The Daily Parker

We had a blast of lake-effect snow yesterday. This happens when cold air passes over a warm lake, pulling huge volumes of moisture from the water and freezing it into snow. The air got quite a bit below freezing yesterday morning, so the northeast winds picked up a lot of vapor from the 8°C water, which it promptly dropped on the city.

Through the spring and early summer we often hear that it's "cooler by the lake." But like the idea of "global warming," that hides a lot of nuance in a simple phrase. A slightly-more-accurate telling might be that it's "less variable by the lake." And yesterday we got an example of that.

At Inner Drive Technology WHQ, which is just over 2 km from Lake Michigan, yesterday was the first day since March 2nd during which the temperature didn't get above freezing. Yesterday the temperature ranged from -3.0°C to -0.5°C, with a dip during the second round of snowfall between 8 and 10 am. On March 2nd, it ranged from -5.4°C to -0.2°C.

Contrast with Chicago's official weather station at O'Hare (23.2 km from the lake), which last had a full day below freezing on February 21st. On March 2nd it did get down to -8°C, but it got up to 3°C, after hitting 14°C on February 28th. Similarly, yesterday O'Hare was both colder (-3.9°C) and warmer (2.2°C) than IDTWHQ, warm enough for all the snow to melt just a few hours after it fell.

Today's forecast promises above-freezing temperatures everywhere in the Chicago area today, rising to 18°C by Saturday. The snow doesn't bother me, but I hope the remaining ice melts from the sidewalks today.

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it.

I didn't enjoy these things, though:

• Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task.
• Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and Goebbels-inspired model of the White House Ballroom cannot fathom why it's the size of a convention center.
• It's not that Nick Fuentes is a Nazi sympathizer, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole—he's probably all of those things—but he's also a nihilist bullshit artist.
• My party really has to stop nominating old faux-centrist dickheads for public office and get behind the people who can actually win.
• Global warming may not make your city warmer on a specific January day, but it might make your city get 20 centimeters of rain in one day.

In one bit of good news, the Illinois legislature restored $1.5 billion to state transit agencies, which means the CTA and Metra will live to fight another day. Included in the legislation was an end to parking minimums within 800 meters of public transportation hubs or corridors. I hope this encourages developers to build density where it's needed.

Cassie and I are about to spend the next 8 or so hours outside. The official temperature at O'Hare hit 29.4°C (85°F) a few minutes ago, and it's 25.8°C (78.4°F) at Inner Drive Technology World HQ.

Just for comparison, the normal high temperature from July 11th to July 17th is 29.3°C.

We're in no danger of setting a record high temperature today—that was 33°C set in 1971—but yes, I can tell you it feels like July, just with a lower dewpoint (12.2°C at O'Hare, compared with an average of 20.8°C this past July).

Still: I'll take it. Looking forward from the last weekend in September, I don't see too many more sit-outside-with-a-beer days in 2025. But right now, Cassie and I have a date with a dog park.

A few weeks ago I gathered up the dewpoint statistics for Inner Drive Technology WHQ to show that, yes, this summer really sucked. I promised the final numbers after summer officially ended Sunday night, and here they are:

The average dewpoint for the summer and for August both dropped a lot in the last 10 days of the month. August 24th to 31st had an average dewpoint of just 12.8°C, while for the first two thirds of the month we had a tropical 20.5°C. Those 8 autumn-like days ending the summer made a huge difference.

As if to underscore that we're now officially in autumn, a cold front is pushing through the area. It's still 22°C at IDTWHQ; the overnight forecast has the temperature steadily dropping to 11°C by sunrise. If that happens, it'll be the coolest weather we've had since May 31st (9°C).

Dayrestan, Iran, sits on an island just inside the Strait of Hormuz directly across the Persian Gulf from the UAE. At 9:30 am local time Thursday, the airport weather station reported a temperature of 40°C with a dewpoint of 36°C, which makes a heat index of 83.2°C (181.8°F). AccuWeather says it was likely an instrument error, though the next station over, in Bandar Abbass, reported a temperature of 39°C with a 27°C dewpoint for a heat index of 52.3°C (126.1°F) at the same time—hardly an improvement. Bandar Abbass got up to 42°C with a 56.3°C (133.3°F) heat index later in the day, so I will not plan any summer vacations there in the near future. (Well, that and US citizens aren't allowed to visit Iran, but still.)

Elsewhere:

• Both Michael Tomasky and former Pro Publica president Richard Tofel argue that news outlets need to stop both-sidesing the OAFPOTUS and call him out on his lies more directly.
• Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof likens the OAFPOTUS's tantrum over the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report to a 5-year-old playing a board game.
• A group of Democratic legislators from Texas have decided to vacation in Chicago this week to deny Texas Republicans a quorum in the state's House of Representatives in an effort to stop the anti-democratic redistricting plan the OAFPOTUS wants them to pass.

Finally, one of the three endangered piping plovers that hatched at Montrose Beach six weeks ago got eaten by a hawk over the weekend. RIP Ferris.

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all:

The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely.

In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple effect through urban planning and disaster management for decades:

The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.

The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.

But work on Atlas 15’s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of Volume 2 this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.

The review of Atlas 15 is among a number of efforts by the Trump administration to curb climate science. The administration dismissed the scientists responsible for writing the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated study typically published every four to five years — and dismantled the program that oversees the reports. In a budget document submitted to Congress last month, Trump proposed zeroing out funding for NOAA’s climate research and eliminating many of the agency’s laboratories and institutes.

Do you know that more Republican voters live in areas negatively affected by climate change than Democratic voters? Neither did they.

We cannot comprehend the damage this administration has already done to the United States. And they plan to do so much more.

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things:

• Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it."
• Linda Greenhouse condemns the pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
• Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
• The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
• Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
• A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
• At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
• In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
• Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
• Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
• New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."

Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)

I got in a bit early this morning to beat the heat. Good thing, too, as my train line partially shut down upstream of my stop just as I got on the train. It's up to 34°C at O'Hare and 33°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ (feels like 42°C—107°F), with a forecast of 36°C and continued horrible heat indicies for this afternoon when I walk Cassie home from dog school.

Chicago isn't the only place getting this awful weather. The record heat will affect over 200 million people this week with similar temperatures from North Carolina to Connecticut hitting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has dropped more than 150 cm since its soggy peak in 2020, giving us our beaches back and ending routine flooding on lakefront streets on the South Side. (Don't worry, we still have a fifth of the world's fresh water.)

The weather should moderate tomorrow, with thunderstorms coming through in the afternoon. I very much preferred the weather in Seattle this past weekend, though. And I hope that Cassie and I can get some real walks this week.

We had a lovely double rainbow yesterday:

But this morning, we had something else entirely:

Canadian wildfire smoke raised the air-quality index in Chicago to well over 150 this morning. This is the satellite view from about 20 minutes ago:

Unlike the last couple of weeks, however, the smoke has now descended to ground level, making Chicago look like it did in the 1970s, before the Clean Air Act started to do its thing:

We're hoping the smoke clears up soon. And that the Canadian firefighters will get the prairie fires under control.

As for the politics, well, the droughts and changing moisture patterns leading to the fires up north are predicted consequences of human-induced climate change.

Two photos this morning. First, Cassie tried to convince the other patrons at Spiteful Brewing yesterday that no one ever pats her:

She was pretty successful with the ruse. People stopped to pat her continuously. She has us all trained.

Second, here is the GOES-East visible light photo from about half an hour ago:

See all that haze from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the northwest, through the US Midwest, and swooping all the way down to Jacksonville and out to the Atlantic? That's wildfire smoke from the Canadian plains. There isn't a cloud in the sky over Chicago right now, but we can really see the haze.

Cassie and I are about to go on an adventure involving A Ride in the Car!, and we'll probably get another hour of walkies today. The smoke hasn't yet descended to ground level so the AQI is not great (61) but so far not hazardous. Still, the number of fires this early in the season doesn't bode well for the summer fire season.