Similarly, governments are ignoring the connection.

This is the people who are supposed to help or at least disseminate correct information, letting everyone down for, I assume, political reasons. Shame on them.

Media Matters has a more detailed analysis here.

Record High Temperatures Being Shattered

Hot Whopper puts this in some context and adds some other sources, here.

The Weather Channel has this map of current western heat alerts:

More on the western heat wave here at Weather Underground.

The extreme heat has even surged north into Canada. Cranbrook, in far southeast British Columbia at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, set a new all-time record high of 98 degrees (36.8 degrees Celsius) Sunday, according to The Weather Network.

Even Revelstoke, British Columbia – 130 miles north of the U.S. border, about 1,500 feet above sea level and better known for skiing – reached an amazing 103 degrees (39.5 degrees Celsius) Sunday.

Great Britain is sweltering “on the hottest July day on record,” according to Jessica Elgot at the Guardian.

As temperatures reached 36.7 °C at Heathrow, commuters were facing difficult journeys on the London Underground. One platform at Kings Cross underground station recorded 33 °C however the temperature on tubes is believed to be even hotter.

Charlotte Dalen, originally from Norway but now living in London, said: “It was pretty warm and very smelly. People were waving pamphlets to keep cool but it didn’t look like it was helping.”

The map at the top of the post of current heat anomaly estimates across the globe is from Climate Reanalyser.

An Unprecedented Tropical Cyclone

Raquel is a Pacific Tropical Cyclone (hurricane) which is the earliest to form in the region (The “Queensland Zone” as tracked by the Australian meteorologists) in recorded history. From the Bulletin:

TROPICAL Cyclone Raquel has formed in the south-west Pacific near the Solomon Islands, triggering the earliest cyclone warning on record issued for the Queensland zone.

“Certainly it’s a unique scenario,” Jess Carey, a spokesman from the bureau’s Queensland office, said. “Since we’ve been tracking cyclones with satellite-based technology, we haven’t seen one in July.”

The storm became a category 1 cyclone early on Wednesday morning and had a central pressure of 999 hPa about 410 km north of the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara as of just before 5am, AEST, the Bureau of Meteorology said. It is forecast to strengthen to a category 2 system on Thursday.

“The cyclone is moving southwest at about 16 km per hour and should gradually intensify over the next 24 hours as it approaches the Solomon Islands,” the bureau said in a statement. “The system will remain very far offshore and does not pose a threat to the Queensland coast.”

The official cyclone season runs from November 1-April 30. Any cyclone after May or before October is considered unusual.

Wildfires Gone Wild

Over the last several days and continuing, there have been extensive and unprecedented fires in the west as well. Drought in California has increased fire danger, and now things are starting to burn. This year the fires started earlier, with one of the largest fires having burned during a normally low-fire month, February. Also, fires are burning where they are normally rare. According to Will Greenberg at the Washington Post..

Cal Fire has already responded to 1,000 more incidents this year than they see on average annually. The agency reached that same landmark last year as well — but in September.

By the end of June, officials had fought nearly 3,200 fires.

In total, Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service have responded to fires stretching over 65,755 acres so far this year.

And this is just the beginning for California’s 2015 wildfire season.

Meanwhile, in Washington, where it has been dry and hot, hundreds have been forced to flee from some amazing wildfires. From the Guardian:

The wildfires hit parts of central and eastern Washington state over the weekend as the state is struggling with a severe drought. Mountain snowpack is at extremely low levels, and about one-fifth of the state’s rivers and streams are at record low levels.

Eastern Washington has been experiencing temperatures into the 100s, and last week Washington governor Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation that allows state resources to quickly be brought in to respond to wildfires.

In Alaska,

The number of Alaska’s active wildfires is literally off the charts, according to a map recently released by the state’s Division of Forestry.

Over 700 fires have burned so far this summer, the most in the state’s history, and that number is only expected to get bigger as the state is experiencing higher temperatures, lower humidity and more lightning storms than usual, said Kale Casey, a public information officer for the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, which serves as a focal point for state agencies involved in wildland fire management and suppression.

Here’s a map of current Alaskan fires:

California Drought Still A Drought

And, of course, from the US Drought Monitor …

According to data accumulated by the National Weather Service, as shown (with added items) here …

… we should have had about four or five named storms at this point in the season. Since numbers for this time of year are small, variation is large, so this is not too meaningful but it can give us an idea.

So far, we have had these storms in the Atlantic:

Tropical Storm ANDREA
Tropical Storm BARRY
Tropical Storm CHANTAL
Tropical Storm DORIAN
Tropical Storm ERIN

The next storm will be named Fernand, and it may be forming as we speak:

There is a 60% chance that this stormy blob will turn into a named tropical storm over the next few days. Also there are several interesting looking proto-stormy-blobs between the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean that have promise.

This possible named tropical storm, which would be Fernand, is aimed at Mexico.

UPDATE: The stormy blob is now officially a tropical depression, and there is a hurricane hunter heading for it right now. Expect this to become a named storm later today. Then, it will cross the coast in Mexico and turn back into a stormy blog. But for just a short while, very likely (but maybe not), Fernad will exist.

UPDATE: Yup, Fernand formed, is now over land in Mexico, and will dissipate.

So, we have had five named storms. By the end of the month, we’ll probably have six. And that is about right.

From Intellicast, we have a picture of the immediate and near future jet stream:

The arrows-bearing white lines curving up over the rockies, across the upper midwest, and down along the east coast indicate a highly convoluted wave in the jet stream. This convoluted pattern is most likely the result of the Arctic being warmed (via global warming). This reduces the gradient of heat from the equator to the pole. A steeper gradient would result in a straighter jet stream. When you get a bunch of convolutions (waves) in the jet stream, owing to complicated meteorological math stuff, the waves tend to stall in place. Areas “under the curve” (like, right now, the middle of the US) get big high pressure systems that move warm air to the north, for several days at a time. A result of this would be a big giant heat bubble as shown in the following GIF I copied from Paul Douglas’s blog:

Which, in turn, is likely to seriously exacerbate drought conditions in the region, as shown on this map from US Drought Monitor:

So, really, “Tropical Weather” isn’t just Atlantic Hurricanes, but heat waves at places such as the Minnesota State Fair:

Cooperative Extension Agent:

Of course, it never really gets unbearably hot here. Again, I can make the comparison: A heat wave where I grew up is when the temperature hits 100 or more during the hottest hour of the afternoon and the nights do not cool off much. Here, where I live now, a heat wave is where it hits 90 or more every day but it will still go to 70 or sometimes below during the coolest part of the night. People in Chicago and New York will complain about their heat wave to about the same degree as people in central and northern Minnesota will complain about their heat wave, but there is a difference. People in Chicago and New York die during their heat waves. Not all of them, but some of them.

Heat Wave:

Of course, people in northern Minnesota die by falling through the ice more often than people in New York or Chicago do.

Typical Day On the Ice:

My feet can be wet, and even muddy and sandy inside my shoes and I don’t care. Glynn Isaac could not stand wet feet. He grew up in arid country (South Africa and Kenya) while I grew up spending time in a temperate moist forest (the Adirondacks). Had this not been true, I would have never done my PhD on what I did it on. Glynn wanted to work in the Ituri Forest but what he ended up doing is sending his only student who did not care about wet feet. You would be surprised as to how many archaeologists ended up specializing in one area or another because of something utterly tangential to archaeology. Jack Harris studied the Karari Industry because he could back up a truck with a trailer on it. Lew Binford got into archaeology at all because he had time off while a soldier in Korea and ended up bumping into interesting tombs. J. Desmond Clark took an interest in Africa (and, essentially, founded and shaped African Archaeology) for similar reasons; He was assigned to positions with trenches, dug across interesting stratigraphy, while with the British Army in North Africa.

Archaeology:

I once new a graduate student in anthropology who went into graduate school to study a particular system. She was very excited about this system because it had to do with genes, and genes were (here words…) “The Truth” as opposed to, I guess, bones and stuff. That system didn’t work out. She tried another one. Didn’t work out. She tried a different one. Didn’t work out. Finally she discovered an interest in monkeys. Monkeys have genes, interesting ones, and that worked out. Funny how “The Truth” can be such a problem.

Interesting Monkey:

I can’t remember the first time I was ever in a house with air conditioning, but it might have been when I was 13 and my parents moved to a place with an air conditioner. It was not on all the time and it kept the downstairs absurdly cold if the upstairs was cooled at all, so it had little effect on me (living in an uninsulated room over the garage extension and all). My wife, my daughter, my son, lots of people in my wife’s family, others that I know these days all grew up in houses with air conditioning. When my daughter was growing up she did not like wearing coats or sweaters. Her mother always wanted her to do so, because she, the mother, was always cold. Same old story, you’ve heard it before. “I’m cold, put on a sweater!” I conspired with Julia often so she did not have to wear the uncomfortably warm clothing. So, even though she grew up with air conditioning, she grew accustom to cold. So one end of her range of comfort is more open ended than the other. She is skinny and lanky but the heat bothers her. An Inuit trapped in the body of a Maasai warrior.

Air Conditioning:

Speaking of Inuit, a friend of mine is an Aleutian (they historically live on the same end of the planet) and while he grew up in a run of the mill middle class home on a reservation, the home was in Alaska and he spent a fair amount of time on boats in the Bering Sea and on land doing archaeology and stuff on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Then he went to live with reindeer herders in Siberia (the Eveny or Evenki, not the Sámi). I thought it was funny when the first thing he said to me when he returned after his first season of working with them as an anthropologist was this: “I can’t believe how COLD it is there!” And he got to sleep with the best reindeer!

This is him:

Without going into details, it is more or less true that your body adapts early in life, but for the rest of your life, to the range of temperatures to which it is exposed when you are little, after infancy but through toddler years. The way your skin gets configured, with blood vessels and sweat glands and so on, and some things having to do with neurons, adapts to control heating and cooling, and as an evolutionary aside, comfort for a certain range. Lots of things adapt as we grow, but these things are sorely understudied. The assumption that you are a product of your genes right down to the details is too pervasive. For instance, how well you see detail in various conditions adapts. If you grow up in Arizona you will have a different way of seeing than if you grow up in the Pacific North West. Well, not if you grow up in Phoenix vs. Seattle, but if you grow up in the wilderness in those two areas. Colin Turnbull has a story about this in relation to Pygmies which I will not relate because I think Colin put the Bull in Turnbull and I don’t trust most of his stories. But I have an Efe Pygmy story that might relate and is true: If you give some Efe Pygmy men a mammal identification guide so they can pick out a picture of some animal they just saw, so you can relate the observation to Western Linneonormative Classification Schema, they hold the book upside down as often as right side up. That is what we might expect from people who don’t read at all, they hold the book randomly. But then, they’ll start rotating the book around so they see the picture of the monkey “right side up” and “up side down” and everything in between. Then they’ll make their ID. I never see Westerners do that, but it makes sense. A western book held by a western person shows a picture of an animal sitting or standing there, and you hold the book up in normal book position and you imagine you are up in the tree staring at a monkey standing on a branch ten feet away. But in real life, you almost always see monkeys that are above you or nearly above you. In a rain forest, the arboreal mammals that are not above you are too far away to see well, and behind too much vegetation. They are shadows crossing distant gaps. Efe not only see correctly in a forest, but they know how to adapt the book to use it to represent that way of seeing.

And they see better. As I mentioned above, I spent a lot of time in a forest growing up, so I may be better than some Arizonan guy at seeing detail in a forest. But not like the Efe. One time I was talking to my friend (in the Ituri) about a particular species of snake.

“I’d like to see one of those,” I said. We were sitting right in our research camp. He chucked. “What?” I said.

“Come over here,” he stood and walked away beckoning me to follow. I followed.

“There,” he said, pointing.

I looked. I saw nothing but branches and leaves. “What am I looking at?”

“Your snake.”

“Really? Where?” raising my hand to point at the bushes that lined the path down to the water from our base camp. He grabbed my hand to stop it from going near the bush.

“Right in front of you. You almost touched it.”

Now, this is a snake he had seen from about 100 feet away, a snake that I was now in reaching distance of, apparently, but could not see. The snake in question, by the way, was a “boomslang” a.k.a. “green tree snake” … the are small, green, and blend in very nicely with the green trees. Nasty venom. Apparently, this one was perfectly camouflaged.

“I still don’t see it.”

“OK, stand back,” he said as he raised his bow, arming it with a monkey arrow. Efe men always carry their bow and a few arrows with them.

He drew the bow, took a breath to stop himself from giggling (at me), and fired.

And the arrow went through the snake in at least three places, so the now squirming reptile could not extricate itself from the branches it was effectively pinned to. I could finally see it. At first I felt bad that the snake had to die to teach me a lesson, but then it occurred to me that my friend was surely going to kill this snake on his way back to his camp anyway. He had seen it, after all. And, a snake an Efe sees is a dead snake. They do this to keep the chances of being bitten by poisonous snakes down, and since his uncle had lost a leg to a viper in his youth, one could understand this especially in his case.

Boomslang:

But the point is, to him, seeing an 18 inch long green snake in a green bush over 100 feet away was like me seeing my bus coming down the avenue. On a hot day, which I would not think of as too hot because I grew up without air conditioning.

One’s comfort zone, one’s path in life, one’s personal history. A lot of people call it free will, but it’s not.

Sorry for going all Philosophy on you: