In July, 1989, I drove my German Shepherd from Flagstaff to Newport Beach in my Honda Civic with no a/c. It was 122F in Needles and I brought a few gallons of water to pour on the dog and keep her cool. Temperature was 68F in LA when we arrived that evening.
In July 2006 I drove with one of my kids from Cupertino to Fort Collins in a different car with no a/c. It was 115F in Sacramento. At Donner Summit it was cold.
Hot temperatures like this happen all the time in California and Arizona. No one used to think anything of it, until McKibben et al drove everybody looney.
Climochondria
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Flew into Phoenix about 1990. Hot, hot, hot. Drove to Flagstaff. Our speed was about six degrees per hour! Really liked the Flagstaff and Sedona areas. The Cardinals can have Phoenix.
You and your dog adapted to a temperature swing of 54 degree in one day yet these bed wetters think humans can’t adapt to a couple of degrees of global warming. What a bunch of maroons.
Worse than that is to know that the “globe” has been actually cooling for at least 15-16 years now, and the trend has intensified slightly after 2008.
That is one point the physicist Lubos Motl has repeatedly made, that even if the predicted temperature changes came to pass, they are far smaller than the temperature swings endured with time and place every year.
German Shepherds are the best dogs, I’ve had 6 of them.
Yeah Steve, 122f is hot. Over 50c.
I experienced it one day in the Sturt’s Stony Desert in Australia and had to keep working but I survived.
That was in 1957 and it’s the only time I saw a bird die in flight from heat stress.
How hot must it have been when Governor Arthur Philip reported in the first fleet journals 20,000 dead birds per mile during a heat wave in 1791?
Do you have a reference for that?
Nor will this surprise, if the genial influence of the climate be considered. Placed in a latitude where the beams of the sun in the dreariest season are sufficiently powerful for many hours of the day to dispense warmth and nutrition, the progress of vegetation never is at a stand. The different temperatures of Rose Hill and Sydney in winter, though only twelve miles apart, afford, however, curious matter of speculation. Of a well attested instance of ice being seen at the latter place, I never heard. At the former place its production is common, and once a few flakes of snow fell. The difference can be accounted for only by supposing that the woods stop the warm vapours of the sea from reaching Rose Hill, which is at the distance of sixteen miles inland; whereas Sydney is but four.* Again, the heats of summer are more violent at the former place than at the latter, and the variations incomparably quicker. The thermometer has been known to alter at Rose Hill, in the course of nine hours, more than 50 degrees; standing a little before sunrise at 50 degrees, and between one and two at more than 100 degrees. To convey an idea of the climate in summer, I shall transcribe from my meteorological journal, accounts of two particular days which were the hottest we ever suffered under at Sydney.
[*Look at the journal which describes the expedition in search of the river, said to exist to the southward of Rose Hill. At the time we felt that extraordinary degree of cold were not more than six miles south west of Rose Hill, and about nineteen miles from the the sea coast. When I mentioned this circumstance to colonel Gordon, at the Cape of Good Hope, he wondered at it; and owned, that, in his excursions into the interior parts of Africa, he had never experienced anything to match it: he attributed its production to large beds of nitre, which he said must exist in the neighbourhood.]
December 27th 1790. Wind NNW; it felt like the blast of a heated oven, and in proportion as it increased the heat was found to be more intense, the sky hazy, the sun gleaming through at intervals.
At 9 a.m. 85 degrees At noon 104 Half past twelve 107 1/2 From one p.m. until 20 minutes past two 108 1/2 At 20 minutes past two 109 At Sunset 89 At 11 p.m. 78 1/2
[By a large Thermometer made by Ramsden, and graduated on Fahrenheit’s scale.]
December 28th.
At 8 a.m. 86 10 a.m. 93 11 a.m. 101 At noon 103 1/2 Half an hour past noon 104 1/2 At one p.m. 102 At 5 p.m. 73 At sunset 69 1/2
[At a quarter past one, it stood at only 89 degrees, having, from a sudden shift of wind, fallen 13 degrees in 15 minutes.]
My observations on this extreme heat, succeeded by so rapid a change, were that of all animals, man seemed to bear it best. Our dogs, pigs and fowls, lay panting in the shade, or were rushing into the water. I remarked that a hen belonging to me, which had sat for a fortnight, frequently quitted her eggs, and shewed great uneasiness, but never remained from them many minutes at one absence; taught by instinct that the wonderful power in the animal body of generating cold in air heated beyond a certain degree, was best calculated for the production of her young. The gardens suffered considerably. All the plants which had not taken deep root were withered by the power of the sun. No lasting ill effects, however, arose to the human constitution. A temporary sickness at the stomach, accompanied with lassitude and headache, attacked many, but they were removed generally in twenty-four hours by an emetic, followed by an anodyne. During the time it lasted, we invariably found that the house was cooler than the open air, and that in proportion as the wind was excluded, was comfort augmented.
But even this heat was judged to be far exceeded in the latter end of the following February, when the north-west wind again set in, and blew with great violence for three days. At Sydney, it fell short by one degree of what I have just recorded: but at Rose Hill, it was allowed, by every person, to surpass all that they had before felt, either there or in any other part of the world. Unluckily they had no thermometer to ascertain its precise height. It must, however, have been intense, from the effects it produced. An immense flight of bats driven before the wind, covered all the trees around the settlement, whence they every moment dropped dead or in a dying state, unable longer to endure the burning state of the atmosphere. Nor did the ‘perroquettes’, though tropical birds, bear it better. The ground was strewn with them in the same condition as the bats.
Were I asked the cause of this intolerable heat, I should not hesitate to pronounce that it was occasioned by the wind blowing over immense deserts, which, I doubt not, exist in a north-west direction from Port Jackson, and not from fires kindled by the natives. This remark I feel necessary, as there were methods used by some persons in the colony, both for estimating the degree of heat and for ascertaining the cause of its production, which I deem equally unfair and unphilosophical. The thermometer, whence my observations were constantly made, was hung in the open air in a southern aspect, never reached by the rays of the sun, at the distance of several feet above the ground.
From: The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Complete Account of the Settlement at
Port Jackson, by Watkin Tench
http://ia600301.us.archive.org/2/items/acompleteaccount03534gut/3534-h/3534-h.htm
Steve, Watkin Tench reported on that and WUWT mentioned it here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/global-warming-it-was-warmer-in-sydney-in-1790/
I don’t have the link to Tench’s actual report although I did read it years ago:
Tench also recorded the effects of the extreme heat of Feb 1791;
“but at Rose Hill, [modern day Parramatta] it was allowed, by every person, to surpass all that they had before felt, either there, or in any other part of the world. Unluckily they had no thermometer to ascertain its precise height.”
“An immense flight of bats, driven before the wind, covered all the trees around the settlement, whence they every moment dropped dead, or in a dying state, unable longer to endure the burning state of the atmosphere. Nor did the perroquettes, [parrots] though tropical birds, bear it better; the ground was strewed with them in the same condition as the bats.”
And even Governor Arthur Philip noted the effects of the extreme heat of the summer of 1790/91;
“from the numbers [of dead bats] that fell into the brook at Rose Hill [Parramatta], the water was tainted for several days, and it was supposed that more than twenty thousand of them were seen within the space of one mile.”
Google books has it: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uYxNAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=%22surpass+all+that+they+had+before+felt%22&source=bl&ots=OXqbhgpHkE&sig=PcMqUnV8PtotZz5jnGXT7yw4Xt4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=r_fPUfjiBOTP4QTnsoDICA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22surpass%20all%20that%20they%20had%20before%20felt%22&f=false
bit.ly/157HOY5
Ooops – should’ve read the posts below before posting!
http://books.google.com/books?id=CX6eH4o451AC&lpg=PA273&dq=%22dead%20birds%22%20heat%20%22arthur%20phillip%22&pg=PA273#v=snippet&q=birds&f=false