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The “Urban Heat Island” effect is an artificial warming of the climate in the center of urban areas due to increased heating by pavement and lack of shade due to loss of tree cover, among other things. This 3-minute YouTube video describes some efforts by big cities like Los Angeles and New York to combat…
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Several news outlets this week reported that the USDA is offering relief to agricultural producers impacted by either the 2017 hurricanes or the wildfires out west last year. According to one story in AgWeb, “Producers impacted by wildfires and hurricanes in 2017 are eligible for monetary assistance to rebuild and recover on their farms through…
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A recent article in North Carolina Health News highlights the problems that older people may face when heat waves occur. Older human bodies (and probably also those of older pets and livestock) do not handle heat as well as younger folk, so they are more likely to suffer ill health when temperatures rise. This is…
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We’re halfway through July, so let’s take a look at our current climate situation. Temperatures in the Southeast have been variable but in most cases fairly close to normal, especially when you compare it to our friends up north, who have experienced much warmer temperatures. At least in part this is due to precipitation and…
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There have been a number of stories in the news in recent weeks about the number of record high temperatures that are being set around the world. You might wonder if this is becoming more frequent than in previous decades. Here is a careful analysis by climatologist Brian Brettschneider looking at the number of record…
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When I lived in Wisconsin, we said in the summer when it was humid that all that water vapor was from the corn growing in Iowa. Earth.com posted a recent story which described an ongoing experiment to look at changes in clouds due to agricultural irrigation in the Great Plains. The field experiment is called…
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I saw a lot of tweets last night from Charleston SC about the impact of the current king tide on urban flooding in that city. Many streets were awash in sea water that was driven up by the higher than normal tides caused by the new moon. Here is a similar story about urban flooding…