These are really good suggestions. Please take them to heart. 

Now that we are officially in summer, the heat (which will be worse this upcoming week compared to last week) seems to be playing with the brains of some people. The latest silliness from Washington.  And, from outside Washington: From, where else, Florida: --- And, From England --- Enjoy your summer!!

Sheesh, don't they have editors any more? I hope the heat mitigation efforts are much more successful than the Sports Illustrated  article about them. 

I've added a hilarious clip of Bill Nye, here .  --- original posting --- Consider these headlines: Now, take a look at the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center. If this forecast is correct, it would make 2024 the slowest start to a hurricane season since 2014! I'll be the very first to say that it could still be an awful hurricane season, slow start or not. But that's not the point. After the implications that it could be a quick start to the hurricane season, excuses are already being made. The forecasts of a bad hurricane season seem to center around the observation of warmer than average water in the hurricane breeding grounds. Some of us tried to point out that there is much more to hurricane formation than just water temperature, but those comments were largely cast aside.  Much of the above was based on Big Climate's fear mongering. As Dr. Ryan Maue pointed out on Twitter this morning, rather than using its own chief meteorologist Ginger Zee (a well...

Climate 'science,' where hype overcomes facts. This is what drives me crazy about climate 'science' and climate scientists. They should be condemning this unscientific nonsense in the strongest possible terms. Instead, silence. Here is the issue as reported by Bjorn Lomborg and Jo Nova , the allegedly scientific journal Lancet  attempted to visually overstate the number of deaths due to heat when we know -- and has been reported on this blog innumerable times -- cold kills far more. So, what did they do? They distorted the graph!  Below is the base axis: On the left is the legend for deaths due to cold. On the right side of zero is the axis for heat deaths. They are not close to being equal! The graph on the left is how it was presented in Lancet, which makes it look like heat deaths number far more than they actually do. On the right is Bjorn Lomborg's graph of the same numbers of deaths with the same axis. It becomes easy to see that cold kills ten times more than...

Since you've heard this from me many times, I decided to link to two other experts: Dr. Cliff Mass  has a PhD in meteorology and is a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington. Cliff walks his readers through the meteorology, here .  Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr.  is a policy expert in Colorado.  He works on the meteorology with his father, the distinguished Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. His piece on the incredible hype surrounding heat is here .  Addition:  July 23. Dr. Ryan Maue has plotted (above) the daily high temperatures from 2014 to 2022 in black with 2023 in red. As you can see, there is nothing especially unusual about this year.  It is all hype. 

It was so awful that an Amazon worker nearly  collapsed.  We now have the statistics and it was no big deal in either climate or weather terms. In fact, much of the northern third of the state was cooler than average! I'm not saying it wasn't quite hot for 3-4 days (it was) and I'm not saying it wasn't an inconvenience. But, Big Climate would have you think this was Texas' hottest summer ever. Not even close. 

Oy! While I reveal my age here, the fact is that I didn't have a single air conditioned classroom until I was in college; and even then it was probably half of them. Ironically, none of the meteorology classrooms at OU were air conditioned.  In the Great Plains and Midwest, one can get 100° days in late August and early September. Much of this problem could be solved is to go back to the "Labor Day to Memorial Day" schedules of 50 days ago. It will lessen the number of days with extreme heat.  Problem solved!

There has been, rightly, a lot of news coverage about the heatwave over the western half of the United States that is currently in progress. You've probably seen a lot of maps like the one below.  While it technically depicts the weather at roughly 18,000 feet above sea level, it is a decent proxy for where a heatwave exists.  The good news  is that the heatwave is going to break. This is the same model's forecast for eight days from now (Wednesday, 23rd). The very bad news  is that much of western half of the nation will continue drier than normal over the next week. 

Since the data collection ended on the 5th, we've had record rains in southeast Arkansas and northern Mississippi while the drought in the West has gotten worse. There is no sign of relief west of the Continental Divide. 

While I do not usually post the 6 to 10 day forecasts, this one is worth noting: the extreme heat forecasted for the western third of the United States. In many areas, record temperatures will be set. Wildfire danger will be extreme.  Please make sure that elderly or infirm people are cared for. This is a dangerous situation. 

Wednesday, the CDC was telling us about tornado warnings while using a fake picture of a tornado. Now this. It is  not  satire. Published yesterday: Our hard-earned tax dollars were just wasted to determine that heat deaths are more common where its hot than in, say, North Dakota. The next sentence is a real gem. Yeah, I needed tax dollars to be spent to tell me heat-related deaths don't occur in Montana in winter. What could be behind this nonsense? After all, I would think the CDC would be kind of busy with other things right now.  We find the likely answer toward the end. It is likely this study is intended as some sort of marker upon which to build global warming hype. Unbelievable. The CDC is obviously overstaffed and overfunded. It needs to be dismantled. In its place should be a small group of highly dedicated professionals who want to, you know, actually control disease.

The story is here . I have two comments: As Ronald Reagan said, "A government bureau is the closet thing we will see to eternal life on this earth." So, if there is a government panel set up to make energy saving suggestions, it will continue offering them (even if all of the good ones have previously been suggested), no matter how inane. The fact that almost no one can sleep with an 82° bedroom temperature is irrelevant. They've done their -- paid by our tax dollars -- appointed job even if it is useless. Second, if we let the people in government who believe it is their job to micromanage our lives to have even more power, things will morph from merely annoying to actually becoming dangerous.

This year, for National Heatstroke Prevention Day, there is a lot of focus on children perishing in the back seats of cars. Based on my research, the root problem is that children are stuck in the back seat due to unnecessary passenger side airbags. Three weeks ago, I wrote the above piece for this blog after a child heat death occurred outside of Wichita. I strongly recommend removing passenger side airbags. Details here .

If you see a child, infirm adult or pet in a parked car in hot weather  you may now take action and be protected by law.  Full details are  here .

Unfortunately, meteorologist Jan Null reports that two children died in hot cars this week. Texas, details .  North Carolina, details Never  leave a child unattended in a car.