Latest news with #SummerHeat
CNN
12 hours ago
- CNN
Summer ‘warming hole,' elaborate diamond heist, futuristic furniture: Catch up on the day's stories
5 Things CrimeFacebookTweetLink Follow 👋 Welcome to 5 Things PM! If you're looking to squeeze in one last trip before the end of summer — maybe a little Labor Day getaway — our travel team offers 10 great options. I can confirm that this magical mountain retreat and this charming coastal town are both worth a visit. Watch to see why. Here's what else you might have missed during your busy day. Tens of millions of Americans have endured a sweltering summer — the season when the effects of climate change are arguably most apparent. It's getting hotter, longer, more humid and more dangerous. But there's a strange divide along geographic lines. Hundreds of items just got a lot more expensive to import into the US, now that President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on steel and aluminum has kicked in. Deodorant, butter knives, baby strollers and fire extinguishers had been excluded — but not anymore. A gang of thieves concocted an elaborate scheme to steal a rare $25 million pink jewel in Dubai, but police recovered it just a few hours later. The suspects posed as wealthy dealers by renting luxury cars and holding meetings in high-end hotels. Scott Janssen was an atheist when he started doing hospice work 33 years ago. Then he began hearing about — and witnessing — his patients' deathbed visitations. What he saw changed his view of faith. Seaweed. Old sneakers. Mushroom mycelium. Designers are thinking outside the box and using surprising materials to make products for the home that are more sustainable. GET '5 THINGS' IN YOUR INBOX If your day doesn't start until you're up to speed on the latest headlines, then let us introduce you to your new favorite morning fix. Sign up here for the '5 Things' newsletter. 🐻 Bear Theft Auto? A woman in Asheville, North Carolina, watched in disbelief as a curious creature casually opened the doors of an SUV and peeked inside — like it was shopping for a new ride. House panel to make Epstein files public after redactions to protect victim identities White House says Putin-Zelensky meeting plans are 'underway' Hurricane Erin threatens dangerous surf for much of the East Coast 🤿 Beneath the streets: A hidden world lies under the historic neighborhoods of Budapest. Take a closer look at one of the largest active thermal water caves in the world. 💻 Which chipmaking company is the US government considering making an investment in?A. IntelB. NvidiaC. QualcommD. AMD⬇️ Scroll down for the answer. 👋 We'll see you tomorrow.🧠 Quiz answer: A. The Trump administration is considering an investment in struggling chipmaker Intel.📧 Check out all of CNN's newsletters. Today's edition of 5 Things PM was edited and produced by CNN's Kimberly Richardson and Sarah Hutter.
CNN
a day ago
- Science
- CNN
The strange divide in how Americans experience summer temperatures
Climate change Air quality PollutionFacebookTweetLink Follow Chris Mooney is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a CNN Climate contributor. He is currently a professor of practice in the Environmental Institute at the University of Virginia. The contiguous United States has endured another searing summer. June was unusually warm, and a major heatwave afflicted nearly a third of the population late in the month, and July offered little relief. This is hardly a surprise: Summers in the Lower 48 are now 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than they were in 1896, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Summer is the season in which the effects of climate change are arguably most apparent: It's getting hotter, longer, more humid and more dangerous. Yet averages elide a complex reality: The country's experience of hotter summers — and thus one of the most visceral aspects of climate change itself — is fractured along geographic lines. Summer is behaving very erratically as the country warms, with large changes in some regions, especially the West, and very muted ones in the central and southeast US. Comparing summers of the past 30 years with a broad period between 1901 and 1960, the limited warming and even slight cooling in some locations becomes strikingly apparent. It's dubbed the summertime 'warming hole.' Scientists have acknowledged the warming hole's existence for some time, and sought to explain what is causing it. They are not at all convinced it will continue — frankly, many suspect it won't. But for now, it stands out enough that it requires an explanation, which many research papers have attempted to do. 'There are not too many places on the planet that are showing this, honestly,' said Joseph Barsugli, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who contributed to a recent study on the topic. 'It's pretty unique, I think.' The pattern is so widely recognized among scientists who study warming trends in the US that it was prominently featured in the most recent installment of the US National Climate Assessment, which came out in 2023. Under the Trump administration, that document no longer resides at what was once its main government website, but it is still available here. It states that in summer, 'seasonal temperatures in some regions east of the Rockies have decreased,' although it adds that in the Southeast, a trend of cooling temperatures had 'recently reversed.' This is an oddity amid a warming climate, as the general pattern is that the world's land areas are warming up more quickly than the oceans. Europe, for instance, is one of the fastest warming land areas on the planet. But where you are on Earth determines the kind of climate change you get, and there's an enormous amount of variability. Scientists are still trying to understand the reasons behind the bifurcated pattern — which they sometimes call a 'dipole' — in US summer warming rates between the? West and East. It has been attributed to anything from the cooling effects of reforestation in the Southeast to 'corn sweat' in the Midwest tied to more productive agriculture. The 'sweating' refers to how corn crops transpire and put more water into the air, which then can fall as cooling rain. 'I think a piece of it is the land use change, and basically, the increase in agricultural intensification, which just kind of dumps water into the atmosphere,' said Jonathan Winter, a professor at Dartmouth University who has found that the warming 'hole' has actually been good for Midwest corn yields. There's also reason to think that in the Southeast, as people abandoned less profitable farms during the 20th century and forests regrew, that too muted warming. Especially in the summer, forests draw up water through tree roots and transpire it into the air, making it more humid. In a recent paper, Mallory Barnes of Indiana University and colleagues find that this had a significant cooling effect. Reforestation 'cools off big areas, not just small areas,' said Barnes. On top of all that, some of the phenomenon has to do with the extreme temperatures associated with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. That human-induced phenomenon skews the data extra-warm in that era for some parts of the US, making it hard to find a warming temperature trend today. Very warm summer temperatures in the 1930s are noticeable, for instance, in the temperature history of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. The summer warming hole is also sensitive to how it is defined, and in recent decades, there are signs that it may be lessening, somewhat. In southeastern states like Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, summer temperatures were very cool in the 1960s and 1970s but have warmed considerably since then. It's just that they haven't necessarily risen much beyond where they were earlier in the 20th century – yet. In some places, like Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, the overall change remains in the direction of cooling: Finally, the dearth of warming in summer doesn't necessarily mean regions are not warming over the whole year — summer only comprises a quarter of that and gets averaged in with everything else. Still, it mutes the overall change and is an anomaly that needs explaining. It's also significant because summer is when warm temperatures are potentially the most dangerous. It's also the season we most feel and remember the experience of heat. One thing the different hypotheses tend to have in common is an emphasis on the cooling effects of rainfall. For instance, in one striking 2023 paper in the Journal of Climate, a group of leading researchers sought to understand why this 'warming hole' pattern has 'not disappeared,' as might have been expected, and why many climate models don't produce it. One of their key findings was that an increase in rainfall is the explanation. The rain comes in during summer afternoons and cools temperatures down, keeping a lid on them. 'More rain or cloudier conditions have limited daytime temperatures from rising across a large part of the region,' said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist with Climate Central who was involved with the research. Indeed, the study shows that nights in the region have been warming as expected. It's the days that have not really done so. Ultimately, beyond local factors, some researchers are tracking the source of the changes farther afield. They believe a rainier pattern over the eastern US may be rooted in the behavior of the Pacific Ocean. It's complex to decipher what may be happening, but generally, scientists believe ocean patterns can affect weather and climate in very distant regions. And that includes, perhaps, why one part of the US might be getting more rain while another gets drier. The atmospheric alignment is similar to what has been called the positive phase of the 'Pacific North America' pattern, with a cool eastern US and a warm West, said Labe. If ocean surface temperatures are warmer than normal 'in the central equatorial Pacific near the Dateline, no matter what time period you use, it appears you'll get a warming hole somewhere in the eastern US in summer due to increased clouds and precipitation,' said Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has studied the warming hole and its connection to the Pacific. The relative lack of warming has been highlighted by some critics of various aspects of climate science. That includes John Christy, the state climatologist of Alabama and a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Christy recently co-authored an Energy Department report that did not deny the Earth is warming in general, but criticized 'exaggerated projections of future warming.' That document has mobilized a large number of climate researchers seeking to refute it. 'One can immediately see how determining the warming effect on Alabama of the extra [greenhouse gases] is a problem as the temperatures of the recent decades (which should be responding to the warming influence of extra [greenhouse gases]) have actually been cooler than earlier decades when this influence was essentially absent,' writes Christy. And it's true Alabama shows up in the summer warming hole. But because the lid on temperatures is so closely tied to rainfall, Barsugli warns that there's no guarantee it'll continue. The warming can leap back without something to suppress it. 'If you do have a very dry year, it probably means you'll break records in maximum temperatures,' he said. 'It's sort of a latent threat.' It's also hard not to notice the summer warming hole primarily affects central and southern states that tend to vote Republican. It's unlikely that temperatures themselves are significantly affecting people's ideology, however, said James Druckman, a political scientist at the University of Rochester who has studied the factors underlying beliefs about climate change. 'I don't think they're having a substantial impact on what people think. They might at the margin,' Druckman said. 'I think the politics have become too polarized or entrenched on this issue.' Ultimately the question is whether the hole will finally be overcome by broader trends. Experts say it might, though they're not sure when. 'It's this tug of war between the increase in rainfall and the increase in temperature,' said Winter. 'At some point, I do expect that it will dissipate. It will still be cool relative to the rest of the United States. But relative to historical temperatures, I think you will eventually see climate change.'
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
Got the sniffles? Here's what to know about summer colds and the COVID-19 variant called stratus
Summer heat, outdoor fun ... and cold and flu symptoms ? The three may not go together in many people's minds: partly owing to common myths about germs and partly because many viruses really do have lower activity levels in the summer.
Yahoo
10-08-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Feel sticky this summer? That's because it's been record muggy East of the Rockies
Climate Stickiest Summer More than 70 million Americans sweated through the muggiest first two months of summer on record as climate change has noticeably dialed up the Eastern United States' humidity in recent decades, an Associated Press data analysis shows. And that meant uncomfortably warm and potentially dangerous nights in many cities the last several weeks, the National Weather Service said. Parts of 27 states and Washington, D.C., had a record amount of days that meteorologists call uncomfortable — with average daily dew points of 65 degrees Fahrenheit or higher — in June and July, according to data derived from the Copernicus Climate Service. And that's just the daily average. In much of the East, the mugginess kept rising to near tropical levels for a few humid hours. Philadelphia had 29 days, Washington had 27 days and Baltimore had 24 days where the highest dew point simmered to at least 75 degrees, which even the the weather service office in Tampa calls oppressive, according to weather service data. Dew point is a measure of moisture in the air expressed in degrees that many meteorologists call the most accurate way to describe humidity. The summer of 2025 so far has had dew points that average at least 6 degrees higher than the 1951-2020 normals in Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Columbus and St. Louis, the AP calculations show. The average June and July humidity for the entire country east of the Rockies rose to more than 66 degrees, higher than any year since measurements started in 1950. 'This has been a very muggy summer. The humid heat has been way up,' said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central. Twice this summer climate scientist and humidity expert Cameron Lee of Kent State University measured dew points of about 82 degrees at his home weather station in Ohio. That's off the various charts that the weather service uses to describe what dew points feel like. 'There are parts of the United States that are experiencing not only greater average humidity, especially in the spring and summer, but also more extreme humid days,' Lee said. He said super sticky days are now stretching out over more days and more land. High humidity doesn't allow the air to cool at night as much as it usually does, and the stickiness contributed to multiple nighttime temperature records from the Ohio Valley through the Mid-Atlantic and up and down coastal states, said Zack Taylor, forecast operations chief at the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center. Raleigh, Charlotte, Nashville, Virginia Beach, Va., and Wilmington, N.C., all reached records for the hottest overnight lows. New York City, Columbus, Atlanta, Richmond, Knoxville, Tennessee and Concord, New Hampshire came close, he said. 'What really impacts the body is that nighttime temperature,' Taylor said. 'So if there's no cooling at night or if there's a lack of cooling it doesn't allow your body to cool off and recover from what was probably a really hot afternoon. And so when you start seeing that over several days, that can really wear out the body, especially of course if you don't have access to cooling centers or air conditioning.' An extra hot and rainy summer weather pattern is combining with climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Woods Placky said. The area east of the Rockies has on average gained about 2.5 degrees in summer dew point since 1950, the AP analysis of Copernicus data shows. In the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and part of the 1990s, the eastern half of the country had an average dew point in the low 60s, what the weather service calls noticeable but OK. In four of the last six years that number has been near and even over the uncomfortable line of 65. 'It's huge,' Lee said of the 75-year trend. 'This is showing a massive increase over a relatively short period of time.' That seemingly small increase in average dew points really means the worst ultra-sticky days that used to happen once a year, now happen several times a summer, which is what affects people, Lee said. Higher humidity and heat feed on each other. A basic law of physics is that the atmosphere holds an extra 4% more water for every degree Fahrenheit (7% for every degree Celsius) warmer it gets, meteorologists said. For most of the summer, the Midwest and East were stuck under either incredibly hot high pressure systems, which boosted temperatures, or getting heavy and persistent rain in amounts much higher than average, Taylor said. What was mostly missing was the occasional cool front that pushes out the most oppressive heat and humidity. That finally came in August and brought relief, he said. Humidity varies by region. The West is much drier. The South gets more 65-degree dew points in the summer than the North. But that's changing. University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said uncomfortable humidity is moving further north, into places where people are less used to it. Summers now, he said, 'are not your grandparents' summers.' ___ Borenstein reported from Washington and Wildeman reported from Hartford, Connecticut. ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
31-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Here's when Arlington Community Schools students return to class this year
Summer heat is still in full force, but school is about to start up once again. Arlington Community Schools will head back to school on Aug. 7. Here is when public schools in the Memphis area return from summer break. DeSoto County Schools DeSoto County Schools will head back to school on July 31. Memphis-Shelby County Schools Memphis-Shelby County Schools students will head back to school on Aug. 4. Germantown Municipal School District Germantown Municipal School District will head back to school on Aug. 6. Millington Municipal Schools Millington Municipal Schools will head back to school on Aug. 6. Lakeland School System Lakeland School System will head back to school on Aug. 7. Bartlett City Schools Bartlett City Schools will head back to school on Aug. 7. Collierville School District Collierville School District students will head back to school on Aug. 7. This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Arlington Community Schools: Here's when students return to class Solve the daily Crossword
