Temperatures barely climbed into the 90s and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed after a longer and hotter heat wave killed more than 700 people nearly three decades ago.

Now, the city — and the country — is facing the reality that because of climate change, deadly heat waves can strike just about anywhere, don’t only fall in the height of summer, and need not last long.

That was the lead to a Newsmax story May 28. But the instant blaming of “climate change” is both unhistorical and unscientific. As our friend William D. Balgord, Ph.D. (Geochemistry), President of Environmental & Resources Technology, Inc., Middleton, WI, put it in an email:

Heat waves have plagued the country since before white men arrived on the continent. In the notoriously hot 1930s, and long before anyone suggested there was a global warming afoot or man-made climate change. That decade recorded all-time high temperatures. Many were being established in 1934 and especially in 1936 across the Midwest (and Chicago) and several other northern tier states, with no SUVs to be seen.

Enough already with the folderol about how climate change will destroy the planet. We went down that road 90 years ago and didn’t know it at the time. The Broadway musical “Very Warm for May” appeared in 1939 in response to the 1934 and 1936 heatwaves that set the stage for the Dust Bowl and, fortunately for Those alive today, left us some of the very best lyrics ever penned by Jerome Kern.

Photo by Rohan Gangopadhyay on Unsplash.