Mark Lane: No denying it, it's hotter out there

I was mowing the lawn when the mower abruptly cut out. This was a battery-powered mower. I don't use gas-powered yard equipment anymore. (The smell! The noise!) The battery, it turned out, had overheated and demanded relief that instant.

I was OK with this. I was overheated, too. I, too, needed relief that instant. I was glad the mower's sensors called for a work stoppage. I rolled the mower into the garage and headed for the refrigerator. Thank you, battery sensor.

It turned out I had picked a day with record-breaking heat to do this job. This month has seen a remarkable number of days with record-breaking heat. As of mid-month, 11 heat records were set at Daytona Beach International Airport's weather station. And we still have a lot of summer ahead of us.

So far, we're poised to set the record for the hottest average temperature recorded for any August, 86.1 degrees as of Thursday. Maybe the hottest month ever, depending on what the next couple of weeks bring.

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This comes after a July that saw the second-highest monthly mean temperature, 83.6 degrees, of any July in 100 years. The hottest July recorded here was in 2016, with a sizzling 84.1 degrees.

Statewide, last month was the hottest July on record. It tied June 1998 as the warmest month ever recorded.

Worldwide, last month was the hottest month in 174 years of record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So yes, everywhere in the northern hemisphere, it's been a hard summer for lawnmowers ― and their owners.

In the Daytona Beach area, high-temperature records were broken five days this month: 97 degrees on Aug. 15 and Aug. 16; 99 degrees on Aug. 10; 98 degrees on Aug. 9, and 98 degrees on Aug. 8.

A string of low temperatures for the day also set record highs: It only went down to 78 degrees on Aug. 14; 79 degrees on Aug. 12; 78 degrees on Aug. 11; 79 degrees on Aug. 9; 80 degrees on Aug. 8, and 77 degrees on Aug. 3. A lot of warm nights and early mornings.

Usually, coastal areas like Daytona Beach have the advantage of being a little cooler than the state's interior because the ocean moderates temperatures. That's still the case, but barely. Daytona Beach reported 25 days last month when temperatures equaled or topped 90 degrees while Orlando reported 28 days. The average high temperature in Daytona Beach was 91.8 while in Orlando it was 93.7.

Back in pre-air conditioning days, Daytona Beach used the slogan "It's cooler here" as a tourism pitch. And it is, but not by enough to be worth the trip lately. And anyway, the ocean temperature averaged 84 degrees this month, which doesn't feel like much of a cooling dip.

Certainly, a hot day that conks out both you and your lawnmower is weather, not climate. An August full of warm nights that keep the air conditioner chugging away is weather, not climate. But decades of increasing average temperatures? A bathwater ocean? A string of all-time records locally and globally? That's climate. And that's what we're experiencing, just a little more so this year.

Yes, even though Florida's Department of Education recently approved a Prager University climate-change-denying video to show to kids in the classroom. (PragerU, by the way, isn't a university, it just calls itself that.) And even though for many of our elected officials climate change isn't supposed to exist. (Remember when former Gov. Rick Scott's administration reportedly forbade state officials from even uttering the phrase?) And even though suggesting the planet is getting warmer here at home will reflexively cause people to accuse you of being a woke alarmist and hippy tree-hugger, the numbers seem clear, both worldwide and locally.

Who are you going to believe, your elected leaders or those lying thermometers?

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: No denying it, it's hotter out there