The dog days oppressing much of the country with miserable heat, drought and brownouts are a normal part of the climatological pattern and do not portend disastrous climate changes, a UB geographer says. That could be occurring as well, of course, but based on 100,000 years of geological evidence, we just seem to be going through a warm phase of our climatology. Drought is a result of one to three years of particularly dry, hot weather that climaxes in a relative disaster in some form-crop failure, dry wells, serious wind erosion. Then its time is up and the dryness abates. Drought doesn't last forever.
Rain comes and after a few years, it stabilizes the water table depleted by the drought.
Ebert notes that periods of intense or stalled weather conditions are likely to endanger or cause serious economic deprivation in the affected region. It means about what the last one meant. So every dramatic weather condition seems worse than it actually is. It was miserably hot in the East for some time and like today, people feared that it was a warning of future disaster. But it's not a fluke.