America sizzled through some hot nights last month, enough to make history.
“When you have daytime temperatures that are at or near record high temperatures and you don’t have that recovery overnight with temperatures cooling off, it does place a lot of stress on plants, on animals and on humans,” Gleason said Friday. “It’s a big deal.”
In Texas, where the monthly daytime average high was over 100 degrees for the first time in July and the electrical grid was stressed, the average nighttime temperature was a still toasty 74.3 degrees — 4 degrees above the 20th century average. In the past 30 years, the nighttime low in the U.S. has warmed on average about 2.1 degrees , while daytime high temperatures have gone up 1.9 degrees at the same time. For decades climate scientists have said global warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas would make the world warm faster at night and in the northern polar regions. A study earlier this week said the Arctic is now warming four times faster than the rest of the globe.