In the 1950's when records were broke, it was about 50% for new lows, and 50% for new highs. Today when records are broken, its 90% for a new high temperature, with 10% for record low temperatures.

Get used to it, this is going to be much more common. Climate change is real. The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate. The Poles regulate the worlds weather. That cooling from the Poles, counters the heat from the Equator. When the caps are gone, and the cooling is no longer there, we are going to roast.

So, if a hot summer means global warming..... that must mean that a cold winter means global cooling, or is a cold winter just a weather pattern?

Which way is it global warming, uh... global cooling... uh climate change hoaxers?

Yeah, just call it climate change. That way you're covered no matter which way the weather, uh... climate change.... goes.

Glad to know that while homes in my state are being burnt to the ground by nature, weather, and certain ignorant people, that people are still talking about politics and/or @!$%#.

"Hey John, did you here that my best friend"s house burnt down?"

"That's what that damn red state deserves!"

or

"Inhofe should be sent to jail!"

or better yet

"It's @!$%#ing global warming!"

Yes, I'm a cursing, democratic Oklahoman, so unless another troll would like to draw conclusions just because the majority of us (NOTE: US; I wouldn't exclude myself from this state just because I don't agree with the majority) are crazy in some sense, they can go ahead and respond back to this post. But, just so you know, I won't be much fun to aurgue with, considering all I'll say is:

A. Not everyone here is a Republican. Hell, even I'm not 100% sure if I want to become a real Democrat or not, but I am mostly just defending people who are wrongfully attacked by comments that slam this state.

B. @!$%# you with bringing in politics when people are loosing their homes. When you can't PHYSICALLY HELP these people, keep your hate comments to yourself. You are not helping anything. Who the hell cares about Inhofe? It's not like your comment is going to send him to jail.

C. Unless you can change global warming with your comment, you can keep your comment to yourself, because all you'll be doing is getting support from people who believe you, or getting hate from the people who don't. You won't be the first person to think of this, and you won't be the last, so please, just send love/hope/prayers/whatever-else-you-want-that's-possitive to the people that have lost their homes. That's all they ask for.

I hope I've rested my case.

Anybody see a pattern between red states and the drought?

even after the finals they are still getting burned by the "Heat". did someone beat me to that joke? anyway, drink lots of water people in oklahoma (like i needed to type that), cause yall are getting it worse than anyone.

Mr grover, the gop, & the rushbo will tell you that the high temps are just part of a cycle. They cannot tell you how high the temps will get or how long their cycle will last. But they tell you again and again that the temps will come down but can't tell you about when it will.

And mr grover, the gop, & the rushbo including the romney man insist on building the keystone xl pipeline which will spew co2 like crazy and send co2 emissions to unheard of levels. Obama on the otherhand has brought the country co2 emissions levels nearly back to 1990 levels.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/us-co2-emissions-may-drop-to-1990-levels-this-year/

But this is just the start. We will need to reduce co2 levels in the atmosphere much, much more. And if you a/c bills exceed $100 per month, you should check into solar photovoltaic panels. I tell you that you will find that they are the only way to lower your electricity bills to nearly zero after 10 years.

First you will need to determine your solar photovoltaic payback period for the solar panel installation. It is nearly always less than 12 years. But if you are paying $200 to $300/month, the payback period will be much less. It has to with the cost of electricity when you use more and more. The last watt is the most costly. Ok. So what happens after the payback period is over. Then all of the power output of the photovoltaic solar system is free and while still under warranty for 25 years or more. If you do the math, solar photovoltaic systems are the way to go.

And more good news. Solyndra is finally getting out of bankruptcy. Soon you will be able to get sooo many watts out of your new solar system after you have past your pay back period that you can recharge your chevy volt and run around town at no cost and begin saving your gasoline costs too.

I am ashamed of the comments being made on this subject of fires in my state of Oklahoma. People, families and fellow Americans are losing their homes and everything they own. How dare you talk politics! Politics has nothing to do with wildfires. Most people in Oklahoma are hard working, decent and honest. It doesn't matter if your Rep. or Dem. homes are being burned to the ground and peoples lives are in danger. These comments make me sick. What kind of people are making these comments? Where is the compassion for your fellow Americans, your next door neighbor, your family. This country is in serious trouble so why don't you try to come up with some answers and quit bashing the good people of the state of Oklahoma! Our country is in trouble with the economy, jobs, healthcare, wars, housing. Why don't you try to raise your IQ and have a debate on making America better instead of bashing Oklahomans. If you can't talk about the topic of wildfires and the extreme heat, don't bother even posting. You are just showing that your not very smart and have no commonsense or values. I think the people making thses comments are idiots!

its hot here in kansas too. 23+ days of temps over 100 thus far, and august is just starting.

I live in Arizona which last summer extinguished the largest wildfire in state history. These are tragic events but closely conform to what scientists have been saying abut climate change. Deniers can continue their drumbeat but denials won't restore the atmosphere’s chemical composition to what it was 200 years ago.

I am not surprised there is no general agreement on this issue. It is one that requires humans to place greater value on the long run than the short run. Humans tend to be poor decision makers when facing such choices. However, that doesn’t make the lack of an effective long run decision on this subject any less tragic.

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]

Jeez Louise! They loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly -- Ever read grapes of wrath! They all moved to California.

Well, if it isn't a sign that global warming is real, then GOD must be punishing the Red States, like Oklahoma, for being evil^^. Too bad your fire departments are all for-profit corporations now and they refuse to put enough funds from their pockets into the fire equipment needed to handle the fires, without calling in every state around them, and the forest service, and the national guard, too, adding to the deficits in your home towns. But you also endorse reducing the siize of the federal government and FEMA,FDA, EPA, and all the services that allow your interstates to have maintained infrastructure. Maybe the rich corporations will get generous and fix your burnt homes and bridges. Sure they will^^.

The small places that are even hotter never get a story. Some of us have been living in 110 or better for weeks now.

Where did all you double digit IQ folks come from???

If it isn't climate change it's God's erath on some very bad people.

111 in OKC. Norm. My digital thermomter weather station in northern Tulsa county was 115 on Wednesday. The day OKC was 111, southern Tulsa county was 113. Heat records are being broken all over the state. Hate to say it, but hope that a hurricaine hits NE Texas. Seems that will be the only quick relif we woulg get. Sorry Texas but you could use rian also.

You Global Warming nuts that have been following false science for two decades (and has been proven to be faulty) make a claim based on one hot summer the world is coming to an end. Up until this year we have had record cold winters and record snow falls. When that is pointed out you remind the public that you can't base climate change on one single weather pattern, but you jump up and down on one hot summer in the middle of the country. By the Way it is just the midwest that is suffering such drought and high tempatures. The rest of the country is dealing with nurmal heat and moderate rain fall. Get off of your soap box. Few people are buying into your hoax.

Over 100 degrees in Oklahoma for weeks in the summer! My gosh, I guess in the the fifty plus years I've been here, I never noticed that it just started now...some summers are hot, some are hotter, they vary from year to year, its called weather.