It’s with great difficulty I come to terms this summer is less than a week old. My plants
are dying from the heat. That’s the bad news. The good news is the water from the previous two
years is finally drying up. The pond is going with it. That would be the body of water that for the
last twenty-five years has been a body of weeds.
All over America the heat is rising. Roads are buckling under the heat, and Interstates are
closing due. They’ll have to do the repairs at night I imagine. I spent twenty-seven years doing
bridge and highway work, and it’s brutal in this sort of weather to try to work.
In 1997, we hit a spell where it was brutally hot but this was in August. They sent a
nineteen-year-old new hire out to learn a few things from me, and the first thing he learned was
we were not going to sit in the truck. We had shit to do.
This guy had poked fun at me for a while for being “old.”
He bragged he could put up with the heat much longer than I could, and when I got out of
the truck, and took the keys with me, he wasn’t daunted. After about an hour he had drank all the
water he brought with him. He was sweating, but still not giving in. About an hour later, he
wanted to sit in the truck and cool off. I told him he had to do ten pushups for every minute he
spent sitting in the AC. I did fifty. I told him I was going to check on a few things and I would be
back soon. I walked away. He freaked out.
An hour later he was in full panic mode. Three hours in direct sunlight next to an asphalt
operation and he was wilting. He wanted to call someone in the office to come get him but cell
phones hadn’t taken over the world yet. He tried to get the contractor to let him sit in his truck
and no.
Red faced and not sweating anymore, I was getting worried about him. He told me he
quit and wanted me to take him in. I dropped him off at a pay phone and waited until I was sure
someone was on the way. He looked bad.
When I got back the asphalt crew had quit. Not finished for the day, but mutinied. Out of
twelve men, ten of them had gotten into the work van and left. It was three in the afternoon. I
stopped by a bridge project and got into the water with my work clothes on. Spring Creek is cold
and clear and I soaked for a while.
The young man went back to the office and told them I was horrible and had tortured
him. When I got back, clothes already drying, I told them he had quit, and refused to work. They
didn’t so much as slap his wrist. Later, I found out the actual temperature was over 100 degrees
and the heat index over 110.
They don’t make teenagers like they used to. But the heat is getting worse every summer.
Take Care,
Mike
They aren’t smart enough in Central Texas to do that type of work at night. I have never understood why. They heat here is bad, the heat index is awful. They traffic is getting worse as well. Seems like they should.
Chick, all the interstate work I did was at night. I missed the entire summers of 2010 and 2017 working at night.
Poetic.
Marco, I never thought so, but thanks!
During the summers while in college, I worked for my county’s highway department–either helping layout the asphalt or flagging traffic (yeah, stopping vehicles going 55+ MPH holding a stick with an orange flag on it and wearing an orange vest was a great idea). This was in SW Ohio, so the highs would get into the low- to mid- 90s with humidity. We worked 4, 10-hour days (so three day weekends) and no a/c on the vehicles.
I don’t think each summer is hotter than the previous one–it comes in cycles. In fact, from about 1997 to about 2016 or so, temperatures were pretty steady. This is why it went from global warming to climate change.
Still, everyone should be careful in the heat–especially if it is humid.
Decades of peer reviewed scientific research doesn’t line up with your personal opinion there, Tim.
Though ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ describe different things their interchangeability has become accepted. Neither term is redundant.
There’s plenty of information at your fingertips, Wikipedia is a good start.
Tim, if this is a cycle, its trending upwards without a hitch. The diary entries for temperature were rock solid consist in the late 1990s as 72 for a low during the summers. They are now getting up around 74. That doesn’t seem much except it’s warming faster now and not dropping again. The pythons in south Florida are moving northwards as well as other invasive species. Summer begins in South Georgia in early May now and lasts until November. Were this a cycle of some sort, we would see some sort of break, some dip in temperature, some sign the strange plants and animals that are marching north have been pushed back. But we see every indication telling us this is speeding up.
Looking at the Skeptical Science site, temperature cycles last about 30 years. Other phenomena last longer–like the little ice age in Europe was from abut 1350 until 1850. During this time, the River Thames in London would freeze over at times to allow ice skating and other on-ice activities from about 1608 until 1814.
As for the temperatures in the diary, was the thermometer always in the same spot? And that spot did not become a heat island with buildings, concrete, and asphalt? If the latter, then current readings would be artificially higher. Was the thermometer replaced?
Or would it be easier to continue defending against Mother Nature? Over the last about 100 years, deaths due to nature has dropped quite a bit because we have figured out how to build more hurricane-resistant buildings, air conditioning has become more prevalent, and insulation and heating sources have gotten better.
Global average temperatures show that the Little Ice Age was not a distinct planet-wide period but a regional phenomenon occurring near the end of a long temperature decline that preceded recent global warming.
And ‘continue defending against’ Mother Nature? The people of Tuvalu might disagree with that being a successful strategy.