COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Why is it so Damn Hot?


Something is happening. It just does not get this hot in so many places for so long.

100 degrees is just scary.

You can survive it but just barely and for just so long.100 degrees is a threshold. Everything stops being green. Every living thing suffers.

The only hope in 100 degrees is to escape, hunker down and hope for it to end. The real scary thing is that there is no additional margin for more heat. What happens if the new Hot becomes 102, 103, 104?

At those temperatures, and with humidity, it becomes hard to breathe and impossible to function. It desiccates your soul.

Whoever and whatever is causing it, we get the message, you can stop now.




48 comments:

  1. Because it's July?

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  2. It' not. Colder than a well diggers tit here recetnly, and very rainly. They couldn't get millions of crops plantd in Canada. To rely on those heat statins in the bigger cities is more fraud, all we got in NASA, and they're have trouble with their data.

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  3. Today...Sunny. Highs in the mid 80s to mid 90s...except in the lower 80s on the camas prairie.

    Tonight...Clear. Lows in the mid 50s to lower 60s.

    Friday...Sunny. Highs in the mid 80s to lower 90s...except in the lower 80s on the camas prairie. West wind 5 to 15 mph with gusts to around 25 mph in the afternoon.

    Friday Night...Clear. Lows in the 50s. West wind 5 to 15 mph in the evening...becoming light overnight.

    Saturday...Sunny. Highs in the 80s...except in the upper 70s on the camas prairie.




    Delightful here.

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  4. They're freezin their nuts off in Australia, right now. Funny how that works. I've noticed that when the yellow thing in the sky gets directly overhead I sweat a lot more. Gotta look into that.

    The good/bad? news is the equatorial Pacific is cooling off, going into a La Nina it looks like. There's usually a little lag-time, but we're likely to start getting cooler around August.

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  5. Thu Jul 15, 4:58 pm ET

    WASHINGTON (AFP) – Last month was the hottest June ever recorded on Earth, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday, amid global climate warming worries.

    The combined global land and ocean surface temperature data also found the January-June and April-June periods were the warmest on record, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, which based its findings on measurements that go back as far as 1880.

    In June, the combined average for global land and ocean temperatures was 61.1 degrees Fahrenheit (16.2 Celsius) -- 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit (0.68 Celsius) more than the 20th century average of 59.9 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 Celsius).

    Temperatures warmer than average spread throughout the globe in recent months, most prominently in Peru, in the central and eastern United States and in eastern and western Asia, according to NOAA.

    In contrast, cooler-than-average conditions affected Scandinavia, southern China and the US northwest.

    The Beijing Climate Center found that Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin experienced their warmest June since records began in 1951, while Guizhou saw its coolest June ever.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100715/ts_afp/environmentclimatewarmingus_20100715205842

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  6. It's called "Weather"

    Deal with it.

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  7. Temp record is unreliable

    U.S. weather stations have been located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat.

    89 percent of the stations fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 metres away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
    (Watts 2009)

    The conclusion is inescapable:

    The U.S. temperature record is unreliable. And since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

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  8. This is how the satellites (not influenced by Urban Heat Island effect) saw it.

    Hot, but Not a Record

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  9. Temperatures in in Tunica are, Always, 3 to 6 degrees cooler than the temp from Memphis International Airport. Usually, 3, or 4 degrees in the Summer, and 5 to 7 degrees in the winter.

    Just building a town of 1,000 around a temp station will have a Large effect on the Temps.

    IIRC, going from 1,000 to 2,000 had a larger effect than going from 1 Million to 2 Million.

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  10. Bell city manager might be highest paid in nation: $787,637 a year

    Top city officials in the small, relatively poor city of Bell might be the highest paid in the nation, according to documents reviewed by The Times.

    In addition to the $787,637 salary of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo,
    Bell pays Police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year
    , about 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and more than double New York City's police commissioner.

    Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia makes $376,288 annually, more than most city managers.

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  11. Oh my...I was wondering why the porch lights were still on this morning, until I went back and read the last thread. I still can't figure out how I turned them on. The pool light didn't work, the spa light didn't work and two bottles of wine is just as bad as having 6 beergaritas and a half a bottle of soco and lime. I'll have to bring some tiki torches tonight

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  12. My soul seems to be doing just fine. Actually it couldn't be better. But my lungs, now that's a different story and for the first time this season, even back in the spring when the pollen count was really high I didn't need to, I now have to use my Advir.

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  13. You could please Rufus no end if you;s get of of this little solar power night lights and stick em around. They charge up by day they stay on most of the night, but give that unobtrusive sorta romantic effect. Carbon neutral too. Only about ten bucks for five as Shop-KO last I looked. I relay on my innate ability to navigate in the dark, like the cat, or a bat.

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  14. Hernest Hemingway once flew up through a skylight, kid of a famous incident, Esra Pound all ways teased him about it. We a a dog named Ezra, best dog I never dad, got hit by a car, had back surgery, and that was that, no more Ezra for this world at least.

    I almost we up through a grain elevator when the elevator springs came unloose.

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  15. Well if things worked around here I wouldn't need to bring my own things. And there is an outside light but I can't find the switch for that either. you would think that I would know this by now.

    And the hard wax all over the deck, around the hot tub, was a big indication on why my hand was burnt when I got up this morning. It feels like I'm back in TN.

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  16. Rufus, you'll be proud when I put my pool in I'm going to buy solar panels to heat my pool.

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  17. See, this is the problem I have with blogger a lot of times when I refresh or send a comment it goes to an error page. What the fuck?

    It goes right back to the site but sometimes it's down for a while. And what about a couple of weeks ago when it kept eating our comments?

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  18. bwahahahahaha

    I found the porch light switch. I knew it was in the kitchen somewhere. They have hanging lanterns so the switch isn't a regular switch instead it's a little black box with two buttons, it's sitting on the window sill above the sink. It took ten minutes to find it.

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  19. That'll work, Melody. Don't take the "first" price. Shop around. Look for a small guy that knows what he's doing. That's done a few.

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  20. One can only hope and pray that the heat wave will bake the crap out of the arab world..

    Hope it gets to be 120, in the shade

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  21. We're going to see if this 'heat wave' has dried out the alfalfa. Bet it has some, maybe he's even cut it.

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  22. The Telegraph has an unusual story


    Mystery trader buys all Europe's cocoa
    Even Willy Wonka might struggle to use this much chocolate. Yesterday, somebody bought 241,000 tonnes of cocoa beans.

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  23. Hunt Brothers, back from the dead, having learned nothing, trying to corner the chocolate market.

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  24. It's a breezy 78 degrees in N. Mississippi, today.

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  25. I doubt if anyone here needs one of these (except, maybe Ash,) but it's good for a smile.

    Finally, an Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit.

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  26. "The Voices were calling me again last ; clean your
    guns"


    Wife and I both thought that was good, on back of an old pickup truck.

    The alfalfa has indeed been cut, and bailed, but they failed to take the camera. I got left cleaning my room.

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  27. Washington Senate: Murray Falls Behind Two GOP Challengers

    heh, the heat's on for Patty.

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  28. Rufus, funny you mention that heat difference between Memphis and Tunica. Thirty to forty years ago, my Dad would make that observation every summer, as it would always rain in Memphis, but not in Tunica. He would just say, "It's all that concrete and asphalt in the city that makes it hotter". The rising heat from the city would more frequently trigger rain from the thunderboomers over it than would occur in the fields of dirt and plants in the Mississippi Delta.

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  29. Those in the far north have noticed big changes in their local climate. Is it any wonder a pineapplehead perched on an island oasis in the middle of the pacific doesn't experience much change in his local climate?

    WiO, is it perpetually shady in Israel so they won't noticed the baked Arab all around them?

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  30. Every year at this time we have the dance of the thunderboomes over the Wallowa Mountains - and the Blues , sometmes the affair is consummated sometimes not but beautiful to hehold you can set you watch by them.

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  31. It still works that way, jwillie.

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  32. The got solar toilet flushers too.
    Run off ambient lite in shithouse.

    About $300, but think of the savings and reductions of Greenhouse Gases.

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  33. An HD Link to this Whitehouse would be useless...

    Tehran in Chains

    Do modern communications ultimately hobble or enable dictatorship?

    Of all the unanswered questions from Iran’s 2009 post-election upheaval — prematurely labeled in the West as the “Twitter revolution” — this remains one of the most urgent and perplexing. Technology, conventional wisdom runs, punches holes through iron curtains.
    An interrogator can still extract a false confession under duress. But as Roxana Saberi writes in “Between Two Worlds,” the prisoner can recant on ­YouTube immediately upon release.

    IranFor all their exhilarating potential, however, the new media can also warp a budding democratic movement, hurling it into premature confrontation with the state.

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  34. Hamas Moves to Enforce Water Pipe Ban in Gaza

    GAZA — In a new attempt to try to impose a conservative Islamic way of life, Hamas started this weekend to enforce a ban on smoking water pipes in public.

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  35. Summer of '80 was the hottest one I remember. It was also my last summer in Memphis and the MidSouth. Was over 100 degrees for 15 days straight, highest temp was 108. Dallas, Tx had 42 straight days of 100+ temps, 69 days total 100+ that summer. I don't think this summer is anywhere near as hot as that one. Regardless, and maybe because I spent every summer working outdoors in that heat on the farm, I love it. Fainted from heat exhaustion that summer (1980) before 8:00 am one morning while moving sandbags to patch a rice field levee. Remember vividly walking out of the house at about 6:45 am and seeing that the thermometer read 82 degrees. It would be 90 by 9 am. Humidity in those rice fields was always 90%+.

    Carried a .22 caliber pistol at all times while walking those paddies to check the levee gates. A friend stuck his hands under one of those gates to raise it and a cottonmouth came out from under it (underwater) and climbed straight up his arm! He said it was one of the biggest adrenaline rushes he ever had. I shot over a dozen cottonmouths in about 10 minutes one day when i found them all laying around the water pump for one of the rice fields, although that was with a .22 caliber rifle and the pistol. Never went anywhere on the farm without multiple weapons in the truck - gunrack behind the seat and lots of ammo under the seat. Those were the days!

    (Amazing what's on Wikipedia - 1980 US Heat Wave)

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  36. I'll leave the rice farmin to the Chinee. Can't stand no snakes.

    I don't think moccassins are particularly aggressive. Probably unlikely to get bit if you don't step on one, but I don't care. I don like'm.

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  37. ash: WiO, is it perpetually shady in Israel so they won't noticed the baked Arab all around them?


    No those Jews are smart enough to build umbrellas...

    The Arabs? They are one dumb group of people, it all goes to show what happens when your great great great grand daddy fucks the domestic help...

    Man I wish Abraham had used a condom on Hagar...

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  38. Rufus, you'll be proud when I put my pool in I'm going to buy solar panels to heat my pool.


    Melodoy

    The two happiest days in a pool owners life--just like a boat owners life--the day she put is in and the day she took it out. They can be a big pain in the ass, we finally got rid of ours, no it looks like an arboretum out there. Only time it got used was the neighbors kids kids helpin themselves.

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  39. And that's double trouble--then you'll have trouble from the solar panels, which need upkeep, and the pool too.

    Don't you have a nice river around there seme where, a Pannslyvanian 'Wenaha'?

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  40. The one I saw hanging in a tree on the Selway on Augugst being skinnind had to be 10 or 12 feet long, I couldn't get my hands around it, skinned like you'd take the meat out of a sausage, just kinda unrolled like women used to take their old nylongs off, the head very prehistoric, the rattles already removed. I had one swim towards me once out in a stream but then he veered away. I think you got to be a little nuts to actually like snakes. But we got 'em. I don't know what they do in winter, overwinter at some the Holiday Inn I quess, or in some hole in the ground. I asked the guy if the meant was any good and he says ya like rabbit or chicken. Ya, if you've lost your taste buds.

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  41. My river rat days are over I only wade in water where I can see my feet.

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  42. ah, that explains the red toes!

    :)

    My cousin and her farmer out at Ritzvlle talked the county committee, which they were on of course, the build them a pool as a flood control measure. There hasn't been a flood sine Lake Missousla washed through but not to matter, they got it, and parked a couple of horse there. It wasn't long before they tired of the whole thing the horses were sold, the pool is no a mud hole and Dave and Sally are back to international skiing.

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  43. It finally hit one hundred here today, the alfalfa all baled up but still in the field. It was a heck of a harvest just not enough acres to amountet to much. I go to take pics tomorrow, I stayed home today. There is some kind of dulcimer contest out at the old church were I got married, think we'll go to that. Up on the prairie it's cooler, Lewis ton being the lowest place in Idaho.

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  44. Put some luminescence on those red toes you might be able to wade at night but be careful though you might attract the crabs.

    Goodnight, Melody.

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  45. The only thing happening is a ridge of dry heat hanging heavily over the midwest keeping out the cooling rains that Colorado and South Dakota are getting right now. It was 112 degrees in Lawrence, Kansas today. The only hotter experience I've had was in las Vegas at 114. It's 84 degrees now at 11:35 PM. Wheeee--eew! God bless our troops in the hellish deserts of the mideast.

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    ReplyDelete