Heat wave: 1,000+ records fall in USA in a week

[GliderGuider]

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/story/2012-06-27/heat-records/55874718/1

In the past week, 1,011 records have been broken around the country, including 251 new daily high temperature records on Tuesday.

Those numbers might seem big, but they're hard to put into context — the National Climatic Data Center has only been tracking the daily numbers broken for a little more than a year, said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the center.

Still, it's impressive, given that records usually aren't broken until the scorching months of July and August. If forecasts hold, more records could fall in the coming days in the central and western parts of the country, places accustomed to sweating out the summer.

The current U.S. heat wave "is bad now by our current definition of bad," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, but "our definition of bad changes. What we see now will be far more common in the years ahead."

[pscot]

1. Our definition of bad changes

What about our definition of worse. Or worser. When it's killing us, is it still only bad? When it gets biblical are we still saying, "Gee. I've never seen it so bad"? I'm beginning to believe it was a mistake to quit drinking .

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. The records did not fall , they melted.

[bananas]

3. The dustbowlification of America - and all that solar energy going to waste.

We can build desert solar now, or dustbowl solar later.

[Nihil]

4. I vote for dustbowl solar later so that they only have to meet a lower demand (fewer people).

(I'd actually vote for rooftop solar now but that wasn't one of your options.)