Crystal-clear this Friday morning on California’s north coast, and if my apartment neighbor behind me hadn’t left his back patio light on, I most-likely could have seen a billion stars.
Even with a half-moon shining bright in the southern sky, maybe I’d have spotted two billion.
We’re in the throes of some wonderful weather.

Yesterday was gorgeous — it was one of those ‘good as it gets‘ kind of days with bright sunshine, a slight, wispy wind, and temperatures nearing the mid-70s, which around here could almost be considered hot.
Near-about a tropical heat wave.

(Illustration found here).

In the six years I’ve lived up here, there’s been maybe a week to 10 days worth of T-shirt only days — and since spending nearly 20 years in Central California, where the temperatures range from fairly-warm to blistering-hot, the distinct difference is astounding — year-around T-shirt days. The weather here doesn’t match the calendar, and is about the same as we can get days in July like days in December or January — though it’s colder and much wetter in winter, there’s a flat-line to it all.
I love it.

Not so just a mile or so inland. Right now it’s in the mid-50s here along the coast, and near 10 degrees warmer about eight miles away, and more than 20 degrees hotter over in Redding, about two hours away.
And that’s at 4 in the morning.
Way-worse in some spots. Some parts of the Bay Area will see scorching temperatures this weekend.
Via the San Francisco Chronicle:

While San Francisco’s Pride festivities will be graced by temperatures in the mid-70s, the result of cooling coastal breezes, the situation in Brentwood can be best summarized by the forecasted highs for Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday — 104, 106, 106, 106.
There, as in other inland cities like Livermore, authorities are recommending that children, the elderly and others sensitive to the sun stay out of it completely.
Malls and bookstores are among the suggested escapes.
Farmers in the delta region are taking measures to protect their tomatoes and other crops, while hoping the wave doesn’t linger too long.
“We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature,” said Glenn Stonebarger, a partner at G&S Farms in Brentwood.
Parents whose kids aren’t in a big softball tournament in the city are planning sojourns to places like Brentwood’s city pool, which expects to approach its 900-person capacity.
There is even concern about the strain of playing 18 holes of golf.
…
The heat wave — which is expected to cool down a bit before the July 4 holiday — is hitting the Bay Area on the heels of rare June rain showers earlier this week.
The ups and downs can be confusing, even to Northern Californians accustomed to the vicissitude of the seasons.
But “meteorologically, that makes sense,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services.
Low-pressure troughs that bring rain are often located next to areas of high pressure that bring heat, “so that’s going to give us real warm weather. They kind of go hand-in-hand.”

However, hands-down the heat is way-on for the southwest US and all the way west.
Via NBC News:

A high pressure system hanging over the West this weekend is expected to bring temperatures extreme even in a region used to baking during the summer.
Notoriously hot Death Valley’s forecast could touch 129 degrees, not far off the world-record high of 134 logged there July 10, 1913.
The National Weather Service called for 118 in Phoenix, and 117 in Las Vegas on Sunday — a mark reached only twice in Sin City.
“It’s brutal out there,” said Leslie Carmine, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, which runs a daytime shelter in Las Vegas to draw homeless people out of the dangerous heat and equip them with sunscreen and bottled water.
While the Southwest boasts the most shocking temperatures, the heat wave is driving up the mercury all over the West.
Western Washington — better known for rainy coffee shop weather — should break the 90s early next week, according to the weather service.
…
The heat wave is “a huge one,” National Weather Service specialist Stuart Seto said.
“We haven’t seen one like this for several years, probably the mid- to late 2000s.”
The system’s high pressure causes air to sink and warm, drawing down humidity.
“As the air warms, it can hold more moisture, and so what that does is take out the clouds,” Seto said.

Indeed. Warm air holds more moisture, and the entire air of this planet is getting warmer and warmer. Climate change is baking us.
James Hansen, formerly of NASA (now retired), and the long-ranger crier for climate change action, says in a report last August, the earth is just going to get hotter.
Via Climate Central:

The study by Hansen, who first warned of the consequences of manmade global warming in landmark Senate testimony in 1988, shows that a new category of extremely hot summers has become far more common than would ever have happened without the buildup in heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities.
“I don’t want people to be confused by natural variability — the natural changes in weather from day to day and year to year,” Hansen said in a press release. “We now know that the chances these extreme weather events would have happened naturally — without climate change — is negligible.”
…
According to the study, during the period from 1951-1980, extremely hot summers covered just 1 percent of Earth’s land area. This had risen to 10 percent of the Earth’s land area by the period from 1981-2010, and even higher during the 2006-2010 period.
In other words, the study found that the odds of such extreme summers were about 1-in-300 during the 1951-1980 timeframe, but that had increased to nearly 1-in-10 by 1981-2010.
“This is not some scientific theory,” Hansen said to The Associated Press. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”
…
The study finds that manmade global warming caused the Texas heat wave of 2011 and the deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 by dramatically altering the frequency of extremely hot summers.

“ . . . We can say with high confidence that such extreme anomalies would not have occurred in the absence of global warming,” the study says.

And to just to add a bit of fright — this an introduction at Skeptical Science to an article on the heat wave that’s been blasting across Alaska right now — in that climate change is a morphing monster out of control:

The melt in Greenland and the high temperatures in Alaska may be more signs — like we needed more — of the reality of climate change.
Even scarier is the fact that the climate models used before didn’t predict this sort of thing.
The climate is very complex, and it’s hard to model it accurately.
This is well-known and is why it’s so hard to make long-term predictions.
But before the deniers crow that climatologists don’t know what they’re doing, note this well: The predictions made using these models almost always seem to underestimate the effects of climate change.
That’s true in this case, too.
So it’s not that the models are wrong and therefore climate change doesn’t exist.
It’s that the models aren’t perfect, and it’s looking like things are worse than we thought.

So just enjoy this weekend, if you can, and let the future wait for Monday.