In New York, It's the Summer That Isn't

The heat! AHHH! Break out the jackets its so hot!

If you feel like reading for the Liberal/Media spin on this it is worth the laugh. Basically, it is cooler because the air is hotter. Or something like that. I still believe the science that shows we are entering an ice age. It makes more sense than the babble of the politically correct fools who believe otherwise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/nyregion/01hot.html?_r=3&hp

But this summer has been conspicuously different in New York City. Not one 99-degree day in Central Park. Not a single day that the temperature even approached 90. For just the second time in 140 years of record keeping, the temperature will have failed to reach 90 in either June or July.

The daily average this month has been at or below normal every day but two. The temperature broke 80 on 16 days in New York -- one more day than in Fairbanks, Alaska. Depending on Friday's high, this will be the second or third coolest June and July recorded in New York. If August follows the same pattern -- and the latest forecast through midmonth predicts that it will -- this could be the coolest summer on record.

The result: relief, lower electric bills, spared lives and undisturbed slumber.

But this being New York, New Yorkers have also recalibrated their threshold for heat complaints. This summer, 85 is the new 95.

"There's no doubt there's a tendency to acclimatize to a weather pattern," said Fred Gadomski, a Pennsylvania State University meteorologist. "This summer, we've had so many relatively cool days that even if it gets a little warm people are reacting to it as if it's a very hot day."

In the end, this will have been the coolest June and July since either 1903 or 1881, when sweltering New Yorkers grumbled about a sudden early August heat wave.

"There were warmer days during last summer," The New York Times reported on Aug. 6, 1881, "but men and women became accustomed to the unexampled heat of that unexampled season and did not mind it so much."

This has been the sixth coolest July on record. The high was 86 on July 17. For June and July, the average as of Thursday was 70.6, the third coolest. As of the end of the day Thursday, the average temperature in July was 72.6, nearly four degrees below normal.

"A monthly departure of four degrees below normal is very significant," said Gary Conte, a National Weather Service meteorologist.