>NOAA Summer 2009 summary and numbers released

This is an amazing map to look at as you can see that when combining the entire lower 48, just how much of it is cooler than normal.

My summer forecast pointed towards a possibility of normal to slightly below normal for the Southwest/West and Southeast with higher than normal precipitation and I thought the Northeast could end up slightly below normal. I was wrong when it came to the Plains and Midwest which I said would be warmer than normal and we would see more in the way of extreme heat. However I believe my main core of my forecast was pretty good considering it was made back in March!! I believe my ideas also of a cooler coastal California was good with the heart of summer seeing a peak high at downtown LA of 92 and reasonably cool throughout with a heat wave at the end of August into September and the other heat wave back in April..

In truth, I just didn’t see just how cold it would really be, but how many expected the July to be as cold overall?

This is the 29th year of global warming or better known in a more reasonable and realistic sense when backing history behind it, the “Modern Warm Period” and this period has displayed monster heat events such as the killer 2003 heat in Europe, the second warmest July and the warmest January both in 2006 for the USA, One of the warmest winters across the Northern Hemisphere in 2006-2007 all came around a 2-4 year period, possibly when the Modern Warm Period maxed out. These types of “extreme” events are very likely nothing new to our earth but simply because of bigger urban centers and more people as well as better documentation of these events make them “extreme”, however I believe the heat waves, cold waves, hurricane landfalls, tornadoes, droughts and floods we’re all on the rise and just as extreme back in the last warm period in the era from the 1920s to end of the 1940s but possibly even more extreme during the Medeavil Warm Period that was before the Little Ice Age. It’s interesting that we have seen cooling of earth’s temperature over the last decade or so, we are seeing increasingly colder winters and we have the same amount of ice globally as we did 29 years ago, that BTW was when the commencement of the “Modern Warm Period”, the reversal has possibly begun, rebuilding our poles with ice and our glaciers. The new glaciation period is quite possibly beginning with signs throughout as increasingly colder winters, cooler and shorter summers. A harsh 30 years of global cooling is ahead of us, but like during the warm 1930s when real heat was melting all-time records, winters did see tremendous cold in winter, so when we see harsher winters, don’t be surprised to see hot summers and heat waves still show up.

Global Warming and an above normal global temperature is still likely to continue for another 10 years but it will take many tougher and tougher winters to bring our earth back to where it was in the 60s and 70s. However the solar cycle may be telling us that it’s not so much the cold, 60s and 70s era we must worry about but more an era more similar to the Little Ice Age and the late 1800s, early 1900s which brought the most severe winters of all time to our planet. Could we see those kind of winters back within the next 20 to 30 years? I believe we will.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark