Fox Squirrels in Ann Arbor at University of Michigan Aug 21 2021 by Corey Seeman
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case.” – Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connection
Five years ago I shared the news that July 2021 was the hottest July on planet Earth in the modern era. Life (and temperature) comes at you fast in the age of runaway climate change, so you probably won’t be surprised that just five years later, PBS reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the contiguous United States had its hottest month ever last month:
July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895.
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the U.S. — just a cataclysmic event in U. S. history. If we’re exceeding records from The Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble.”
Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.
The heat in the Dust Bowl years was more concentrated in parts of the Midwest and was aggravated by agricultural practices at the time, Vose said. What’s happening now is due to the burning of coal, oil and gas, scientists said.
“Extremely high temperatures across the continental U.S. this summer, along with intense drought and fire conditions, are absolutely consistent with the climate change signal,’ said Katharine Jacobs, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona.
If you’ve been following Michigan in Pictures for a while, you probably recognize Corey Seeman as Michigan’s leader in squirrel photography. Corey shared this photo back in the summer of 2021. See his latest on Flickr!
PS: You may also recognize Jeff Masters as the founder of Ann Arbor-based Weather Underground!
