This is momentarily interesting:
This map of the United States shows the range between the highest and lowest recorded extreme temperatures for each state. I think the most notable is that Alaska and California only differ by one degree. The state with the widest range, though, is Montana. Our New England states, which traditionally pride themselves on their tough winters and humid summers, are surprisingly middle-of-the-pack. Florida has the smallest range of the continental states, since, as you can tell from the data points, it is just basically fucking hot there all the time.
I’d love to see this broken down to a finer level of granularity so you could see the actual hot and cold spots in a given state.
The Top Ten Hottest Years Since Meteorological Records Have Been Kept:
- 2005
- 2007
- 2009
- 1998 (hey, how’d that get in here?)
- 2002
- 2003
- 2006
- 2004
- 2001
- 2008
Noticing a trend? No? Maybe this NY Times infographic might help:
The first six months of 2010 have already cinched this year taking the #1 spot on this list.
You might like the NYT article that graph came from. It’s actually about how Congress and the Obama Administration are avoiding bringing up the climate bill that desperately needs passing. This Orion Magazine article by author Bill McKibben is even a little more pointed.
And for the denialists among you, a different Top Ten List: Ten Key Indicators That Global Warming is Undeniable. Stick that in your teabag and drink it.
It was officially 100° in Boston on Tuesday, which may not sound like that big of a deal to people who live in warmer parts of the country, but it has only happened twice in the last decade and only a handful of times in the last 100 years or so.
Tuesday also happened to be the point of Earth’s aphelion — the time of year when the planet is closest to the Sun — but this National Geographic article explains that the heat wave and the aphelion really have nothing to do with one another.
For the last couple of weeks, our weather here in Eastern Massachusetts has veered back and forth between temperatures in the 50s and the 80s, sometimes even on the same day. Back in March, we were hit with a trio of huge rain storms that caused “100-year” flooding, but which would have been paralyzing blizzards had the traditional colder temperatures of that time of year been in effect. Those of us who suffer from tree pollen allergies can attest that allergy season this year started early and has gone hard.
But, of course, as the Republicans of Maine point out, global climate change is nothing but a conspiracy of government and big business.
This article in The Economist by John Parker considers the blurring of the transitions between the four seasons as the entire globe gets and stays warmer and how it shows itself especially in the tropical climates, where seasonal variation was even more pronounced than here in the north and is felt even more strongly in its disruption of natural cycles in agriculture and among the flora and fauna.
The Boston Globe reports that long-time Boston television weatherman Don Kent has passed away.
For some thirty years, when New Englanders wanted to know what the weather forecast was, the ultimate voice of authority was WBZ’s Don Kent. Though he was not trained as a meteorologist, Kent was a self-taught weather expert and brought professionalism to a job that, as local television news became more and more formulaic in the 1970s, was so often used as “comic relief” or as an excuse to put a pretty girl in a tight dress on screen for five minutes to point at a map. Kent didn’t do goofy shtick, wear loud suits, or make happy talk. People knew that they could watch him on TV or listen to him on the radio and get a reliable forecast. These days, television weather forecasts dazzle with technology, though they over-sensationalize severe weather situations, but the model of using knowledgeable forecasters is a direct legacy of Don Kent’s career.
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, which marks the half-way point of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are already noticeably longer, but the cold weather has been hanging on with unusual tenacity this year, and so all eyes turn to Punxsutawney Phil to tell us if the weather will cut us a break or if we are destined to grind on with the bitter winds and biting temperatures. Because it’s still so cold, the maple syrup producers in New England are undoubtedly hoping Phil will not see his shadow — they are usually getting geared up in February for their production season in March, but when the weather stays cold, the sap doesn’t flow much.
I guess conditions are a bit milder in the New York City area, because here’s a first-hand account in the NYT from a woman who got to help out with a small sugaring operation right in the heart of Brooklyn. And by “small operation” I mean one sugar maple in some guy’s backyard, but they still do the whole thing with the taps and plastic tubing and buckets just like the farmers in Maine and Vermont. She got two gallons of sap for her efforts and then set up her own evaporator station in her kitchen to boil it down into Grade A syrup. You need 10 gallons of sap for 1 quart of syrup, so she didn’t get much finished product, but the very idea of boiling your own maple syrup on your stove seems like it would be a kick.
Here’s a clip from my favorite TV show, Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe, the host, helps a maple syrup farmer tap his trees, to help you get a sense of what the job is like. You can do it in your own backyard, too, if you have a sugar maple tree. This webpage has a video that tells you how to distinguish a sugar maple from other maple trees (which do not produce edible sap), since sugar maples are not as common in settled urban areas as Norway maples.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
