It’s only July
Friends got stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport for three hours last Wednesday as rare tornadoes ripped through the Chicago area. (Local newscasters call it Chicagoland, but that just sounds to me like an amusement park.) There was another tornado warning on Friday evening.
The heat is doing more than melt glaciers (Washington Post):
As the Northern Hemisphere approaches summer’s peak, heat is testing the limits of human survival in Earth’s hottest spots — and demonstrating the extremes that are increasingly possible and probable against the backdrop of accelerating global warming.
In recent days, China set an all-time high of nearly 126 degrees Fahrenheit, while Death Valley hit 128 degrees, two shy of the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth. Phoenix was expected to observe a record-breaking 19th consecutive day at or above 110 degrees Tuesday. And in the Middle East, the heat index reached 152 degrees, nearing — or surpassing — levels thought to be the most intense the human body can withstand.
Such conditions are more than enough to overwhelm the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature, experts said, and offer a glimpse of dangers only expected to become more prevalent as global warming increases extremes in heat and humidity.
A friend from India used to talk about it getting so hot that birds overwhelmed by it fell out of trees. Something to look forward to since we seem unwilling to do enough to stop climate change.