This summer has been a scorcher across the world. Here in Minnesota it’s been in the 90′s consistently and the drought is horrendous. I haven’t seen it this bad in my lifetime. In fact, the Earth’s temperature for the first six months of the year was the second-warmest ever recorded.

Yesterday’s power outage in San Francisco — which knocked out several high profile Web 2.0 sites as well as this blog for hours since it brought down Six Apart, Typepad’s owner — may be indicative of what we should brace ourselves for going forward.

How are these two related?

There is an increasing demand for power at the same time global weather patterns are changing. In the same way that the desert Southwest of the United States and other oppressively hot regions in the world have been settled in no small way due to air conditioning, the demands on our crumbling power grid (via GigaOM) are increasing. Burgeoning information technology services, an acceleration in building with air conditioning to cool our sweltering bodies (though that has slowed recently), are all rising concurrently with a global growth in population which alone will drive demand for power.

My bride and I are enamored with Scottsdale and have been seriously considering a second home there. We’re second-guessing that decision when I analyze water issues there, consider those issues within the context of global warming, and continue to scratch my head over how a growing desert Southwest can possibly support an exploding population with water (this article at CNet about sums up what I’ve experienced and am thinking through).

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