It is so hot that I am unable to work in my shop, not having a working air conditioner. It has been the most non productive week in memory, I just can not work.
It is just miserable out there. It was 106° last night at 4:30 driving back into my valley. You get burned when you merely touch your steering wheel.
Of course I have friends in Phoenix that consider 106° child's play, it looks like igloo city I suppose when you are facing 119° to 122°.
Never understood the allure of that city but that is probably just me and a lot of wealthy people do live there so it certainly must have its charms. They just don't go outside.
I read this morning that August was the hottest month ever recorded globally or in a tie with July of 2023 anyway.
From NPR:
WASHINGTON — Earth cooked to its hottest month on record in August, blowing far past a key climate threshold, due to the dangerous double whammy of human-caused climate change and a supersized El Nino, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
August's sizzle also helped push the globe and the United States to swelter through the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer scientists have measured.
Last month the world averaged 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit (16.96 degrees Celsius), which technically was one-hundredth of a degree Celsius more than the all-time global mark set in July 2023, but because that's also the uncertainty level, it's considered a tie, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for Copernicus.
"It is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer. This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago," Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said in an email. "The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records (we will), but whether we're going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over."
Well, Andrew, if I had to make a bet, I say we will do nothing and get run over. But I tend to be a pessimist.
I have a buddy on the right that doesn't believe in climate change. His source and the darling of many on the right is this guy John Christy, now retired from Alabama Huntsville. Christy's views run counter to 98% of all climate scientists.
Doesn't believe Greenhouse gases contribute to warming, thinks the thirties were warmer, thinks the problem is that the temperature stations are located on asphalt and that if we do have global warming, it will sure be better than the opposite.
"If it’s just between you and me I’ll just say I prefer the temperature going up than going down… When it goes down we have ice ages that occur and nobody wins in an ice age." John Christy
Christy did something interesting with his data; to prove his point he just created a new graph metric that excluded the really hot days.
Brilliant!
He also appears to have a theological axe to grind.
A devout Baptist, Christy believes that "the use of carbon-based energy" is "needed to lengthen and enhance the quality of human life", which is the "moral imperative." He has argued that efforts to limit greenhouse pollution are "trying to control how others live".
I don't want to control how you live, or think, just don't try to tell me it's not hotter than it has ever been. Of course, he is not the only one indulging in such chicanery, the Heartland Institute is funded by big business to regularly put up a steady load of the same kind of dross.
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So the other day the Federal Judge said that we had no constitutional right to clean water and I assume air and that it was okay for the government to lie to you. I wrote about it here.
It doesn't look like the government is very effective in cleaning up the lead mess either.
I saw today that three states have now made it illegal for people to test for chemicals in the atmosphere.
As the US’s network for monitoring air pollution deteriorates, a Floodlight investigation has found that the chemical industry is going state-to-state to restrict one of the few options citizens have left for holding polluters accountable: low-cost air sensors.
Over the past two years, the non-profit investigative newsroom determined, lawmakers in Louisiana, Kentucky and Ohio have passed strikingly similar laws barring regulators from acting on air-quality data that communities collect themselves – unless it comes from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-approved equipment that typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. Similar legislation has repeatedly been introduced in West Virginia.
Yet when lawmakers in West Virginia offered a version of a bill that would have let regulators consider community data if it met manufacturer requirements, industry refused to back it.
The bill “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent”, wrote Jeff Fritz, an official with the chemical giant Chemours, in an internal email. Bill Bissett of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association wrote that the compromise “neuters” the measure and left it “toothless”. That bill died, along with versions in 2025 and 2026.
Ohio slipped its monitor restriction into a budget bill last year, prompting a lawsuit from a group of plaintiffs including Donna Ballinger.
Ballinger has a low-cost monitor in her front yard in Middletown, Ohio, a few hundred feet from a steel plant that she says frequently sends black, white and gray particles on to her property. Fumes sometimes burn her eyes and throat, she said, and she often holds her nose when walking between her house and car.
“My fear is cancer,” she said.
The lawsuit she helped file alleges that the new rules make her monitor’s readings useless as evidence.
Shelby Co. Health Department questions integrity of community air monitoring report data
Community groups say Louisiana is trying to stop them from monitoring air pollution
https://grist.org/accountability/louisiana-groups-sue-over-air-monitoring-law-camra/
I think it is safe to say that you would have to be an idiot if you expect your government, big business, big chemicals and/or big polluters and the unholy tryst between all of them to keep you safe. Much like forever chemicals, or the EPA on lead pollution the official fallback is that they will be in your yards, water, body and air forever, might as well get used to it.
Somebody is making way too much money to stop.
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