Going to the dentist always makes me tired, and I already wasn’t feeling up to any intellectual heavy lifting today, so instead let’s turn to one of the laziest of lazy blogger tropes: Talking about the weather.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s hot around these parts.
With Austin on the verge of wrapping up its warmest July on record, Mother Nature appears to be assembling the ingredients for the city’s hottest summer ever.
Austin’s average temperature in July as of Sunday was 90.7 degrees, which is not only 5.2 degrees higher than normal but also a full degree warmer than the July record set in 2011, the year drawing the most comparisons to our blistering summer.
The historic weather of 2011 bore memorable disasters and set a benchmark for drought and heat records for Central Texas, including:
90 days of 100-degree weather, a record that holds up to this day — but could be broken this year. The Bastrop Complex Fire, which started in September and burned 34,000 acres and 1,600 homes in central Bastrop County about 30 miles east of Austin, becoming the most destructive fire in Texas history. Austin’s warmest year ever with an average temperature of 72 degrees. Six years later, 2017 became the warmest year, but only by a tenth of a degree. A drought that reached record levels across the state in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a joint effort of the National Drought Mitigation Center, the U.S. Agriculture Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exceptional drought — the drought monitor’s most severe level, typified by crop loss and extreme sensitivity to fire danger — had spread to as much 87.8% of Texas in mid-September and 88% in early October that year.
It’s not the hottest temperatures we’ve had on record: In September of 2000, it hit 112°. In 2011, we had the worst drought in recorded history. So maybe we’re just in the “Every 11 years Austin gets really screwed” cycle.
And we’re not even having the worst of it. Drought has Lake Mead at record lows. (Evidently China has gotten all our rain and is suffering record floods.)
We’re used to 100° summer days, we’re just not used to so many above 100° days in a row. A certain sense of lassitude slips in.
Still, we soldier on. Dogs still get walked three times a day, and I did my usual Sunday bike ride, since it was only 100°.
But expect some lazy blogging days.
I absolutely understand the lethargy, Lawrence. We are in the country outside of Austin so it’s a little cooler, but still at or over 100 every day. It’s so enervating that you don’t want to do anything even if you are inside where it’s air conditioned.
For some reason I don’t remember 2011 all that well but I DO remember 1980, which was similar. I lived in Dallas then where it was about 5 degrees hotter than Austin was every day. And I had an un-air-conditioned VW Beetle. Boy, was that a long summer.
If June is Pride Month, the heat makes July Sloth Month. And May (when George Floyd riots began) is Wrath Month.
I’ve heard hurricane season intensity is tied to an 11-year sunspot cycle. Record heat every 11 years in Austin can’t be a coincidence.