The Romans called them diÄ“s caniculÄrÄ“s, literally “the dog days”, because they associated the hottest, most humid days of summer with Sirius, the Dog Star, in the constellation Canis Major, the larger dog, listed as one of the 48 constellations by Ptolemy almost 2,000 years ago. I can tell it’s the dog days of summer because there are no interesting op-eds or editorials in any of the major news outlets. Everyone is either on vacation or just phoning it in.
Europe is suffering through the hottest summer on record. High temperatures in France and Italy have been between 90°F and 110°F or, said another way, weather that wouldn’t be particularly unusual for Chicago in summer and completely normal in St. Louis, where I grew up.
You haven’t experienced summer until you’ve worked next to a blast furnace in a steel mill in a St. Louis summer with the ambient temperature and humidity both around 100. My dad was a conscientious objector to air conditioning as well so I never lived in an air conditioned home until I was a grown man.
My dad was not an ogre. Far from it. But my mom’s first major expense (after paying for my dad’s funeral) was to have central air installed in the house.
I remember one summer when the news out of Chicago was the daily death toll from heat. Don’t remember what year, late 70’s?. High rise apartments, no A/C, elderly tenants.
Kind of surprised we’re not getting the same from Europe today.
I thought I knew heat until I spent a summer in East Africa not far from the equator. When the wind came off the ocean it would be 110 and high humidity. When the wind came off the desert it would be “dry” but 125. The one day it rained it wasn’t really rain – it was large drops of mud falling from the sky and coating everything.
I’ve only experienced 125° weather once, while passing through Twentynine Palms in the California desert on a family trip when I was a kid. The car wasn’t air conditioned and even with the low humidity it was pretty beastly.
“You haven’t experienced summer until you’ve worked next to a blast furnace in a steel mill in a St. Louis summer with the ambient temperature and humidity both around 100. “
I assume you mean open hearth or EAF, and complete with greens and silver coat. Heh. Lots of fun. My belated sympathies. I don’t think people who have not experienced it understand the intensity of radiant heat coming straight off of liquid steel 10 ft away (not slag covered) and how it is not just hot, but can burn your face right off, or blind you. It’s 2850 F people.
Great fun. 🔥😓
Andy – you’ve convinced me. I’ll take that place off the bucket list.
Just hit 145 in Kuwait (in the sun), 131 in Saudi Arabia (shade) . (I believe that they record the official temperature in the shade, but in direct sunlight it is much higher. Working on blacktop during the summer in Saudi was no fun.)
https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/kuwait-and-saudi-arabia-record-highest-temperature-on-earth-1.1560325581417
Steve