter cold increase discomfort), but they can't be expressed in degrees.
To take things to their logical absurdity, let's say you're an obese person with thick head hair. You're standing in full sun and there's no wind. The humidity is 100%. For some reason, you're wearing middle-weight clothing. The ambient air temperature is 96°. Your "feel-like" temperature is 158°!
Same for the wind-chill factor, which takes no account of whether you're standing at the corner of Portage and Main in Winnipeg (proverbially called the coldest corner in Canada, and Winnipeg is one of the coldest large cities in the world, if not the coldest) in January in a bikini or a thick buffalo coat.
Both things are simply hype to dramatize weather news.
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@Cyclist - You do have a point, however the inflated/deflated number gives one a sense of the intensity of the weather apart from the actual temperature. This means that a day that is 80 degrees without humidity is warm but not awful at all, but becomes unbearable as the humidity rises.
You post as a resident of San Jose, California, which isn’t far from where I lived for decades. It can be warm there sure, but it is nothing like the weather you get in the North and the East; you get no humidity and your winters are a total joke. So... basically you don’t know.
Don’t believe me? Come to Ontario in January when the weather will be a tolerable -20 Celsius (that’s minus 4 Fahrenheit), with a wind chill that takes it down to -35 Celsius.
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My asthma has kicked up this summer to the point I need my previously unused rescue inhaler. I found myself actually wheezing for the first time last week. It is a new thing for me to remain indoors on hot sunny summer days. Be safe and cool everyone.
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Guess we need some of that global warming, eh Donald??? Amirite??? right, yeah... hooo boy that was a good one.
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@Lionel Hutz But, but ... that's fake news! Who you gonna believe, Trump or your thermometer?
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I moved to Thailand 2 years ago. Hot in America? . . . Yaaaaawn
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it's hotter than Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise
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If the migrants being held in the southern containments have been miserable before, then this will be a test for their survival. Without necessary preventative measures, let us hope that this heat wave does not create a catastrophe for these people.
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It’s so hot I’ve abandoned all clothing.
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America with all its asphalt, buildings crowded together, outdated electrical systems, etc which was why I moved to Dominican Republic. The afternoon trade winds bring the high of 103 down to a breezy 88 in the evening starting around 5 in the afternoon. Until the sun can be blocked from overhead the US is going to get hotter I’ll just stay here and have a cold crevasse and watch the sun go down.
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@CathyK
Just don’t drink the bootleg alcohol!
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@CathyK, (from Oregon?), you realize, don’t you, that most of the United States is not “asphalt” or “buildings crowded together”? It can be plenty hot in the middle of a farm field. As for “outdated electrical systems, that’s odd. I assume you are referring to the recent NYC outage. Most of the US is not NYC.
The DR gets way too steamy for my taste. And tourists keep dying there.
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Being used to always lovely San Diego weather, I’m hiding out in the air conditioning on a research visit to Albany, New York. Today, I left half a buttery lemon cookie in the car. A good bit of the butter part seeped right in to the map underneath it. Good grief!
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America is becoming so hot, pretty soon Hades will be considered a cooling center.
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Nowadays in America, one simply has to say: It's not he heat; it's the stupidity.
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I was in London in 2001 or so when they had a blistering heatwave. As native Georgians [from the United States], my mother + I were astounded at the melting Brits. The lawn of Buckingham Palace was toast-dry, and no air conditioning was to be had in any pub. We were perfectly fine, being used to heat and all. I have sympathy for my brethren in the North. However, it's been about 100 degrees in the shade in my backyard in Rome, GA, which is between Atlanta and Chattanooga, TN, and the heat index puts us basically at 108 most days. At 10:00 p.m. it cools down to about 80 F. We have an air-conditioned home, but we're outside a lot. Come visit!
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@Elizabeth Ard — Expressed in degrees, the "heat index" has no scientific validity. It's a prop for TV weather personalities and reporters who should know better to hype their reports. It was not 108° in Chattanooga unless an accurate thermometer said it was.
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Trump changes his mind?
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@John
No he just loses it.
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We are blanketed by the cool marine layer here today, thank goodness. But speaking as someone with no AC in her home, I have the following suggestion for cooling. Lie down and place a bag of ice (place a thin towel between your skin and the bag) or a large-ish therapeutic frozen gel pack (I keep several in the freezer for headache treatment) on your breastbone. I have no idea why this works, since you don’t have a lot of vascular activity right there, but I find that it does wonders. Maybe it cools the lungs, or is close enough to the heart plumbing. Part of the effect it that it calms the body. I tend to get panicky when I’m overheated.
Please attend to your pets and livestock in this heat. They don’t always signal how much they are suffering.
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I was born in Arizona. When the AC would go out, I used to spritz my clothing with water and make sure the fan was on. I still do that here on hot days. The water evaporates pretty quickly but it works to cool you down. I also spritz my sheets on warm nights.
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@Mary T: Swamp coolers. Trees do the same thing.
@Mary T. That works when the humidity is low. Not so helpful in most of the affected regions.
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America is so hot that you need to go for skin cancer checks and use sunscreen lotion that has at least a 50+SPF. Maybe the NY Times can do an article on what sunscreens are the best to buy. The hotter the sun the more chance there is of getting skin cancer so go for a mole map check once a year and wear sun hats and sunglasses as I met someone who had skin cancer on their eye lids, between the fingers, and on the inside of their ears.
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@CK, um, there is no connection between heat and skin cancer. None.
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@Passion for Peaches
Too much exposure to the sun absolutely causes skin cancer; it's called melanoma and is often a killer.
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But, of course, the Occupant in the Oval Office denies global warming - just as he is in denial about anything else that does not affect him personally - because after all, he is a "stable genius." And who knows better than he - about global warming -when climate experts (that would, of course, exclude him - on just about everything) around the globe have confirmed the planet is heating at a frightening rate.
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So hot in AZ that two rivers caught fire. Granted, they had dried up and were completely devoid of water, but that sentence can’t be said all that often. Gila and Agua Fria river beds. We got up to around 117!
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@Scott L.
May you and all animals be safe in that tortuous heat.
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@Left Coast, yes, I always think of the pastured livestock and the cattle and sheep on more remote grazing lands, animals in massive feedlots, and chickens and pigs in their tortuous agricultural buildings. These creatures die from this kind of heat, and it is an awful way to go. And the horses being trucked across the border to Mexico for slaughter? I bet that practice doesn’t stop for a heat wave.
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If the Republicans stay in power you can expect this to be your future
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I know that facts and science have a strong liberal bias, but the first five months of 2019 place Earth on track for its third warmest year dating to 1880. Americans will ignore human caused global warming at our peril.
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Don't show imprisoned animals in zoos and think it's cute. Stop that.
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The world is getting warmer and water is going to become scarce. Local councils need to plan ahead for droughts when all the water supplies dry up.
If sea levels are rising then governments need to make more use of converting sea water to drinking water like they do on cruise ships.
Our winter in the South Island has been the warmest I've ever experienced. We've only had minus 2 degrees and it used to go down to minus 10 degrees and we've had some extreme temperatures for the middle of winter with massive swings. One day was even 17 degrees. That's the sort of temperature you'd expect in a Christchurch summer. lol!
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What are you talking about? Cookies bake at 350-375. Eggs fry in a reaction to oil heated above 250. Even in 110 degree weather, you would not be able to cook these items in the hot sun.
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@Bhibsen: I have a big Fresnel lens from a rear projection TV that will melt a brass padlock on a sunny day.
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I make Pupcycles. Stand a Steribone in a yogurt container, add a few treats and water - freeze. Pup gets some cool exercise while trying to get at the treats. One Dog used to pick up and drop the bone in an attempt to free the prize.
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In upstate NY, we are only 11 weeks away from the time of our earliest ever snowfall and 9 weeks past our latest ever.
We shall see.
I do remember that when they were broadcasting from the then new Busch Memorial Stadium inSt. Louis in the 60s, they placed dry ice on the color TV cameras to keep them cool.
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"It also prompts people to do the unusual, like fry eggs on a sidewalk..."
Honestly - if you can't get a stick of butter to melt on the sidewalk, you'll never get the eggs to fry. :)
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Last month (June) was the hottest month (globally) ever recorded. Last year was hotter than the year before, which was hotter than the year before...
How can that be? I have it on the highest authority that this is just a hoax. In fact, it's totally normal for it to be so hot that your driveway melts. Another fine day in 2019!
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