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Macomb, IL – Triple-digit temperatures and strong winds that turn showers into severe thunderstorms with six-plus inches of rain in a few hours sap our strength. Droughts and wildfires plague the Southwest; tornadoes are more frequent and dangerous in the Midwest; the Mississippi River is flooded so much and so long the Army has to sacrifice thousands of acres of farmland to save some towns.
Meteorologists and farmers, gardeners and businesses, Weather Channel fans and regular folks all suffer new extremes, and there's new proof that fears of climate change are valid.
Gardener Paul Redman says, "There is telling evidence that climate change is affecting plant life around the world."
Redman is director of Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the American Public Gardens Association launched a project linking NOAA's climate services and the association's gardens, which get 70 million visitors a year. The effort seeks to educate garden enthusiasts about climate change affecting America's green spaces.
Meanwhile, NOAA has just released data showing America faces a "new normal" - literally.
Comparing average temperatures year around, the new normal temperatures for the United States reflect a warming world, according to NOAA's decades-spanning averages, called "US Climate Normals." Updated every 10 years, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center's Normals are 30-year averages of a lot of data collected from thousands of sources nationwide.
Each time they're updated, an old decade is dropped, and a new one added.
Starting this month, when you hear that a day was hotter, colder or rainier than normal, that "Normal" will be a little different from the past. These averages are one definition of "climate," as opposed to more variable, short-term "weather" events.
The new Normals also show that climate can and has changed.
Mac Franklin, gardener at the North Carolina Arboretum, told Jennifer Freeman of NOAA's ClimateWatch magazine, "Longer periods of warm weather affect plants in many ways. It can mean less water in the soil, and then the rain we do get can't seep into the ground as easily. Longer warm periods can lengthen the pest season and allow for more generations of pests."
The new Normals show that every state experienced warmer temperatures in 1981-2010 compared to 1971-2000. State-by-state, the annual average minimum and maximum temperatures are warmer.
However, it wasn't daytime highs but overnight lows that increased the most. January's nighttime temperatures were higher everywhere in the United States except the Southeast; warmer winter nights were especially evident from the northern plains to the northern Rocky Mountains.
A NOAA team calculates the Normals from millions of bits of data, some collected and reported automatically by instruments, while other measurements collected manually each day by volunteers. Taking part are thousands of stations in the National Weather Service (NWS) Cooperative Observer Program, plus stations staffed by professionals within the NWS, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
NOAA scientist Anthony Arguez, the US Climate Normals project manager, says, "Our job is to take the data values as collected by the National Weather Service, apply robust quality control and standardization to improve the fidelity in our products, and use sophisticated statistical techniques that result in high-quality Normals of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, and derived quantities such as heating- and cooling-degree days."
The American Chemical Society, American Statistical Society and the National Academy of Sciences are just a few of the many organizations and scientists who warn of human-caused change to the planet's climate.
But they're up against wealthy and powerful forces whose interests are in profiting in the short term, regardless of long-term consequences: coal companies, the oil industry, and the Koch brothers and their mouthpieces on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
Friend Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, says, "We can't guarantee that any specific disaster is caused by our warming atmosphere. The links are delayed and diffused. But considered together, the escalating floods, droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes fit all the predicted models. So do the extreme snowfalls and ice storms, as our heated atmosphere carries more water vapor."
Indeed, this is no hoax; this is heat. The problem is real and urgently needs a collective response.
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of WIU or Tri States Public Radio