"Global Warming"

Some history for "the sky is falling crowd".

"From June 1 to August 31, 1930, 21 days had high temperatures that were 100 degrees or above" in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Cybercast News Service. "That summer has never been approached, and it's not going to be approached this year."

Are y'all paying attention?

The summer of 1930 also marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th century. In 1934, dry regions stretched from New York and Pennsylvania across the Great Plains to California. A "dust bowl" covered about 50 million acres in the south-central plains during the winter of 1935-1936.

Luckily, I wasn't around during the Depression. (NO, I'm not THAT old!) My dad had some tales to tell though, and he wouldn't be impressed with the "heat wave" of 2006 either.

"Big cities are getting warmer -- with or without global warming -- because the bricks and the buildings and the pavement retain heat," Michaels added. For that reason, he prefers to compare temperatures in nearby rural areas. "There's been very little change" in those areas, "so we trust the record to be a reliable indicator of base climate."

The more concrete and brick, the more heat. Common sense. Even a rattle snake knows this, but not the Algore types.

"Usually, the way the jet stream breaks out is very hot in the East and relatively cool in the West or vice versa," he said. "This time around, it looks more like the summers of the 1930s," but he dismissed the idea that the extreme temperatures of that time were caused by man-made "global warming" since "it wasn't around then."

Just a fluke, right? Man causes a lot of problems, true, but we don't control the cycles of weather. One thing this article did not mention, which annoys me, was the summer of 1979 in northeast Texas. The 60 days of 100+ degree temperature. Trust me, 113 degrees (in Dallas) is hot. It got up to 117 in Wichita Falls. Now THAT is HOT!