July saw 3,135 new daily high temperature records in the U.S. \u2014 over 100 per day. That overwhelmed new cold records by a factor of nearly 17 to 1,\u00a0as this chart from\u00a0Capital Climate shows.<\/p>\n
For the year to date, new heat records are beating cold records by a remarkable 12 to 1, which trumps the pace of the last decade by more than a factor of 5!<\/p>\n
I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can\u2019t pin any one local record temperature on global warming. A\u00a02009 analysis shows that the average ratio for the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, a sharp increase from previous decades. Lead author\u00a0Dr. Gerald Meehl explained, \u201cIf temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the country\u2019s leading meteorologists and\u00a0climatologists \u2014 including NASA\u2019s James Hansen \u2014 have looked at the data and concluded that like a\u00a0baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace.<\/p>\n
One state in particular is ground-zero for global warming this summer, just as it was last summer (see my 8\/11 post \u201cOklahoma Sees Hottest Average Temperature of Any State on Record\u201c). And coincidentally, it is the home state of the Senate\u2019s leading global warming denier.<\/p>\n