"More more more profits for republican oil billionaires." - G.O.P.

This year
Paraphrasing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

“Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.”

the common citizen starts supporting those in government trying to save the planet from the wealthy's greed. The planet gets hotter an hotter now and maybe the citizens need an education in understanding how the planet functions because it seems like conservatives don't give a damn about our children's future and life systems on earth. When you tick off Mother Nature you are in real trouble as humans do not control the earth and its systems and Mother Nature is not going to back down as it doesn't care how much wealth you have

We are fucked.

In September no less! So many fires.dense smoke here. SAD

Ironically we have had a relatively mild summer.

Unfortunately though, the storms of the last few years have been more severe. Our insurance rates are skyrocketing due to the heavy widespread damage they have caused.

I'm so old I remember 12 distinguishable months.

and everyone who ever installed that type of panel likely took them down because of roof leaks.

Yes it was terrible optics for Reagan, who was a hateful idiot, but honestly they would have come down under any president because they simply caused problems with the roof. Eventually the panels were repurposed at a college and ended up in a museum.

Nowadays solar electric is huge across the country. Efficiency is way up with modern cells. Alternative energy is exploding.

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/animated-70-years-of-u-s-electricity-generation-by-source/

Ty, for proper info. 👍

but were used for water heating versus being tied into the building's wiring to power lights or appliances, etc.

I.e., they still collected and converted the energy (photons) from the sun and converted it.

The Smithsonian has one on display and pics of it - https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1356218

the coolest from this point forward.

And it's mid-Sept.

On the plus side, I'll be helping my friend harvest his experimental pawpaw orchard here. Pawpaws are a southern fruit, but now it's warm enough to grow them up here, along with persimmons and peaches. I'm propagating and selling seedlings from southern species for an assisted climate migration project, to ready our forests for what's coming.

Got a bald cypress, pecan and tupelo swamp (like you'd find in Louisiana) already in the works. Lots of saplings 2-3' tall growing well. Hopefully I'm long dead before it gets alligators though 🤣

(in a rim county of Philly), the previous owner had planted a FL-native tree - a long-needle pine - in the front yard (it took me awhile to get it identified because it doesn't belong up here but I was able to get an ID from a conifer specialist back then). Here it is 20 years later and it is still there and growing just fine (it got some winter damage earlier on in the mid-2010s, but shrugged it off).

She also has a Celeste fig growing against the back (SW-facing) corner of her house that she planted maybe 8 years ago (the previous one planted in 2003 got killed to the ground after 2, back-to-back icy winters around 2013/2014). She harvested a pile of ripe figs a couple weeks ago from the now 8-10ft tall shrub. I wrapped it for her the first couple winters (it was a 2gal/3ft tall size originally) and once it was established, it was on its own.

My other sister had bought a house a few years earlier and the previous owner was actually a horticulturalist who had all kinds of specimen perennials, shrubs, and trees around the yard and one of them included a spring-blooming, evergreen camellia with huge double pink flowers. The cammy is still there (now about 15ft tall) blooming every spring (I remember having to look that up too because it was another that didn't belong up here ).

We now have full tree-sized crape myrtles planted all around my neighborhood (although I know some are the more hardy hybridized ones, but I still recall a trip down to Atlanta back in the late-'90s wondering what the heck those hot pink flowering shrubs and trees were). We also have evergreen southern magnolias thriving here, another breakthrough, where previously, the deciduous saucer magnolia was the norm.

The city's "official" low temperature hasn't gone below 0F in 30 years as of this year (last time was January 1994).

Climate change is real!

Back 20 years ago, we were USDA Hardiness Zone 6b and we are now Zone 7b with the 2023 release (where a 7a update happened in the 2012 version).

40 yr ago it was 4a. The MN DNR is now recommending planting oaks and maples that used to be native to southern Minnesota all the way to the Canadian border, because they've realized our iconic North Woods conifer forest is living in borrowed time.

it had it's last coolest summer

I can remember a hotter summer in 1988, when it was in the 90's for about 8 weeks straight with no rain. People actually died from the extended heatwave that year.

The thing about Pittsburgh and southwestern PA is that we don't often get sunny days here, even in the summer. The moist air coming up the Ohio River Valley meets up with the moist winds coming down from the Great Lakes, and the result is that we get a lot of cloudy days. It doesn't always mean rain, but we get a lot of that too.

This past summer the winds were different, and we didn't get so many cloudy days. We got a lot of sun and many days up in the 90s, with not so much rain. It's nice to see blue skies and sun, but not when your grass dies brown and your veggie garden won't grow.

I hope next year we get more balance between warm sunny days and occasional rain. The thing I like about living in Pittsburgh is that we don't often get big storms here, and the snow isn't too bad in winter. We're actually very fortunate compared to other areas of the country.