| It's Feb 1st and I'm driving around with my A/C on. According to my phone the high today in Austin, TX today will be 77F. (It was 83F.) If you look at the historical record of Austin's high and low temperatures http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ewx/?n... maybe that's not so bad. On Jan 30, 1971 it was 90F. The record for today was set in 1963 at 83F. Austin's low temperatures are impressive too: Feb 1, 1951 it was 12F. In 1949 it was -2F on Jan 30.
But the average temperature range for Austin http://www.weather.com/weather... this time of year is between 62 and 40. Moreover, note that most of the US has "escaped winter" thus far this year. http://chrissearles.blogspot.c... January 2012 was, "statistically (speaking), an extremely off the charts heat wave for the whole month for most of the country." January 2012 was America's 2nd most heat record breaking month out of the last 12, second only to August 2011. And journalists are not asking climate scientists "is there a connection?"
Surely the press will start talking to climate scientists soon? As the world's fossil fuel industries boom2 and climate scientists cautiously advise http://chrissearles.blogspot.c... that our current weather/climate situation looks an awful lot like the scary, unsustainable scenario environmentalists like me are afraid of (as in the lots of "change" this century scenario), Central Texas stays dry. Really dry.
Oh sure, it's "rained," but I recommend checking the US Drought Monitor archive http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/... clicking the "Contiguous US" setting to "Texas" and noodling around between the graphics to get a sense of how hot and dry summer 2012 will likely be. Visit my website to see selected images for the state of Texas (and footnotes): http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
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