THE NEXT ICE AGE - NOW!

30 Jul 09 – A few days ago I posted an article - in good faith - quoting from an article on Accuweather.com telling you about 3,000 low-temp records for July!

A couple of days later a reader emailed me saying that my source disagreed with me.

Huh?

I then went to Accuweather, and the first words to greet me were "This blog entry has been superceded by a newer one which has updated stats."

So, let me bring you up to date.

Even though Accuweather still agrees that we broke 3,000 low temperature records in July, they also say that temperatures are “still biased to record-breaking highs.”

“When you compare the number of Record Lows to Record Highs for 2009 so far on a monthly basis," says Accuweather, "you come up with more lows than highs since May, but more highs than lows before that…year-to-date there have been 1,820 more highs than lows broken."

"The overall trend is UP," says Accuweather.

Now I don’t know what to believe.

Are they simply being politically correct? I'm inclined to believe Accuweather (as opposed to The Weather Channel), but I wonder where those higher temperatures occurred.

The record low temperatures occurred across a vast portion of the Upper Midwest, not just on scattered days, but for the entire MONTH of July - from Paducah to Dayton to Indianapolis to Chicago to Rockford to New York City to Nashville to South Bend.

Were the record high temperatures similarly spread over such a wide area, or were they in a concentrated area? I don't know.

What I do know, is that this coming February, if I were living in an area that should receive 30 feet of snow in one week, I wouldn't much care if some other place - say,  in southern Arizona - were reporting record high temperatures for the same week.

See Accuweather's posting:
http://www.accuweather.com/mt-news-blogs.asp?blog=weathermatrix&partner=&pgUrl=
/mtweb/content/weathermatrix/archives/2009/07/1000_low_temp_records_set_this_july.asp
Thanks to Joe Herr for pointing this out.