A victory so hot you can taste it.. cut it with a knife, serve it with corn, drizzle it was sweat.
Yes, indeed, the NOAA is telling us now that July, 2012, was the hottest month ever. On record. Period.
Now, ‘ever’ a long time, and certainly since the NOAA didn’t exist forever, the ‘ever’ is a little limited by ‘in recorded history’ of the NOAA. But it’s worth noting, as the NOAA did, that this year has now surpassed the hottest period of time during the famed 1936 Dust Bowl. It goes without saying that this year, the dust bowl has returned. Corn crops and other farmland is drying up, becoming brittle. Rivers are drying and fish are dying. Riverbeds are just muddy as water levels drop to new lows. And the great and mighty Mississippi is ever-so-quickly becoming wimpy and weak.
So what does the hottest month on record mean to you? If you’re like me, it meant lots of air conditioner use, light headed feelings during noontime walks, damp clothing after a day of sweating. It was almost unbearable. And at times it was unbearable for many. People have died during this heat wave, along with those crops and animals. Also dead are the hopes of a nice yield during the harvest time. It was supposed to be a great crop this year. Those hopes quickly dried as quickly as rivers and streams. The harvest moon coming later this year may be a bad moon rising.
The other quotable notable from the NOAA report is this point from Jake Crouch, a scientist at NOAA’s National Climate Data Center:
Dry soils in the summer tend to drive up daytime temperatures, and because dry soils prevailed over so much of the United States, that helped make things hotter over a wide area, Crouch said by telephone.“The hotter it gets, the drier it gets, the hotter it gets,” Crouch said.What made this year different from the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 was nighttime temperatures, he said. In the Dust Bowl years, the warmth was largely driven by daytime highs. This July, the record heat was also pushed by warm nighttime temperatures – the overnight lows weren’t that low.
