Mother Nature Raises Hell this Summer

The North-American heatwave has made many cities more hellish than usual. Whether it's Pennsylvania roadways turning into bubbling tar pits or ozone-smog choking people in DC, the last two weeks of summer have been a little challenging.

"In this heat, it's not just about discomfort," said Latoya White, a health worker in the capital. "For many people it's about survival." Indeed, besides heat stroke and dehydration, Harvard recently published research showing hot weather raises the danger of heart attack.

Air conditioning is one way to escape the heat. But what do you do when your AC fails? Many units in Oklahoma have stopped working because "the units aren't really built to handle this kind of heat for this prolonged period of time." I've seen units failing in New York for the same reason. My parent's compressor actually burst even though they only cool to a modest 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

Don't try to flee to Canada either, because their central countryside is being ravaged by hundreds of wildfires:

These fires are being caused by increasingly hot weather, drier conditions and DAILY LIGHTNING STRIKES. These fires are so bad, they're polluting the air across the Great Lakes in Minnesota.

As if that's not scary enough, this heatwave actually gets worse at night. "While the current heat wave has recorded 12 all-time daily highs so far this month, it also has registered 98 all-time overnight highs," said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA went on to report that "when temperatures overnight do not cool to levels that provide relief, it increases the stress on people without air conditioning, on livestock and on crops" and that this is "consistent with what we would expect in a greenhouse-warmed world."

Given all of the above, it's very hard to accept this weather as "normal climate progression." Instead, it really feels more like Hell-On-Earth.