This is Burlington? Temperatures well into the 80s with 71% humidity and sticky, thick air like the steam that fills a bathroom and fogs a mirror after a hot shower?
Well, yes, it is, and it’s going to stay like this through Friday, the National Weather Service said, then cool off some, with a high temperature of 75 and overnight lows returning to the 50s by Sunday.
Although it was hot and muggy Thursday, the city’s designated cooling centers — air-conditioned spaces for Burlingtonians to beat the heat — went mostly unused.
A cool classroom at the Center for Recreation and Education in the Old North End sat empty, with all the lights still off. The Leddy Ice Arena was empty, too. While the Fletcher Free Library had people milling around, Library Director Mary Danko said that, because it’s a public building, it wasn’t easy to differentiate between library patrons and people sick of being hot and sticky.
People did head for the beaches on Lake Champlain, although shallow water was somewhat bath-like. Inland, lakes and swimming holes got a lot of action.
Heat advisories for all of Vermont and northern New York went into effect Wednesday and will run into Friday night, with daytime temperatures near 90, humidity remaining near 70% and a chance of thunderstorms rolling in and out of the area.
Weather isn’t climate, but unseasonable heat — which can be dangerous to human health and have impacts on agriculture and natural ecosystems — are likely to become more frequent and more extreme.
The heat wave hit Burlington just a few days after the International Panel on Climate Change issued a harrowing report, predicting that a hotter future with more extreme weather is now locked in for Planet Earth — though a small window is still left open to make changes that will stop things from getting extraordinarily worse.
Kate Crawford, an environmental health scientist at Middlebury College, said she couldn’t say whether this heat wave is directly related to climate change but did say that climate change is dramatically increasing temperatures and all sorts of extreme weather, including heat waves.
High heat is not just uncomfortable. It can have serious health effects, said Kristin Baker, nurse manager of the UVM Medical Center’s emergency department.
“High heat makes people much more prone to dehydration, and it can happen very fast in higher temperatures,” Baker said. High heat is particularly hard on people with preexisting conditions, infants, children and elderly, whose bodies may not adjust quickly and who might not recognize symptoms of extreme dehydration — being overly thirsty and sweaty, fatigued or dizzy.
The UVM emergency department dealt with several patients who felt weakness, fatigue, dizziness and irregular heart rate, all of which could — but not necessarily — be signs of heat-related illnesses, hospital spokesperson Neil Goswami said in a message.
