Confirmation Pending, But Floridia (Sicily) May Have Hit 124F; Lemons Cooked On The Trees
Before this week, the small Sicilian town of Floridia had a few claims to fame. The second wife of a Bourbon king was the town’s duchess. The snails that are a local delicacy are raised here. Its surrounding fields won it the greenest city in Italy prize in 2000. Its mayor is among Italy’s youngest. But now Floridia has become known for something else, something far more ominous. It is perhaps the most blisteringly hot town in the recorded history of Europe, offering Italy and the entire Mediterranean a preview of a sweltering and potentially uninhabitable future brought on by the globe’s changing climate.
“Floridia is now the center of the world when it comes to the climate,” said Mayor Marco Carianni, 24, as he cooled off in the town’s central square on Thursday, a day after a nearby monitoring station registered a temperature of 119.84 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 49 degrees Celsius. “We beat Athens.”
On Friday afternoon, that temperature dipped to a brisk 96 degrees. But days earlier, the unprecedented heat rendered Floridia a blindingly bright ghost town, with its bars deserted, its baroque and sand-colored churches darkened, its piazzas emptied. In the surrounding fields, the area’s famed snails burned in their shells. The relentless sun branded the verdello green lemons with yellow blots and stewed their flesh within. Everyone holed up in their houses. The air-conditioning they blasted prompted blackouts. The digital sign outside the local pharmacy showed an unofficial temperature of 51 Celsius, or nearly 124 Fahrenheit.
The choking heat wave has hardly limited its reach to Floridia, a satellite of the ancient town of Siracusa. For weeks, it has swept all across Italy and the region. Wednesday was just the climax, the unforgiving temperatures the latest event in a summer of heat-induced plagues. Wildfires and unpredictable winds have torched woodlands in the southern region of Calabria, claimed pastures across Sicily, forests in Sardinia. Officials evacuated residents of a small town near Rome after a wildfire broke out. Greece is still smoldering from its worst fires in decades. Much of Europe is looking at the skies with trepidation, wondering if the winds and weather will bring more choking heat, or hail or floods.
EDIT
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/world/europe/sicily-heat-wave-record-temperature-floridia-italy.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
= new reply since forum marked as read
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GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!
I read it on the internets,
so it must be true . . .
W
Inhofe had a snowball
