OK, we're looking at the National Weather Service's Seattle page, and can't help but notice this big swath of a color that an online color chart says is "medium violet red" stretching from north of Everett nearly to Olympia. That's the area covered by an "excessive heat warning."

Not that anyone in Seattle needed to know that, after what we've sweated through over the weekend. Daily high records were set with Friday's 97 and Saturday's 96. You have to go back to August of 1977 to find three days in a row over 95 degrees here, as we just experienced. And don't forget the humidity. One NWS forecaster on Saturday warned of the "stickiness factor," not usually much of a concern here.

Dave McPhee and his daughter Anna, 5, find a way to beat the heat at Seattle's Alki Beach. P-I photo/Joshua Trujillo

In the face of this comes the New York Times' revelation on Saturday that NASA has quietly dropped the part of its mission statement that has fueled much of the agency's groundbreaking climate-change research. Here's what it used to say:

"To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

But reporter Andrew Revkin reveals that the part about understanding and protecting Earth has been eliminated. This happened when budget proposals were floated by the administration in February, but the NASA rank and file were never consulted and it's only now becoming apparent that it could restrict the agency's research, Revkin writes. Here's how NASA atmospheric chemist Philip Russell, who has labored at the agency for a quarter-century, explains the change:

"When there was that very easy-to-understand statement that our job is to protect the planet, that made it much easier to justify this kind of work."

So, is Seattle's heat wave a sign of the long-predicted climate change? All together now, boys and girls: No single weather event is a sign of climate change. Climate is made up of weather averaged over many decades. As British climate researcher Philip Jones put it in a recent Reuters article carried by MSNBC:

"NASA's averages for the world and what we produce here are far more informative than looking at the extremes in Britain, France or Italy . . . It's the global averages that count."

That said, though, it is worth noting that the U.S. Climatic Data Center recently reported that the first six months of this year were the warmest six months since record-keeping began in 1895, according to Reuters.

So what's up with the Data Center? Budget troubles. The recently passed House budget would slash its funding for the second year in a row.

Dateline Earth would be the last to suggest that there's any cause-and-effect going on here, but taken with what's happened to NASA's mission statement, you have to wonder how much the leadership in D.C. reallly wants to know about climate change.

P.S. 7/25/06: A few people also pointed out this interview with Revkin in Grist, the online enviro news site offering "doom and gloom with a sense of humor."