Summer’s record heat, drought point to longer-term climate issues

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Justin Pedretti, who owns a farm near the boat ramp in Bonaparte, Iowa, and first reported the fish kill.

Under the most wide-reaching drought since 1956, and torched by the hottest July on record dating from 1895, the United States has been under the kind of weather stress that climatologists say will be more common if the long-standing trend toward higher U.S. temperatures continues. Most immediately affected are the nation’s water sources and the people and crops that rely on them.

The flow of the Mississippi River has slowed — at times rivaling 40-year lows — allowing saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to seep far up the river channel, threatening community water supplies at the river mouth.

Summer’s record heat, drought point to longer-term climate issues – The Washington Post

The only reason July was listed as record heat was because NOAA cheated to produce the numbers. July of 1936 was hotter and it was followed by plummeting temperatures. July of 1950 was the coolest on record.

If people are going to get hysterical over cyclical weather, why not just panic that summer will continue to warm through December, or that the afternoon will continue to heat until midnight? It requires about as much brainpower.

Hansen wrote this in 1999, before he completely lost his integrity

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Whither U.S. Climate?

h/t to Marc Morano