You know it’s abnormally scorching when The New York Times is running Op-Eds about the weather and dinner-table conversations include the term “heat dome.”
“Just five days into summer,” Dr. Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, said in The Times yesterday. “Pavement is buckling in Wisconsin. Trains in the Northeast have had to slow or stop to avoid heat-induced ‘sun kinks’ in the rails.”
It was 102 at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday and 99 in Central Park. We turn learn from Rich Hoffman, the meteorologist at News12 Long Island, that according to temperature gauges at Islip airport there have been more heat waves in the 2000s than in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s combined, and they’re hitting earlier and lasting longer.
Dr. Ward urges governments to approach extreme heat the way we approach a forecast hurricane — with an improved public-warning system and more urgent safety measures to remediate the stress on human health and reduce the ill effects of air pollution, which is exacerbated by a heat wave, especially for those with asthma or other lung ailments.
Here on the East End, we watch the plants like meteorological instruments: Will they survive this week’s brutal weather?
The unusually frigid and rainy spring had an upside, creating stunning bumper crops of hydrangeas and beach plums, two of our area’s most beloved plants. A week ago, we were marveling over the Nikko Blues and the amount of fruits on beach plum branches in the dunes; by yesterday, unless we had irrigation systems (an ecologically iffy practice to begin with) we saw shrubs and bushes wilt and wither. The forecast for today is a dip back into the 70s, thank heavens, and we’ll take advantage of the evening cool to nip out to Maidstone Park to see if we can expect any beach-plum jelly come August at all.