Posted on 08/24/2004 1:09:29 PM PDT by SolidSupplySide
Yesterday, Jimmy Vidal, an air-conditioner salesman in New York, fretted over his fate. It was a sweet, mild day - in August, of all months - so comfortable that he was vexed.
"It's almost September," said Mr. Vidal, 29, assistant manager at the P. C. Richard & Son appliance store in Union Square. He noted that there had been only one day in New York City since May when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees (91 on June 9).
"I should have a.c. overstock of maybe a hundred, two hundred, three maybe, by this time," Mr. Vidal said. "I got one thousand unsold a.c.'s downstairs. I'm hurting."
All over the city, people are noticing how the cool summer is hurting business. In Lower Manhattan, Hawaiian shirts, once a hot seller, are filling up the discount bin at Alice Underground. In Washington Square, Haider Ali, 55, a native of Bangladesh, says beverage sales are off at his stand because fewer people on the street need a cool drink when the weather is mild. At Coney Island, Norman Kaufman's Bumping Boat Rides, which shoots through the water, has fewer takers when the weather isn't hot.
And don't even talk about ruined vacations. "This is the shortest summer I can remember," said Joseph Tusa, 39, a security guard at a hospital. He and his wife, Vivien, 37, a social worker, were sitting in lounge chairs on the beach at Coney Island. "We even took two trips to Florida and Puerto Rico because it was so cold here," he said. "We never do that. We didn't even have one barbecue, and we normally have barbecues all summer long."
Who needs an air-conditioner when you're reaching for a sweater? Who wants Coney Island when you're shivering?
The summer, which ends unofficially on Labor Day, Sept. 6, has been unusually wet with nettlesome and occasionally deadly thunderstorms (a young couple was electrocuted not long ago during a flash flood in Queens). Not only has it not been hot, but some evenings have been autumnlike, with temperature in the 60's.
For the record, this is the seventh-coolest summer since record-keeping began in 1869. The average high temperature at Central Park from July 1 to Aug. 22 was 80.5 degrees, according to the meteorology unit at Pennsylvania State University. (The summer of 2000, for the same period, was even cooler, at 78.7 degrees, making it the coolest by far.)
The jet stream is the culprit, said Todd Miner, a meteorologist at Penn State. It is a continentwide river of air - four miles up - that controls weather systems in North America. The jet stream's serpentine course helps determine where the Tusas go on vacation or whether P. C. Richard sells more air-conditioners. This year, the jet stream has veered off its normal course, barreling through British Columbia, picking up low-pressure systems, dipping down into Montana and Missouri, shooting up into Ohio and then dipping south as far as Virginia, which it rarely does.
"The jet stream is why there is more cool air, as well as enhanced storminess and rain in New York," Mr. Miner said.
Sunny days were so scarce this summer that people were willing to turn down overtime to go to the beach. Henry Otero's boss at the post office, where he is a letter carrier, wanted him to work yesterday. But Mr. Otero, 39, declined so that he could spend the day at Coney Island with his wife and son.
"This has been one of the darkest, wettest summers in a long time," Mr. Otero said. "I came today because I thought this might be my only chance left for a sunny day."
The Tusas said they were on the beach for the same reason. "We hardly used the air-conditioner," Mr. Tusa said. "At least we saved money that way."
To be sure, the air-conditioning industry is in no danger of going out of business. Nationally, air-conditioner sales are projected to rise 7 percent, to 7.3 million units. Businesses bought air-conditioners to replace old units and because residential and business customers, remembering past hot summers, ordered more units earlier, according to the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group in Arlington, Va.
But that is of little consolation for Mike's Air-Conditioning, a small business in Brooklyn that sells the appliances, mainly to residential customers. Business is down 40 percent.
"Every Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Walgreen, Genovese, Pathmark and Waldbaum's sells room air-conditioners, which is what I sell," said Howard S. Lupowitz, who bought the business when the owner retired eight years ago.
"Get this: for $85, you used to be able to buy a fan," he said. "Now, for $75, I'll sell you sell an air-conditioner that'll cool the whole living room. If it's not the weather that gets you, the competition will."
The air-conditioning industry's rule of thumb is that five days of hazy, hot and humid weather will have customers clamoring for units. But Penn State is forecasting temperatures in the low to mid-80's for the next few days, with the weekend unlikely to reach the high 80's, let alone 90.
"I'm doomed," Mr. Lupowitz said.
Hasn't been very hot in California this summer, either. Must be that global warming thing I keep hearing about...
I blame Bush for global cooling.
You're right, it hasn't been that hot in coco county this summer. It's been hot enough, though, that we've got a good crop of tomatoes.
Spinning cool summer weather as bad news...
That's just sad.
Its Bush's fault.
Global warming is causing the cool summer.
< /sarcasm >
Actually, we've only hit 90 once as well, in early June. This August has been one of the coolest I can remember, we've already had several nights in the 40s. Today and the rest of the week its expected to be more summerlike, in the mid 80s.
It's been hotter than I care it to be here in the north Georgia mountains. He can bring me a couple of those air conditioners.
All the heat went to Alaska! We've had one of the hottest summers on record. Over 40 days of 70+º temps. Some days it was so hot I had to drive my truck to work because it has a/c. At least I know we'll have a cool winter!
It's gotten so cool this summer that Al Gore has resorted to speeding in hopes that it will prompt global warming.
Cold here in Boise too. Makes me think ski season is right around the corner.
70 degrees is hot???
Hehe...
This is impossible. The New York Times has been telling us Global Warming is gonna cause heat waves and extreme tempreture swings. The experts tell us that places too wet are gonna get wetter, places too hot are gonna get hotter, and places too dry are gonna get dryer. These milder summers are just not a possiblity considering the massive amount of CO2 man has pumped into the atmosphere the last 130 years. It just can't be.
Off topic I guess, but how much are security guards and social workers paid in NYC? Are they part of the parasite class?
LOL, but it never gets too cold for Gore to talk about global warming. Remember this last winter, Gore picked the coldest day in a decade to give an address in NYC about global warming.
Hehe...
Up here 70º is extremely hot. I have the a/c in my truck running when it hit the 60's.
In NYC, with the second highest cost of living in the US, a guy in a minimum wage job and his civil servant wife can only afford to take two vacations in one summer, and only one of them was overseas! The horror!
There truly are two Americas!
Co-worker said this morning that he left his windows up on the drive to work - he said it felt chilly.
The temp was 73.
LVM
I can count on one hand how many days we've lost to rain. No biggie. I don't think we've even had a 90°+ day here, yet. Very unusual.
The corn here in York County (PA) is over 12ft; usually it's around 8ft. Crops are huge, and yield per acre may set records. Which means prices will be down.
I have a good friend who is a global climate scientist. One of those ice core drilling types. He's an honest one...when pressed, he will simply say that, "We don't know enough to really make an honest estimate of the future." His opinion is that the modeling results are scary, but the models are likely very flawed.
When pressed really hard, he said if he absolutely had to guess, he said we would eventually be dealing with major global cooling. Rather than 100 years of temp data, he looks at the long term trends in ice ages. About 85-90% of modern (geologic) history has been ice ages and about 10-15% has been 'interglacial'. We're in an interglacial. Interglacials generally last about 10k years. This interglacial is about 10k years old.
The thing I found most interesting is that there was generally a sharp period of warming before the onset of each ice age. In other words, the scaremongering of the 1970's is probably more likely than the scaremongering of the 1990's. Not that it is imminent, just that it is more likely to go that way.
If global warming gets any worse we are going to freeze to death.
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