The Southeastern United States is experiencing an Unusual drought, part of the extreme weather condition pattern that is probably related to anthropogenic global warming.Government climate scientists are using terms such as exceptional and extreme drought to describe the current situation which extends from Arizona eastward into Texas and then into Gulf Cost and South Atlantic Coast states as far north as Maryland and Delaware.
To get an idea about the extent of this years drought event, I looked at a discussion by Weather Reporter Matt Engelbrecht of WITN TV in Greeenville, North Carolina. Engelbrecht found that in contrast to a rainfall average of 9" for may and June, Eastern Carolina received only 3.95" this May and June. Previous record dry May & June periods, were in 1995 4.63" and 2008, 4.27". Engelbrecht observed,
In terms of total rainfall, the last two months have been the driest we've seen since they begin keeping records.What is strange about this is that in Knoxville, Tennessee less that 400 miles to the west of Greeeville, we had above average rains in May and June. The drought is having a serious impact on agriculture in states like Texas, where corn farmers and Cattle Ranchers have been devastated. In addition to the exceptional drought, many areas have been subjected to extreme and even record setting heat. Last Tuesday the temperature rose to a record 100 degrees at the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) International Airport, but that is nothing compared to Hutchinson, Kanasa which experienced 12 degrees heat last Sunday,
or Norman Oklahoma which appears headed for an all time record high July temperature, a record not just for Norman, but for the State of Oklahoma. Oklahoma based climate researcher Kelvin Kloesel states that this ,is likely to be a disastrous summer . . .As for record temperatures in Texas, what can I tell you? During the last few days these records have been set:
117 F: in Childress, Texas tying an all time record.
113 F: Borger, Texas - hottest on record.
111 F: Amarillo, Texas - hottest temperature ever recorded. In Amarillo the average daytime high for July between 1971 and 2000 was 91.0 degrees, in 2010 it was 87.8, while this year it has risen to 99.2 so far this month.
Such heat can be fatal. A Texas style heat wave struck un-air conditioned Western Europe a few summers ago, and before it was over, something like 50,000 people died from heat related causes.
Monday, while a massive drought heatwave event was devastating the Southern United States, a huge thunderstorm with hurricane-force winds to the Chicago was knocking out the electrical supply of over a third of a million people.
The climate skeptics are not looking out their windows. They are not going outside. They are incapable of feeling the heat, or of noticing the sweat running down their faces. That bump they heard last night was a tree being blown through their roofs by powerful wind storms, but they pretend to not notice the water raining in through the new hole in the roof.
Climate change skeptics are not making Al Gore jokes about the droughts, the floods, the heat waves, and the damaging thunders thunderstorms that lead to massive power outages. It just is not funny.
There is, of course, a difference between weather and climate, but climate is a series of weather events occurring one after another. Normally the weather tends to settle towards average after an unusual weather event, but this has not been the case for the last couple of years. We are witnessing a lot of weather events, one after another, which are consistant with AGW. The climate skeptics keep telling us that this means nothing, but how long are they going to hold out against reality?
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