Hot Times In Vermont; Hot Times Globally

This headline pretty well sums up the latest IPCC

climate change report 

The big headlines you'll see today, the long awaited United Nations report/update on the state of climate change was dropped overnight, and as widely expected the news is lousy. 

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is a big 3,000 page monster, so I don't think many people have read it in detail yet. 

But reporters have at least gotten through the executive summary, or "Summary For Policy Makers" or whatever, and the headlines are alarming. 

 The UN is calling new IPCC report "code red for humanity."  and that humans are "unequivocally" warming the planet. No hedging there! 

This is an update of the 2013 IPCC report and this one makes more precise, and warmer forecasts regarding the climate than the old document, as USA Today reports. 

As USA TODAY continues:

"According to the report, many of the changes seen in the world's climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes set in motion - such as continued sea level rise, - are irreversible over hundreds of thousands of years."

There will be a lot more new and documents coming out of this report leading up to a global climate conference later this year in Geneva, but this teaser from the IPCC is grim. 

The new report, like so many scientists have been saying, says we face a future with even more extreme droughts, flash floods, heat waves, hurricanes and "weather whiplash" in which we go from one extreme to another in a short period of time. 

As the BBC reports, Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization said, 'By using sports terms, one could say the atmosphere has been exposed to doping, which  means we have begun observing extremes more often than before."

The report, and the above statement, comes as the world has seen a slew of extreme weather and climate disasters this summer. As the report came out overnight, devastating, deadly, extreme wildfires were roaring through parts of the United States, Canada, Siberia, Greece, Turkey, Italy and other nations. 

The Northern Hemisphere is currently experiencing its hottest summer on record. Yet another intense heat wave is now starting to build in the United States Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada, where all-time record heat struck in June. 

IMMEDIATE HEAT IN VERMONT

The weather here seems to be keeping in line with the IPCC report, as we gear up for a very hot, humid week and the risk of more potentially locally damaging storms. 

The big story this week will be the heat, with some areas of Vermont likely to have their first official heat wave since June

It turned very warm and humid during the weekend and the heat is turning up starting today. A warm front of sorts was producing some showers and storms near the Canadian border early this morning and this warm front is introducing us to the real heat.

It'll be near 90 every day this week through at least Thursday, maybe Friday.  The high humidity will keep temperatures up at night, so we won't be getting much in the way of relief when we're trying to sleep. 

Few, if any record highs will be broken in this heat wave locally, but it will feel awfully stuffy all week.

The  heat and humidity means the atmosphere is ripe for strong thunderstorms with torrential downpours. However, for the next couple of days anyway, don't expect much in the way of that kind of weather, as there will be few of any triggers to get the storms going.

Yesterday, I had some fears that stalled mountain thunderstorms could cause some local flash floods, but I don't have reports of anything super damaging. Just local spots with driveway washouts, edges of roads a little overrun by water, that type of thing. Those stationary storms did, in the end, get a little push and moved slowly north before dying, so tings weren't so bad.

Any storms that get going today, tomorrow and probably Wednesday afternoon and evening have the potential to be briefly strong, with torrential rains and gusty winds.  But the storms will be very few and far between.

The storms will also probably be what we call "pulse" storms.  They'll pop up really, really fast, give a small area a good dousing, then quickly fall apart again. Most of these will get going over the mountains. 

More organized and widespread storms look like they will appear Thursday and Friday, and there's a chance some could be severe.  We'll get a better handle on whether that happens by around midweek.

Those Thursday and Friday storms will be ahead of a cold front that is expected to give us blessedly much drier and cooler weather next weekend.