Hot days coming here in California too. Drought has impacted the Southeast most of all, although you don't hear so much about that.
Posted by Mimikatz at July 3, 2007 06:27 PMA string of 90-degree Fahrenheit (F) days in Phoenix does not have the same public health implications as string of 90-degree days in Chicago.
Except when the those "90-degree Fahrenheit (F) days" are consistently the lows here in Phoenix now.
Some of the old timers here say the low temp never stayed in the 90's like it has been in recent years.
I'm not complaining, I love shoveling sunshine in the winter.
It's going to be close to record highs tomorrow, predicting 115 and above.
Great information Christina, thanks for all the links.
Posted by Seven of Six at July 3, 2007 06:32 PMWhat I hate to see is the homeless out in the heat constantly. I volunteered one day last summer and handed cold water out.
I'm not sure what the finally tally was, but I think that 42 lost their lives.
Posted by Seven of Six at July 3, 2007 06:40 PMI live in eastern Washington (desert/vineyards) and our humidity is low and our highs are high. We're expected to be near/in the 100's for the next five days or so.
When we lived in a place without AC, I took plastic wash basins, put a block of ice in them, set that on a TV tray and ran a fan over the ice. Worked great; somewhat like a swamp cooler. One in each bedroom and one in the living area. Most of the time we only had to do bedrooms at night.
I've even done that camping, if there was electrical hookups. Slept like babies. :-)
Posted by Jackie at July 3, 2007 06:52 PMThe Right Wing constantly picks on France for their ?15K heatwave deaths. That happened at the down time for the nation, a weird and wonderful happening I wish the USA experienced yearly. So compare 15K/60M France to 700/2.8M Chicago, and the rates are the same = .025%
I didn't use greater Chicago, which would have been lower than France, 1000/8M = .0125% or half.
So France, during their 3 week universal vacation, suffers an extreme heatwave, and their death rate nation-wide is the same as the city of Chicago's.
If France sucks, then so do we.
Posted by Richard W. Crews at July 3, 2007 11:16 PMSt. Louis is much like Chicago. We have days where the temperature can hoover between 95 to 103, with 80% to 100% humidity. These are killer days, literally. Clamy skin, stifling air so thick you can barely breath, and energy sapped from your body. Those are the days that a fan doesn't help much. I always feel sorry during these heat waves for those who have no relief.
"What I hate to see is the homeless out in the heat constantly. I volunteered one day last summer and handed cold water out."
Seven of Six, you are a good man.
Posted by Judith at July 4, 2007 04:49 AMi remember '95 / i was on the road between Utah and Vermont / stopped at a motel in Kansas / the ac had gone out / it was 99 at 9 in the evening / tried the wet towel method / finally altered my traveling habits and drove at night / now i live in SE Utah where we have already had several weeks of daytime triple digit temps / the key is drinking enough water (if your lips are dry you are dehydrated and no amount of lip balm will rehydrate you) with salt added if necessary to help retain the moisture / the other key is dressing in loose white clothes / white is 9 degrees cooler than colour / i shudder at the heat wave deaths, including kids and pets in hot cars
thanks for a very informative article
during the hot season i get up at 5am to take my walk and do my gardening / i am fortunately an old lady at leisure and can choose my schedule to swing with the weather
katherine
Posted by Katherine Hunter at July 4, 2007 06:57 AMThe Right Wing constantly picks on France for their ?15K heatwave deaths.
I clearly recall Limbaugh and similar bottom-feeder rabies-radio parasites laughing about this news at the time. Disgusting.
Posted by Mike G at July 4, 2007 01:16 PMWe laughed because those younger of age were on vacation or holiday as they call it. They didn't cut short their holiday for the heat. They just couldn't be bothered. How short memoried you people are.
Dr. Hulbe, why no mention of the effects of the sun or solar winds. Seems to me amongst others, that the common link between our climate change and the climate change on other planets is the sun and solar winds. Solar activity seems to be the driving force of the earth's changing climates. An active sun results in warmer temps and a calmer sun, cooler temps from the effects of solar winds creating more clouds.
Any regards for the Danish National Space Agency's demonstration the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation?
Posted by peter at July 4, 2007 05:23 PMDr. Hulbe, don't bother responding to Peter. If you remember, he is 'the know everything' troll.
"We laughed because those younger of age were on vacation or holiday as they call it. They didn't cut short their holiday for the heat. They just couldn't be bothered. How short memoried you people are."
Yes Peter, we know they call it "Holiday." So, was it funny that the elderly died, since they didn't have youth to take them on Holiday?
Posted by Judith at July 4, 2007 06:38 PM
While no one disputes that things are heating up, the Earth has "been there and done that" many times in its 4.5-billion-year existence.
Most of the recent authenticated all-time highest temperatures were recorded well before global warming became a concern. For example, the hottest global temperature ever recorded was 58 C in Libya in 1922. Hottest in the U.S. was 57 C in Death Valley, Calif., in 1913. Saskatchewan boasts Canada's highest temperature of 45 C, at Midale and Yellow Grass in July 1937.
UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, one of the world's leading scientific groups, says the 2003 European heatwave, which killed more than 15,000, might be "unusually cool" by 2060 if high to medium emissions of greenhouse gases continue.
Dr. Patterson, a paleoclimatology specialist at Carleton University, says "Climate change is natural, so it cannot be stopped by car-pooling or turning down the thermostat. The only thing we can do about climate change is prepare for it." and “Greenhouse gases are natural and have been an integral part of the biosphere since life appeared on the planet,” he says. “The earth’s temperature would be –18 degrees Celsius if we got rid of greenhouse gases.”
Patterson's done the core samples and has seen a decade in the past where the temps rose 6C and today some of these people are concerned about just a .6 C change. Look to the Sun's activity to determine our climates changes.
We see marine productivity cycles that match well with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.
Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.
In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star's protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun's energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.
The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales.
In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.
Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change."
Posted by peter at July 4, 2007 09:02 PMI worked way out the Stevenson near Burr Ridge. My car was a convertible but without a/c. That wasn't too bad because I lived way up on the northside and as soon as I hit Lake Shore Drive I would get a tremendous cool breeze.
But it was especially hot that commute home and when I got to LSD...no breeze. It was as hot as comming in from the suburbs.
I made it up to Foster Ave, parked the car, and went inside my building. It was a cute little 3 or 4 story with no elevator. We had a/c but only because the once breezy apts had been chopped up into smaller ones that no longer had cross-ventilation.
I was beat...and hot. I trudged up my stairway looking forward to basking in some very artificial cool. Halfway up the stairs everything went black. Since my stairway didn't really have access to sunlight I'd never noticed how the lights were on 24 hours a day.
My wife met me at the door and it was still blessedly cool inside...but that wouldn't last. It was a Friday and we usually met friends that evening at a great pub at Foster and Clark. We decided to keep the tradition and venture out to see if the lights were still on at the bar and how many of our regular buddies would show up.
It was eerie. No street lights. No traffic lights. The sun was just setting and everything was getting darker. It was the last of dusk when we reached the bar. Everyone was sitting outside and the barowner simply gave away all the cold beer to his loyal bunch...with the proviso that there would be no going downstairs to get any more.
It was still hot. The sun was gone but zero relief. The beers were relaxing and the event was exciting but that was it for the evening out.
Feeling much braver, I pointed out to the gang that at the end of Foster Av...was Foster Ave Beach. And I said anyone in their right mind would go right now and jump in the lake.
Many of us did. The beach was jam-packed with people from all over the far northside. I stripped to my skivvies and waded in.
WOW! The air was at something around 90F and the water was about 60F. It was a tremendous shock. It was hard to breathe and as I looked back at the city I could see the waves of heat rolling along the surface of the water. I felt like a bottle of beer bobbing in a 4th of July cooler. But I could also feel the heat leaving the core of me so I stayed as long as I could.
I came back out to sit on the sand actually to warm up...but I was back in the water in a flash for a serious survival cool-down.
My wife, however, was too demure to strip in. We left and got back to the department about midnight. Still no juice.
It got hotter and, while I was holding up pretty well after the swim, my wife began feeling ill. I poured the bathtub full of cold water and tried to get her to stay in it.
That night was the hottest night in Chicago history. 100F at 03:00.
We didn't get power for a couple days.
That summer still ranks by some measures as the biggest loss of life to natural disaster in US history.
Posted by yanqui mike at July 4, 2007 09:22 PMSorry peter, Christina is a Dr. in this stuff.
May I ask what your credentials are?
Don't forget to back your shit up with some links dude. Or, no one will take you seriously.
peter reviews a number of common talking points. Rather than retread old ground, I would direct him (and anyone else who is interested in a refresher) to some past posts of mine, here and
here and both the post and comments thread here.
a side step from the doctor. I'm flatered. As old as June 15th, 2007. I guess thats just too old for the doctor, she has much more current knowledge. Yesterday maybe?
Some history...
Dr. Kukla, in 1972 a member of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in the field of astronomical forcing, became a central figure in convincing the United States government to take the dangers of climate change seriously. In January of that year, he and another geologist, Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened what would become a historic conference of top European and American investigators in Providence, R.I. The working conference's theme: "The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?"
Later that year, Drs. Kukla and Matthews highlighted the dangers of global cooling in Science magazine and, because of the urgency of the matter, in December they also alerted President Richard Nixon in a joint letter. The conference had reached a consensus, their letter stated, that "a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age."
The White House reacted swiftly to the letter, which described "substantially lowered food production" and "extreme weather anomalies," such as killer frosts and floods, as well as a warning that the Soviet Union might already be in the lead in preparing for the climate disturbances to come. By February 1973, the State Department had established a Panel on the Present Interglacial, which advised Drs. Kukla and Matthews that it "was seized of the matter."
Soon, numerous other government agencies were drawn in -- the issue was seen to be of paramount importance -- and by 1974, a federal government report, A United States Climate Program, cited evidence of the gathering storm, including:
"A killing winter freeze, followed by a severe summer heat wave in the United States.
"Drought in the Soviet Union producing a 12% shortfall in their grain production in 1972, forcing the country to purchase grain abroad, which in turn reduced world grain reserves and helped drive up food prices.
"Collapse of the Peruvian anchovy harvest in late 1972 and early 1973, related to fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, impacted world supplies of fertilizer, the soybean market and prices of other protein feed stocks.
"The anomalously low precipitation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest during the winter of 1972-73 depleted water-reservoir storage by an amount equivalent to an amount of water required to generate more than 7% of the electric energy for the region."
By 1975, the first of numerous bills, such as the "National Climate Program Act of 1975," was introduced to establish a co-ordinated national program of climate research, monitoring, prediction and contingency-planning analysis. Much congressional testimony spoke of the inadequacy of climate research and the need for preparedness. Meanwhile, the failure of the Soviet Union's wheat crop (and a subsequent high-profile U.S. wheat deal), the severe winter of 1976-77 and El Nino's influence on climate became dinner-table talk, heightening the government's desire to predict the climate. In September, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the National Climate Program Act into law, in aid of predicting future climate and combating global cooling. That act has now been enlisted in the effort to counter global warming.
Many today speak with derision of the 1970s global-cooling scare, seeing it as a cautionary false alarm. Others see it as an embarrassment -- Newsweek magazine, which published a 1975 article entitled "The Cooling World," even corrected the record with a 2006 follow-up to its 1975 article arguing that scientists now have it right.
Dr. Kukla sees it -- and the 1975 Newsweek article -- differently. Although the magazine article indicated that the cooling trend would be continuous, scientists knew otherwise. "None of us expected uninterrupted continuation of the trend," he states. Moreover, thanks to new evidence that Dr. Kukla only recently published, he now knows that global warming always precedes an ice age. That makes the current period of global warming a mere blip that constitutes additional indication of the ice age to come.
To Dr. Kukla, the fundamental issue here could not be more clear. For millions of years, the geologic record shows, Earth has experienced an ongoing cycle of ice ages, each typically lasting about 100,000 years, and each punctuated by briefer, warmer periods called interglacials, such as the one we are now in. This ongoing cycle closely matches cyclic variations in Earth's orbit around the sun.
"I feel we're on pretty solid ground in interpreting orbit around the sun as the primary driving force behind ice-age glaciation. The relationship is just too clear and consistent to allow reasonable doubt," Dr. Kukla said. "It's either that, or climate drives orbit, and that just doesn't make sense."
The greatest president ever signed onto this global cooling to the effect of signing legislature to contend with it. The IPCC's paper released just a month ago surely states there's no extreme urgency to do anything. Their paper has it taking hundreds maybe a thousand years to be detrimental to our society. No where near the ten years ALGORE keeps throwing out there as the point of no return. And if we're still usung gas a thousand years from now, I'd be surprised.
Dr. Hulbe, can you just address the Schwabe Cycle?
Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more than 5,000 years' worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. In years when warm summers dominated climate in the region, we clearly see far thicker layers of diatoms and fish scales than we do in cooler years. Ours is one of the highest-quality climate records available anywhere today and in it we see obvious confirmation that natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 62-year slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift in climate in only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny conditions to one that was mostly cold and rainy for several decades.
Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a "time series analysis" on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we have discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.
In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular solar variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that match well with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.
Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.
Dr. R. Timothy Patterson, He's in the business SOS. Look up the other doctors I listed.
Posted by peter at July 5, 2007 07:04 PMpeter A problem seems to be mixing time scales. To say that "warming precedes cooling" is of course correct on the 100,000 year time scales I wrote about here.
Another important issue is to take care with the difference between short (decadal or less) time scale variations related to oscillations in the coupled climate system and any trends upon which they may be superimposed (like the El Nino Southern Oscillation important to the south American anchovy fishery or the Northern Annular Mode and Arctic sea ice, which I wrote about here.
A recent review paper published in Nature on the issues of short time scale (11 year) cycles in solar luminosity is here. The gist of it is that changes in solar brightness are unlikely to have an influence on global climate. The state of knowledge about the effects of changes in UV output and magnetized plasmas is too poor to draw meaningful conclusions. And again, the difference between decadal (or shorter) scale cycles and any trends upon which they are superimposed is important.
The IPCC fourth assessment report working group three certainly does not state that there is no "urgency to do anything." I could link to another post here at Left Coaster but I think I'll refrain and suggest instead reading the summary for policy makers itself.
The comments use the word "our" a lot. Who is included in that company?
Posted by Christina at July 5, 2007 10:32 PM