Before sharing how damn HOT several weather forecasts are saying the coming weekend in Salem will be, this sign my wife put up yesterday speaks to how yellow jackets are viewing our highly unusual weather.
We're used to yellow jackets causing problems on our rural property during the summer. But we rarely, if ever, see them acting aggressively before late July or August.
That's when I wrote "Killing yellow jackets in their hidey-holes," my detailed description of how Laurel and I normally deal with yellow jackets.
Yet here we are in late June with Laurel getting stung as she walked to our front door, spurring her to warn delivery people to leave packages in our carport until we deal with the yellow jacket nest.
Global warming is very real.
Yellow jackets getting irritable a month earlier than usual is just one of a great many signs that temperatures are steadily rising, with extreme weather events like heat waves becoming increasingly common.
Like what Salem and the rest of the Pacific Northwest have to endure this coming weekend, and the beginning of next week. Forecasts differ about how hot it will be, but the consensus is HOT.
Here's what the National Weather Service forecasts for our location: 102 on Saturday, 107 on Sunday, 100 on Monday.
The Weather Channel app has an even scarier forecast: 105 on Saturday, 115 on Sunday, 99 on Monday. That's insane! Yet possible.
And here's what my AccuWeather app is showing: 104 on Saturday, 113 on Sunday, 101 on Monday.
AccuWeather says the record high for Salem on those days is: Saturday 103 (set in 2006), Sunday 99 (set in 2000), Monday 101 (set in 2008). So we could have record-setting heat on all three days, and almost certainly on Sunday.
Last year was a really bad fire season in Oregon. With all of the state experiencing drought conditions, this heat wave, and possible thunderstorms in central and eastern Oregon, threatens to make 2021 an even worse wildfire year.
Keep this in mind if someone tells you not to worry about global warming. But in one sense they're correct. We shouldn't worry about global warming; we should be terrified of it.
And demanding that our elected officials at the local, state, and federal level act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible before our planet heats up so much as to be barely habitable for humans.
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