Nothing new about hot Fresno summers
Oh, please, Fresno Bee, really? This summer is the climate change “apocalypse”? Hot summers in Fresno are hardly new. In the last 60 plus years, swamp coolers, air-conditioning and swimming pools have made it quite a bit easier to deal with what to this Bay Area boy are hellishly hot interludes between May and September.
The term “global warming” has been quietly demoted to the ambiguous “climate change” even by the gung-ho bunch who stand to benefit from so-called clean energy. The Bee’s own daily weather statistics have not shown any broken records this year. Fresno’s hottest day was July 8, 1905 at 115 degrees.
To put it in perspective, California’s (and the world’s) hottest day was in Death Valley on July 10, 1913 at 134 degrees, although some climate historians say this is four or five degrees too high.
Five times between 1960 and 2013 Death Valley reached 129. (When I mentioned this to a friend, he laughingly said that the current temperatures are almost blessedly coastal by comparison).
Ron Genini, Fresno
This story was originally published June 30, 2016 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Nothing new about hot Fresno summers."