AMERICA LETTER If old-style sub-editors were still around, the most common headline in newspapers across the US in the last week might have been "Whew! What a Scorcher!"
It's been so hot in Denver - a record 41 degrees - that airlines cancelled some flights because the over-heated atmosphere wasn't dense enough to support take-off from the mile-high city. The National Weather Service in Salt Lake City reported "at least 200 daily record temperatures set over the last eight or nine days".
In Phoenix, Arizona, the phrase "dying from the heat" has become a tragic reality. The above-average temperatures recorded every day for the past four weeks have turned streets into ovens, killing 20 people, most of them homeless, according to police. Volunteers have been handing out bottles of cold water in Phoenix and other cities, and along stretches of the Mexican border where untold numbers of would-be immigrants have perished.
For five days in Las Vegas, the temperature did not drop below 47 degrees; six people died in the heatwave that has brought joy only to casino-owners whose customers are trapped in ice-cold gambling halls. In New York, the baking temperatures have caused the biggest surge in electric use in history, as millions of air- conditioners run at full blast.
Power companies have also reported record demand in Nevada and California.
The heatwave is likely to continue for weeks. The National Weather Service predicts above-normal temperatures until October along the west coast, in the southwest, the west-central plains, and Texas.
The effect of the record heat over the ocean could be catastrophic for Florida and other states in the path of hurricanes - even as far north as New York.
The temperature of the north Atlantic is the highest recorded and the warm ocean waters have already spawned two successive hurricanes, Dennis and Emily, though the peak hurricane season is late August and September.
So far, this year's hurricane season, which runs from June 1st to November 1st, has been the most active in recorded history, according to the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami. It is predicting 15 or 16 major tropical storms this year of which five to seven more could develop into hurricanes.
The four hurricanes that slammed into Florida last year - Jeanne, Ivan, Frances and Charley - cost insurers $23 billion (€19 billion).
In Alaska, climate change is threatening the very fabric of the state. Scientists in Fairbanks have told me that Alaska could become a massive swamp within 50 years.
There was a report the other day that near Juneau, melting permafrost and sea erosion exposed coffins at an old cemetery, causing them to slide down an embankment and dumping human bones on a nearby beach.
Despite all these alarming developments, resistance to arguments that global warming is at least being accelerated dangerously by human activity still continues in the cool, air- conditioned chambers of Capitol Hill.
There, Republican senator James Inhofe of Indiana calls global warming the "greatest single hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".
Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, chairman of the House energy and commerce committee, has sent belligerent letters to Prof Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and two other scientists, accusing them of "methodological flaws and data errors" in their alarming studies of global warming, and demanding they provide within three weeks lists of all financial support they have received. Their offence, according to the Washington Post, was that they reported a sharp rise in global temperatures during the last century based on an analysis of tree rings, glacial ice and coral layers.
The letter from Barton - who got half a million dollars from the energy lobby for his House campaign last year - infuriated some fellow Republicans.
Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the house committee on science, accused him of trying to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and warned that having Congress put its thumbs on the scales of a scientific debate was "truly chilling". But Barton and Inhofe, who parrot the views of the oil industry, are becoming isolated in Washington, where global warming is at last becoming a serious bipartisan issue.
Getting agreement to cap greenhouse gas emissions is still out of reach in a legislature heavily dependent on the business lobby. The Senate last month rejected a bipartisan bill by Republican senator John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman to establish a mandatory federal cap on heat- trapping emissions. It did nevertheless pass a non-binding resolution acknowledging that human activity is causing the problem.
Republican senator Pete Domenici called hearings on global warming on Thursday during which Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, one of a group of Republicans that has opposed legislation on climate change, said: "I have grown to believe, as many of my colleagues have, that there is a substantial human effect on the environment."
There was still some scoffing at the testimony of Sir John Houghton, lead scientist of London's intergovernmental panel on climate change, who urged the US to take the lead and aim for a zero-carbon-emission society within a generation.
But after the hearing, senators from both sides said they realised the need for quick action and were trying to reach consensus. The question, admitted Domenici, was not "whether we have a major international problem", but "how do we solve it".