Weather, Summer | featured news

As hundreds of residents in Washington and California were allowed to return to homes once threatened by major wildfires, some people were told to evacuate as encroaching blazes neared Idaho towns.

Southern California wildfires are threatening dozens of homes after burning through more than 19 square miles of brush in the midst of a heat wave.

Christopher Carlson sprang into action when smoke and embers ushered a fire that threatened to envelop his Noble, Oklahoma, home. After taking his 12-year-old stepson to safety, Carlson raced against time to assist neighbors and try to save his trailer from one of more than a dozen wildfires that, as of Saturday, had destroyed more than 120 structures.

The relentless, weather-gone-crazy type of heat that has blistered the United States and other parts of the world in recent years is so rare that it can't be anything but man-made global warming, says a new statistical analysis from a top government scientist.

It's been a hot year. In fact, the first six months of 2012 accounted for the warmest January-through-June period on record for the contiguous U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday.

The summer heat just won't quit, with another scorcher forecast for the Midwest Friday. The sweltering temperatures may have claimed at least two lives so far, bringing back memories of the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds. Much of the Midwest, and even parts of the East Coast are suffering.

A day after firefighters made great progress against the fire outside Colorado Springs, hotter and drier conditions on Saturday made for a major test.

...And yet — step for a moment into the chill. The outdoor climate of our sweltering city is a false climate. It is merely the swamp through which we must wade to get to our true environment, a land of recirculated cold, spare blazers on backs of chairs and frostbite. Inside weather is the weather of the office worker. It’s summer outside, but indoors, it’s winter.

After recalculating data from last year, the nation's climatologists are declaring that Oklahoma suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S. last year - not Texas as initially announced last fall.

The summer of 2011 was the second hottest on record for the United States, and the hottest in 75 years, government weather experts said Thursday.