I don't know about the Northeast, but it sure is hot here in the Midwest.

Someone please tell me who took the rain.

I notice some of the comments confuse record temperatures with climate change. To determine the extent of climate change one must look at the year on year average temperature change. One might support the assertion of climate change by citing the rise in sea-level, year on year increase or decrease of average percipitation, decreaase of polar icecaps, and other manifestations that are linked to climate change.

LOL !!! OMFG Its 90 degrees in Vermont WOW!!! hmmmmmmm I guess people freak out in the east when it hits 90+ lol I guess it would be the same out here in the west when it snows 2 feet in a night ;)

The real sad part is that people in the Northeast need to be reminded that they need to take care of old folks during a heat wave....down here in the south we don't need to be reminded to take care of our elderly....we just do it....when we have a cold spell down here during the winter we don't have to be told to care of the old folk....it is something that is understood.

Count down has begun. This earth as we know it will be no more. Not the end of the world. You people need to get prepared. You need to get your paper money and buy gold and silver coins. You need to stock up on food water,medical supplies, all the essentials for you to survive through what has started. You can take this for a joke. but in six months it will no longer be a laughing matter, Yes what you see is Global. Read the Bible., Believe it: or you don't have to believe it. But you can't say you were not told. God is giving each of you a chance to turn your lives around and come to believe him. As this period progress some of most will believe there is A God. You shall call upon him, Then only by your Faith you shall hear from Him. You can call me a religion fanatic it's OK. I can say If I die I know I am going to heaven. There are two choices Heaven or Hell, and believe me Hell is Very Real. You have a rich man and people like yourselves who are not save and take this life as a Joke wish they can cross the boundaries to come and tell you Hell is Real. You say it's a myth I say it's real. Your time is running out. This isn't a political Thing, The president nor his law makes can not put any law to play to stop what is Happening. Stop playing. Get serious. We will have a nuke war soon, get prepared.

Love those kids playing baseball in Chicago regardless of the weather. Plenty of water and sunscreen should do the trick to keep them safe and off the couch infront of the TV.

I lived my first 31 years southwest Ohio and recall cool days even in early June. Low 90s was a real heat wave and they occurred in late July and August. This year there were 90s in March. In '92 we went camping in the area on the summer solstice and it got down to the low 40s. Deniers are correct that one weather event isn’t climate. But deniers should note that we never seem to hear of unusually cool weather events. The pattern seems to be one of drier than normal, unusually warm, drier than normal, unusually warm, with extreme storms mixed in. When a pattern sets up, that just may be the sign of climate. The pattern fits the profile of what scientists have been predicting for years.

I accept the science of humans changing the atmospheric chemical composition through globalized industrialization. Much to my frustration and concern for future generations, the political reality is that there are so many ignorant Americans (some by choice, some by circumstance) it will take many years of violent and powerful weather, unusually hot summers, drought, and increasingly acidic oceans before today's ignorant are dead and more informed voters decide to take action. The problem is that so much more pollution will have been added to the atmosphere by then that the train of climate change will have already left the station and the seas will inevitably rise. What I don't understand is that we buy insurance for our lives, homes, autos, and other valuables but we don't place a value on our planet by paying for insurance just in case the science is correct.

For those of us who don’t like to be ignorant about the science of altering the atmosphere's chemistry, I suggest the following books with a brief quote from each:

1. A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting, 1991 – “The net result of these human activities is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by a third in the last two hundred years – from about 270 parts per million in 1750 to 350 parts per million in the late 1980s. About half of this increase has occurred since the 1950s – carbon dioxide emissions rose from 1.6 billion tons a year in 1950 to 5.4 billion tons in the mid-1980s. Global use of fossil fuels is rising at about 4 per cent a year (which means a doubling every sixteen years) and carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere at about .5 per cent a year. Carbon dioxide has provided by far the greatest volume of greenhouse gas emissions and contributed about two-thirds of the total warming effect so far.” [page 388]
2. The Little Ice Age, Brian Fagan, 2000 – “The Little Ice Age reminds us that climate change is inevitable, unpredictable, and sometimes vicious. The future promises exactly the same kinds of violent change on a local and global scale. If the present, unusually prolonged high mode of the North Atlantic Oscillation is indeed due to anthropogenic forcing, then we must also assume that global warming will accentuate the natural cycles of global climate on the largest and smallest scales. Some of these potential cycles of change are frightening to contemplate in an overpopulated and heavily industrialized world.” [page 214] “Over a century ago, Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley urged us to be ‘humble before the facts’. The facts stare us in the face, yet we do not display sufficient humility. The vicissitudes of the Little Ice Age remind us of our vulnerability again and again. In a new climatic era, we would be wise to learn from the climatic lessons of history.” [page 217]
3. The Long Summer, Brian Fagan, 2004 – “Short-term climatic events like droughts do not often leave a clear footprint. But the droughts of the Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Climatic Anomaly, as it is often called) left giant tracks across the American west, wrought in deep-sea cores, pollen samples, tree rings, and ice cores from high in the Andes. From the California coast to the Maya lowlands to Lake Titicaca, five centuries of sudden aridity wrought havoc on human societies already living close to the environmental edge.” [pages 214-215]
4. The Weather Makers, Timothy Flannery, 2005 – “The concentration of C02 in the atmosphere in times past can be measured from bubbles of air preserved in ice. By drilling about two miles into the Antarctic ice cap, scientists have drawn out an ice core that spans almost a million years of Earth history. This unique record demonstrates that during cold times CO2 levels have dropped to around 160 parts per million, and until recently they never exceeded 280 parts per million. The Industrial Revolution changed that, albeit slowly, for even by 1958, when Keeling began his measurements of CO2 atop Mauna Loa, it was up to only 315 parts per million.” [page 29] “Today the figures are 380 parts per million….” [page 28]
5. Collapse, Jared Diamond, 2005 – “…the atmosphere really has been undergoing an unusually rapid rise in temperature recently and that human activities are the or a major cause. The remaining uncertainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g., whether average global temperatures will increase by ‘just’ 1.5 degrees Centigrade or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those numbers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global temperatures were ‘only’ 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.” [page 493]
6. The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock, 2006 – “Predictions of climate change do not depend only on theoretical models in the form of computer simulations of the Earth. There is now a vast array of monitoring activities sustained globally. Air and sea temperatures are continuously measured, as are the gases of the atmosphere, the cloud cover, the floating ice and the glaciers and the health of the ecosystems in the ocean and on the land. The truth of the models is therefore continuously tested against the observations coming in from the real world.” [page 57]
7. Dead Pool, James Lawrence Powell, 2008 – “The question is not whether the earth has warmed, but why? The scientific consensus is that the cause is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which absorb heat and trap it near the earth. In one of the most prescient predictions in science, in 1896 … Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted the very rise that we now observe. Based on the knowledge that carbon dioxide molecules trap heat, Arrhenius calculated that if atmospheric carbon dioxide level were to double, global temperatures would rise between 7 and 11 degrees F. More than a century later with vastly more information, IPCC forecasts that by 2100, temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.5 degrees F, overlapping the range the Swedish chemist forecast long ago. Arrhenius thought it might take three thousand years for carbon dioxide levels to double, but sadly that is one forecast that he got wrong.” [pages 171-2]
8. The Flooded Earth, Peter Ward, 2010 – “Our planet did not break out of the 180-280 ppm range until about 1800, when carbon dioxide levels began to rise well beyond the old upper limit. By 1900, the level was 295 ppm…. From 1900 to 2000, CO2 levels went from 295 all the way up the current level of about 385 – a 90 ppm rise in just a hundred years. The rate at which carbon dioxide is increasing…is accelerating. Models using the latest values of the measured rise for the past decade, and projecting forward, lead to an estimate that CO2 levels will nearly double in the next two centuries. That is the level of the Mesozoic Period and will cause the ice sheets to rapidly melt – all of them.” [pages 56-7]

I make these suggestions to help frame the science behind the issues associated with human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Many people seem ignorant of the science behind climate analysis and content to put their heads deeply into the sand. The defining characteristic of humanity, complex intelligence, is enhanced by a broad liberal education. Thomas Jefferson had this to say about higher education including science: “the university [of Virginia] would be ‘now qualified to raise its youth to an order of science unequalled in any other state; and this superiority will be greater from the free range of mind encouraged there, and the restraint imposed at other seminaries by the shackles of a domineering hierarchy and a bigoted adhesion to ancient habits.’” [from Thomas Jefferson, Willard Sterne Randall, 1993, page 588]

The heat here is bad, but not as bad as last year when the heat index hit 116!

Of course my air conditioner chose this week to completely die (so no central air). My two toddlers have been up at night screaming for hours due to the heat for two days now. and that's with the window ACs we bought! It really is gross outside and the humidity makes it so much worse. I grew up in the south and the Northeast gets pretty much as hot as my hometown did! I can't believe it.

Great, now we are getting a Cool Wave for the next couple of days. Low 70s. I call this the great Global Fluctuation Period.