Via Climate Progress: Mysterious Nationwide Heat Wave Causes Exploding Sidewalks and a Blood-Red Reservoir

For reasons that no major U.S. news outlet can apparently explain, it is really, really, really hot.  How hot is it?  It was so hot

• “Dick Cheney waterboarded himself.”
• “So hot Charlie Sheen was snorting actual snow.”
• “It was so hot presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was fanning herself with pornography.
• “It was so hot in Washington that Congress had to install a fan on the debt ceiling.”

But not so hot that one can actually find any articles talking about global warming.  I’m not certain how hot it would have to be for that, but hotter than this:

This was the hottest July in Oklahoma history by a full 1°F, and the drought was so bad the Governor told residents to pray for rain.  But this would actually be a rather average July by the second half of this century if we keep listening to the politicians from the Sooner Dust Bowl state — see “U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century.”

ABC News reports, “Heat Wave Causes Exploding Sidewalks and a Blood-Red Reservoir in Texas,” but they can’t bring themselves to invoke any climate science.  Quite the reverse, in fact:

Doomsayers are always on the lookout for signs of the Apocalypse, and few have been more captivating than record-setting temperatures scorching the nation these days….
With the elevated temperatures has come even more compelling fodder for the students of prophesy, including a reservoir stained blood-red in Texas,  exploding sidewalks in Iowa, snail-slow railroad trains in the Midwest and ant infestations in Florida….
Farquhar said he had heard about apocalypse believers commenting on the blood-red reservoir signaling the end of the world. But the scientist said  the red growth, called Chromatiaceae bacteria, is a “naturally-occurring phenomenon.”

Seriously.

Now  as I’ve said many times, every story about extreme weather does not need to mention global warming.  But if ABC News is going to set up believers in Revelation and then invoke science to dismiss them, they could perhaps talk to a climatologist.  Some day.

And that is especially true for a monster heatwave like this that is so uniquely extensive in space and time — just the kind of heat wave climate scientists have warned would become increasingly likely.

Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and found U.S. heat records have been outnumbering cold records by a huge amount.

Monthly total number of daily high temperature and low temperature records set in the U.S. for June 2010 through June 2011, data from NOAA.

Scolnik notes:

U.S. daily high temperature records were dominating cold records in July by a ratio of over 5 to 1, based on preliminary data from the National Climatic Data Center. A surge of heat records in the final week of the month has pushed the total ratio to 6.1 to 1. For the summer as a whole (June and July combined), the ratio has increased to 8.4 to 1. This also increases the year-to-date ratio to 2.7 to 1.
Out of the 1601 daily high temperature records broken in July, 49 were all-time records for any day of any month. Combined with the updated count of 20 all-time records in June, this gives a total of 69 so far this summer. In comparison, only 8 all-time cold records were set in all 3 months of last winter combined.

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.  If you want to know how to judge whether these ratios are a big deal, see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.” which is the source of this figure:

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

Our science-based institutions, like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, have no difficulty straightforwardly explaining the connection between human-caused global warming and these monster heatwaves.  If only our news-based institutions could do the same.