Via Climate Progress: U.S. Sees Most Extreme July Climate, Oklahoma Sees Hottest Average Temperature of Any State on Record



The July Climate Extremes Index for the CONUS was 37 percent. This is the highest July value in the CEI record (since 1910). The culprits were, in order of impact: Extreme warm minimum temperatures (60 percent of the country, easily the largest on record), extreme wet PDSI (soaked northern plains & western great lakes), extreme warm maximum temperatures, and extreme dry PDSI (south-central U.S. through Gulf Coast). According to the Regional CEI, the South and Southeast had their 1st- and 2nd-most extreme July’s on record, respectively
That’s from the July “State of the Climate” by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
Didn’t know that our government kept a Climate Extremes Index? Why would you? The media hardly ever write about it.


The U.S. Climate Extremes Index was explicitly created to take a complicated subject (“multivariate and multidimensional climate changes in the United States“) and make it more easily understood by American citizens and policy makers.

As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense — precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.” And since 1995, the climate has gotten much more extreme.

But still the media has little to say on the subject:
As for Oklahoma, Jason Samenow of the Capital Weather Gang notes:
In Oklahoma, the heat and drought were a punishing double whammy. In a vicious cycle, the dry soil intensified the heat and the heat dried out the soil. The result: heat unprecendented in any state at any time.
He directs us to The Oklahoma Climatological Survey, which reported this news:
Grover Cleveland was serving his second term as President in 1895. Victoria was
the Queen of England and Will Rogers was still a teenager. It is also the year
that statewide average temperature records begin for the United States. There
have been 1399 months pass by since 1895. Multiply that number by 48 and you
have 67,152 months of temperature records for the contiguous states. How hot
was it in Oklahoma last month? Of those statewide average temperature records
for the 48 states, none has been hotter than July 2011 in Oklahoma.
That’s hot — but not hot enough to move the state’s top deniers (see “Oklahoma, Where the Governor Tells Residents To Pray For Rain; Oklahoma, Where the Senator Mocks the Deadly Heat Wave“).

And so in a few decades, this will just be a typical July and eventually a relatively cool one for the state, assuming we keep following the deniers’ do-nothing strategy.  In a terrific 2010 presentation, Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a figure of what the future holds (derived from the 2009 NOAA-led impacts report):



Mother Nature is just warming up.
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