Hot, hot heat

So we're three-quarters of the way through June — and in case you haven't noticed, it's powerful warm out there. But is it really hotter this June than it has been in previous years? As a matter of fact, it is, reports the Chronicle's Eric Berger: The temperatures so far this month have been two degrees above normal, and it looks like that's not going to change this weekend, when the skies are expected to clear and temperatures could climb into the mid-90s. It's also probably not going to change for the rest of the summer: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's forecast for July and August calls for warmer-than-usual temperatures across Southeast Texas.

As Berger notes, the average summer temperatures in Houston have been higher than normal every year for the past decade. There are a few possible reasons why: For one, the years between 1961 and 1990 — which our current temperatures are compared with — included some of the coldest decades in the past century. Also, Houston's weather station moved from Hobby Airport to Intercontinental Airport in 1969, and temperatures at IAH are usually a little warmer than they are at Hobby. Even so, data taken at IAH show that things have been warming up in the last few years. So what does that mean? Global warming? Well, maybe — whereas temperatures worldwide have been increasing slowly over the past 100 years, they've gone up rapidly in Texas in the last 20 years. "The century-long temperature curve for Texas doesn't look a whole lot like the one for the globe as a whole, but global warming can't be helping," John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist, told Berger.

As one of the Chronicle commenters points out, a factor that wasn't brought up is the urban heat island effect, which means cities can be between two and 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside on a summer day. We'd be interested to know what kind of an effect that has on Houston's temperatures — though we suppose it doesn't matter that much as long as we keep our air conditioner cranked down to the mid-40s, right?