![]() ![]() Lindsey, who acknowledges that he was a bit of a climate skeptic in the past, said seeing the increase in seawater temperatures, in particular, over many years “was a real epiphany or wake-up call.” “You just don’t expect Death Valley temperatures along coastal California.” “It was just rip-roaring hot,” said Lindsey, who has forecast weather along the Central Coast since 1991. They are known locally as Santa Lucia winds and can increase temperatures by 5.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet they descend. John Lindsey, a marine meteorologist with Pacific Gas and Electric, said the mercury rose to unprecedented levels in San Luis Obispo due to hot, downslope winds blowing from the northeast. The outlook for September is similarly harsh, with at least a 50% chance of higher-than-normal temperatures, according to national agency. At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, it reached 120 degrees, the highest reading since record-keeping began in 1869, in an area that is less than 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean.Ĭalifornia A sizzling summer: Hottest August on record in California Los Angeles County had its hottest temperature on record when Woodland Hills hit 121 degrees Sept. “An extreme heat event that would have been 100 degrees is now 102.5 or 103 degrees, and that is actually a pretty big difference in terms of the impacts on people.”ĭuring the mid-August heat wave, Death Valley soared to 130 degrees, one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth.Īnother ferocious heat wave over the Labor Day weekend brought Death Valley-like heat to other areas. But it’s clear that climate change has made things notably worse,” he said. “In a world without climate change, it still would have been a hot August we still would have had some fires. While precise attribution studies on the extreme heat waves in California in recent weeks will take time to complete, he said, they are clear examples of how climate change compounds natural weather variability to increase the likelihood of what once would have been a rare event. “People who have lived in California for 30, 40 years are saying this is unprecedented, it has never been this hot, it has never been this smoky in all the years I’ve lived here.”Įach of the extremes Californians are living through right now is fueled, at least in part, by the gradual warming of the planet, which is accelerating as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.Ĭalifornia summers are 2.5 degrees warmer than they were in the 1970s and are on track to heat up an additional 4.5 degrees by the end of the century if the world’s current emissions trajectory continues, said Hausfather. “What we’ve been seeing in California are some of the clearest events where we can say this is climate change - that climate change has clearly made this worse,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank. Their convergence is perhaps the strongest signal yet that the calamity climate scientists have warned of for years isn’t far off in the future it is here today and can no longer be ignored. ![]() And the record heat, fires and pollution all have one thing in common: They were made worse by climate change. A sooty plume has blanketed most of the West Coast, blotting out the sun and threatening people’s lungs during a deadly pandemic.Ĭalifornia is being pushed to extremes. Millions are suffering from some of the worst air quality in years due to heat-triggered smog and fire smoke. In a matter of weeks, California has experienced six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern history and toppled all-time temperature records from the desert to the coast. ![]() “Maybe we underestimated the magnitude and speed” at which these events would occur, he said, but “we’ve seen this long freight train barreling down on us for decades, and now the locomotive is on top of us, with no caboose in sight.” “This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. In just the past month, nearly two decades after the third United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was issued, heat records were busted across California, more than 3 million acres of land burned, and in major metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, air pollution has skyrocketed. In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and “substantially degraded air quality” in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change. ![]()
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