And now, to add insult to injury, it is well over 110 degrees most days. What witchcraft is this?
About the heat wave? The entire west has a Mediterranean climate with the Northwest west of the Cascades having what's called a "warm Mediterranean" climate. That means there is a clear wet and dry season with warn, dry weather for several months of the year. In the Portland area getting a few days over 100F in a summer are not unusual and we get the same phenomenon of the Santa Ana winds in Southern California in the late summer. My allergies really give me fits at those times because lots of grass pollen from east of the Cascades blows into the area.
This is unusual that those winds are early this year and it's exasperated by conditions that are trapping the heat over land in the western parts of the states instead of allowing it to blow out to sea. So we're having an oven effect.
Cliff Mass who is a Meteorology professor at the University of Washington (empire Seattle again
) has a blog that explains all the weather phenomenons that hit this region and the entire west to some extent.
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
He believes in human caused climate change, but he's also quick to point out that weird weather phenomenon alone are not necessarily a sign of it. He is a scientist and weird weather has been with us as long as humans have kept records.
His last three posts are quite interesting, we have some very unusual conditions colliding right now. The latest weather model has us hitting all time high temps tomorrow afternoon followed by below average temps a few hours later. We may break two weather records tomorrow: all time high followed by fastest temperature change in local history.
I grew up in California and lived in Bakersfield for a while. This kind of heat is normal summer weather there.
A question I have is, are vaccinated ppl dying from the delta variant?
Overall a few vaccinated people get COVID (or get it again). But the hospitalization rate for vaccinated people is vastly lower than unvaccinated and the chances of dying are also vastly lower. Comedian Bill Maher tested positive for COVID a few weeks ago and had to take two weeks off from doing his show. He is vaccinated and he said he felt no different. If the production company hadn't been testing regularly nobody would have ever known he had it, including him.
The Delta variant is one of the most contagious discovered, but it doesn't have the immune dodging properties of the South African variant (I forget which Greek letter they gave that one, Beta maybe?) Delta is pushing the SA variant into extinction which is probably a good thing.
The variant that hit Manatee County Florida last week might be Delta or it might be another, new variant, but it appears to be stopped dead by vaccination.
www.yahoo.com
www.medrxiv.org
