Goodbye Summer, Hello Extreme Heat Season
It used to be that we enjoyed four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. I think it’s fair to say that due to Earth’s warming temperatures from our fossil-fueled climate crisis, summer has been officially replaced (or should be) with what I’ll call Extreme Heat Season. I’d like to share two things that I found in my email inbox yesterday morning.
The first item was a “Breaking News” notification from the Miami Herald announcing something that’s, unfortunately, becoming all too common: a heat advisory being published by the National Weather Service. The article announced that our temperatures would feel (that feeling is calculated by a combination of temperature and relative humidity) as if it were 105 degrees Fahrenheit. While it comes as no surprise that it’s hot during South Florida summers, I’d like to tell you that a heat advisory is an unusual event for our region, state, or country, but that would no longer be the truth. Just last Friday, all of South Florida was treated to the first “heat advisory” of the year from the National Weather Service.
In 2023, South Florida endured 43 heat advisories. Here’s what America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had to say about 2023’s heat and extreme heat advisories:
“The record heat of 2023 was unprecedented in modern history in the number of days and hours of high heat index values. There was a total of 43 days with heat advisories across South Florida, as well as 7 days with excessive heat warnings. Naples had 53 days with at least 2 hours of heat index of 105F or higher, with most other South Florida locations between 30 and 50 days. Miami Executive Airport even had 7 days with heat index values of 113F or higher!”
In 2024, heat advisories were issued for the following number of days per county from June through August: Miami-Dade, 40; Broward, 39; Palm Beach, 29; Collier, 29; Hendry, 19; and Glades, 19. None of these totals include the three issued in May. Who knows what the total will be in 2025, but with Friday and yesterday’s news, we are off and running in our new season of extreme heat.
Today also happens to be the one-year anniversary of the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. July 22, 2024, saw global surface air temperatures hit 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit and in doing so replaced the “old” record set, you guessed it, a year earlier on July 6, 2023, when the then record of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit was established. While 62.87 degrees sounds downright cold to us in South Florida, with an index forecast of 105 degrees, remember that these records include our entire planet, North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between.
To further “celebrate” these extreme temperatures, heat index advisories have been issued for the entire State of Florida, not just here in South Florida. For example, temperatures in central and north Florida are forecasted to feel 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
Extreme heat is known to kill more people in the U.S. than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined, and they are growing at alarming rates due to the pollution being pumped into our atmosphere from fossil fuel use. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the average number of heat-related deaths per year in the U.S. rose a remarkable 95% between 2010 and 2022. And here in the Sunshine State, Florida has experienced an 88% increase in heat-related deaths from 2020 to 2023, according to the CDC.
According to Florida State University’s Florida Climate Center, Florida’s average temperature has increased 3.5 degrees since 1950, well above the worldwide increase of 2.7 degrees over that same time period. And it’s not just our temperatures here on land; our ocean temperatures are increasing at alarming rates which, in turn, melt ice around the world that increases sea levels; create a blazing hot marine oven that cooks up tropical weather in ways that produce more frequent and powerful summer storms, including monster hurricanes; and boils coastal tropical environments such as coral reefs to the point that they face extinction.
And that’s not an opinion, it’s science. Here’s a table from the National Hurricane Center, part of NOAA, that illustrates the growth of storms over the decades since 1851, when mankind’s use of fossil fuels that pollute and warm our atmosphere and oceans came into vogue:
Simply stated, if you’ve lived in South Florida for any length of time like I have and think it “feels” warmer in recent years than it used to be, you’re correct. Not only does common sense allow us to conclude that it’s warmer, but so does science. Here’s an illustration from the University of Miami’s Climate Resilience Institute based on data from NOAA and its National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) that produces a weighted average of current and historic temperatures for Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe Counties.
So, aside from your sweating pores, this chart is further evidence that your eyes don’t deceive you. Our warming planet, fueled by fossil fuel use, and temperatures right here in South Florida are inching upwards to ever-dangerous levels, while our beloved summer, filled with beach balls, boat drinks, and white sandy shorelines, is increasingly being replaced by Extreme Heat Season.
Speaking of extreme heat and my inbox, allow me to end by sharing the opinion piece by the ever-witty Diane Roberts from yesterday’s edition of the fantastic nonprofit-independent news site Florida Phoenix:
You can’t ride out climate change in your air-conditioned cave
Science doesn’t care what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis believe.
Diane Roberts
July 21, 2025 7:00 am
Art work from young Floridians concerned about climate change. (Photo by Danielle J. Brown/Florida Phoenix)
If you wake up every morning worrying you’ve landed in hell, you pretty much have.
It’s hotter than Satan’s house cat.
Venture outside and it feels like you’re walking through a sauna wearing a suit made of polar bear fur while carrying a five-gallon pot of live coals.
Like so much in Florida, summer gets worse every year.
The heat is immoral; unconscionable; unendurable.
It should be illegal.
Surely Florida’s governor could figure out how to outlaw this heat.
He solved that pesky climate change business by simply erasing any mention of it in state statutes.
Maybe he could proclaim 100 degrees is really only 80, 80 is 50, and 50 is below freezing.
Kind of like what they call “vanity sizing:” A size 14 dress is now labeled a 10.
Or maybe we could use Celsius: 37 degrees sounds a lot better than 100.
See? You feel cooler already, don’t you?
Or not.
Those of us living in the reality-based culture know you cannot beat the Florida heat.
The best you can hope for is to reach some kind of accommodation with it, appease it the way the ancients would sacrifice a goat or a chicken to butter up a surly god given to smiting people for fun, or figure out ways to avoid the worst of it.
To Do List
I’m a native Floridian; I have suggestions:
1. Find a swimming pool. Lie in the water. Do not get out unless you are joined by an alligator — which happens quite often — and then extricate yourself slowly. No sudden movements. (Gators do not follow homeowners’ association rules.)
2. If reptiles run you out of the pool, try a bathtub. Yes, your skin will become quite wrinkly, but it’s better than heat rash.
3. Go shopping. You’re risking heatstroke getting from the parking lot to the door, but once you get inside your favorite big box store, the air-conditioning will be delightfully frosty.
You can spend hours and hours in Walmart, looking at “school clothes” even if you don’t go to school. Florida’s Back to School sales tax holiday runs throughout August. Unfortunately, the guns and ammo sales tax holiday doesn’t begin until Sept. 8. But it’ll still be hot enough to scald a scorpion and still be hurricane season.
You can get yourself a bargain firearm suitable for firing into the storm!
4. Bribe a grocery store or restaurant to let you sit in their walk-in freezer. Make sure you’ve got a cell signal in there: We don’t want any tragedies.
5. Speaking of ice, here’s something you can do using your home freezer. Stick a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in there, wait three hours, then put them on.
They’ll be stiff for 20 minutes or so, but you’ll enjoy the personal air-conditioning.
6. Leave. Go to Greenland.
Forget Canada (they’re certainly trying to forget us). Greenland will be the 51st state. The only reason it hasn’t happened already is that Donald Trump has been too busy blowing up the National Weather Service, NASA, and NOAA.
But you don’t want to wait till half of Florida flees our polluted aquifers, flooded suburbs, hurricane-ravaged condos and malarial sinks.
Get ahead of the crowd and scope out Nuuk’s best spots for Musk Ox steak and Eric the Red beer.
You’ll never run out of ice in Greenland.
Not for five or six years, at least.
Rising tide
This dang Chinese hoax is warming up everything from the Antarctic to the Indian Ocean to the Pacific to the north Atlantic.
Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, faster and faster every year. So are the glaciers and the icebergs.
How do I know this? Because some of NASA’s global climate change research websites are still up (see link above), but
who knows for how long.
Now where do you think that all that water from the ice sheets will go?
If you answered “everywhere,” you’re correct.
Sea-level rise is evident in this photo of a flooded palm tree taken on the Florida Panhandle’s St. Vincent Island. (Photo by Susan Cerulean)
If you said, “Especially Florida,” you get bonus points.
One of the annoying little quirks of vast quantities of melting ice is rising sea levels.
We live in the southernmost state, the most watery state, the one that floods if you stare at it hard.
A lot of us live just a few feet above sea level.
Since 1970, the sea level has risen seven inches, which might not sound too bad, except even a Category 1 hurricane — Debby in 2024, say — can produce a storm surge of 2-5 feet.
With a whopper like Helene, it’s more like 15 feet.
You see the problem.
Seas aren’t only rising, they’re getting hotter. Hotter seas breed bigger storms.
Over the past few weeks, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico (no, I’m not calling it by that fake Trump name) has ranged from 80 to 92 degrees.
The warmer the water, the faster it evaporates, the faster it evaporates, the heavier the rainfall.
Add to that temperatures in the high 90s and you get a heat-plus-humidity situation which almost certainly violates the Geneva Conventions on torture.
Compared to the poor souls along the Guadalupe River in Texas, we’ve been lucky.
Our luck is unlikely to hold. Every part of Florida is susceptible to flash floods.
Deflection, denial
This is, of course, a global problem.
China is now the worst greenhouse gas offender, but the U.S. is right behind and, given how the regime hates being Number Two, I’m sure we will soon regain the title of Biggest Threat to Human Life on Earth.
New research by the nonprofit Climate and Community Institute shows the 17% increase in the Pentagon’s budget translates into an enormous increase in carbon emissions: 178 tons in 2026.
That’s half of what the entire United Kingdom emits.
We’re not stopping there, either. Trump is enabling extractive industries to pillage the land from sea to shining sea, making swinging cuts to wind and solar energy programs, and ordering an ancient, costly, and dirty Michigan coal plant to stay open.
What, you ask, is Florida doing about this?
(Can you hear me laughing bitterly?)
To be fair, the governor did sign a ban on drilling along the Apalachicola River.
But when it comes to the climate crisis, he deflects and denies.
In addition to trying to deep-six the whole issue by refusing to name it and calling attempts to address the causes of the precipitous rise in temperatures “left-wing stuff,” he wants you to believe monster storms have always happened in
Florida and always will.
It’s just “tropical weather.”
And despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia U.S. representative and weekend scientist, says, weather is not controlled by the government.
But just to be sure, she says she’ll sponsor legislation
Photo courtesy of Florida Skywatchers Facebook page.
Ahead of the curve
Florida, always ahead of the crazy curve, has already passed such a bill, and the governor has signed it.
He cites dark fears of “chemtrails” deployed by shadowy green activists trying to fight climate change by “injecting different things in the atmosphere, blocking the sun and doing all this stuff.”
He added, “We’re the Sunshine State. We want to have the nice sunshine.”
First of all, “chemtrails” are not a thing. Those white lines swooshing behind aircraft are condensation trails, i.e. little bitty ice crystals formed when the exhaust from the plane hits the cold high-altitude air.
Second, while there’s some preliminary research on using geoengineering to reflect sunshine back into space, we don’t know how this might affect rainfall or food production and many scientists don’t think it’s feasible or desirable.
Moreover, why spend billions fooling with the sun when we could develop sustainable power, stop burning fossil fuels, encourage clean energy, and hold polluters accountable for destroying the environment.
Despite most Floridians figuring they can ride this thing out in their air-conditioned caves; the reckoning will soon come.
The hotter it gets, the more air-conditioning we’ll use; the more we crank up the AC, the hotter it gets.
No matter what nonsense the MAGA brain trust comes up with, data are still data.
Storms are stronger. The seas are invading. The heat is becoming increasingly deadly: Florida leads the nation in heat-related illnesses.
Science doesn’t care what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis believe.
As I said, you can’t beat the heat. But the heat can — and will — beat you.
Enjoy the rest of your Extreme Heat Season! I, for one, can’t wait for Fall.
