Summer Weather In Spring; Get Ready For Scorcher Before Fall

Remember that you read this on an early June day that feels like mid-August - - as summer heat, rising temperatures, plus on-again-off-again drought and storms with added intensity turn Wisconsin into Tennessee, or maybe Missouri:

According to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. temperatures have been high enough to make it the warmest spring on record, the warmest year-to-date and the warmest 12-month period as well.

“This warmth is an example of what we would expect to see more often in a warming world. Understanding that the United States and the rest of the planet are warming along with preparing for eventualities like this is one way our nation can become climate-smart,” Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch, National Climatic Data Center, says in the video above.

A subject on this blog for years:

I attended in 2003 a US Environmental Protection Agency program in Chicago on climate change sponsored by Great Lakes Mayors; the consensus scientific prediction - - just like this one - - was for intense rain events that would put pressure on municipalities' stormwater infrastructure.

And certainly in mainstream media. A long piece more than five years ago in the Journal Sentinel had this to say:

Wisconsin's temperature rose 0.7 degrees during the 20th century, according to the State Climatology Office. Globally, the average increase was 1.5 degrees.

In the climate world, these are big leaps.

Since 1920, global temperatures have risen at a faster rate than any time in at least 2,000 years, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

In Milwaukee, the average temperature over the past 30 years has jumped 2 degrees from the same 30-year period a century ago, according to the State Climatology Office.

The higher temperatures coincide with rising levels of carbon dioxide, most of which is the result of burning fossil fuels.

But there are additional explanations for the Earth's warming. Some scientists believe the natural cycles of cooling and the current warming trend have been overlooked...

By the end of the century, the most accepted prediction is that the Earth will warm by 3.2 to 7.2 degrees. This would be two to five times as high as the change in temperature we've experienced since 1900.

The assessment came last month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which surveyed the latest findings in climate research. The predicted temperature increases would dwarf those that have been experienced in thousands of years.

In Wisconsin, winters by 2100 could be more like Missouri's today, and Lake Michigan water levels could drop as much as 5 feet in the next 100 years, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.