Oy vey.

It's about 11:00pm the temperature is 83 degrees with a real feel temp of 102 degrees.


This afternoon we had a temp of 96 degrees with a real feel temp pf 118 degrees.

Got AC?

And I'm sitting here listening to my money just float away. Last Months electric bill was 265 dollars. This Month? I shudder to think.

$430...I almost shit myself. My house isn't huge--it's average, I keep my air at 76 during the day and 74 (starting at about 10p.m. ending at 6 am) at night. I just replaced my heat pump/ac unit with a more efficient one. I have one kid still at home and he's in college. I have pool, but that doesn't run it up much. I'm going to call them and have them come out something isn't right.

Wish I could send it to you!

I hate that cold shit!

:)

If you recall the heatwave in Europe in 2003 where 35,000 died --

scientists connected the deaths not only to the daytime highs but to the fact

that the nighttime temps remained high and prevented citizens from being able

to recuperate from the daytime heat --

"... as earth's temps have been rising, the nighttime low temps have been rising

nearly twice as fast as the daytime high temps.

Before the building of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, daytime and

nighttime temps generally rose and fell in parallel. But as carbon levels levels

in the atmosphere have thickened, they have tended to trap heat during the evenings,

preventing it from radiating back into space once the sun has faded into the

nighttime sky."

Ross Gelbspan -- "Boiling Point" -- 1994 at most libraries --



And, we here in Central NJ have had temps in the 90's beginning in May -- !!

And, we've had 90 degrees throughout most of July -- with nighttime temps in high 80's!!

We're getting a bit of relief now --

but we're also getting more and more thunderstorms and threats of flooding.


What you have to understand is that we had a 50 year delay in our feeling the effects

of Global Warming -- though the glaciers began to melt in the 1940's with the start up

of war production/industrialization --

In fact, scientists knew in the 1880's the impact that industrialization was having on nature/

trees.

Meanwhile, this means that what we are feeling now only reflects human activity up to about

1960!! -- Think of all we did after that time!!

The effects of Global Warming will continue to increase -- and that includes more earthquakes

and more severe earthquakes --

Earthquakes also generate new volcanic activity.

For Florida this time of year. If we get a tropical storm, it might cool things off, depending on which side of the storm you are and if it pulls cooler air from up north. But it will still feel miserable since a storm will just raise the humidity even more.

and that ONLY in Florida the nighttime low temps aren't rising 2X as

fast as the daytime temps?


"... as earth's temps have been rising, the nighttime low temps have been rising

nearly twice as fast as the daytime high temps."


Btw, that's Ross Gelbspan in "Boiling Point" -- written in 2004 --

You might also check out his "The Heat is On!" -- at most libraries.

Out of the ordinary. I have not checked the dew point records for this year - I do think they are trending higher than the old averages. But they are not as extraordinarily higher than average as the temperatures in Texas, Oklahoma and much of the middle of the country this year.

Last year was part of the warmest ten year period in the history of record keeping for my part of Florida, though. What is interesting is that we also had one of the coldest winters on record, for total number of hours below freezing.

You also have to understand that Global Warming has been occurring since at least

the 1880's -- scientists certainly at that time could see the damage to nature/trees

from the Industrial revolution.

There won't be anything uniform about the changes at any given time --

Ireland this Spring and Summer has been very cool --

And I think some posters from Portland, Oregon here have said they have have had

similar coolness, cloudy weather which has prevented the crops from growing --

at least some of them.

No one can say how all of this will compound -- but we are only now beginning to feel

the effects of human activity from about 1960 onward --

Imagine all we did after that time!

I have been in Florida most of my life (about 30 years), yes we have had hot summers but not like this. The real feel temps in S.W. Florida have been in the triple digits all summer. Thats never happened before & also at night we always got some relief. Not now.

While the average was not as bad as this year, there were plenty of years this bad. Years when we'd strip the beds and hang out the sheets to try to get them dry for the next night - but the humidity was still so high in the daytime they never dried. Mom took clothes to the laundromat since they would not dry on the line - Dad offered to buy her a dryer, but in a house without AC that was not a good idea. It was her excuse to get into AC on the worst days.

As little kids in Polk County, we spent the summers playing under sprinklers or at the community swimming pool or at my grandmother's since she lived on a lake. After I got my horse, riding times started before dawn, so we could get out to the trails along the old phosphate pits that had trees growing on the dikes before the sun got high enough to really heat things up. By ten or eleven, we'd be at a shady place with a swimming hole - skinny dip, then take naps until the afternoon showers cooled things off a few degrees so we could ride back to town before dark.

Here in Tallahassee where I've lived since 1972, we've had a lot of years when the actual temperatures were over 100 and the humidity was 80-90% - heat index over 110, likely. This year the only reason the temps have not been that high is that we have been lucky enough to get regular afternoon thundershowers. Of course, that means the humidity heat index are higher than they would be otherwise.

It use to be the peninsula kept slightly cooler because the sea breezes brought in ocean cooled air and caused afternoon showers - is that no longer happening?

What are the forecasts down there for September? I'll be in Naples at a needlework seminar in mid-September. I was hoping to visit Corkscrew Swamp on my free day, but if it is still really hot and humid, I may just sleep out the day in the hotel.

Golfed yesterday and was soaked by the 2nd hole.

There is one in every extreme weather-related thread no matter how many records are broken.

And it gets a lot hotter than that in orlando even.

I'm a little worried about that relative humidity vis-a-vis wildland fires. At least there is no lightning in the forecast. And I am very happy with the relatively cool temperatures here this summer.


Yesterday's human-caused fire (probably accidental). This fire was 3.3 miles from my lookout tower. The RH when this fire popped up at 11:20 am was about 27%. It burned about 1/3 acre in grass and slash.