We begin with the essential question posed by this title. Is hot girl summer getting too hot? The answer: yes. As several media reports, scientific studies, and semi-corporate guidance will soon demonstrate.
Dangerously hot temperatures across the US south-west will continue to climb this week, reaching higher than 120F (49C) in some areas, exacerbating the region’s already-dire drought conditions and increasing the risk of new fire ignitions.
Extreme heat will be felt across much of Utah, along with southern and central California, Nevada and Arizona.
More than 48 million people across the west are now under heat advisory watches or warnings from the National Weather Service, which is predicting that statewide records will be broken in Nevada and Arizona, along with hundreds of new daily record-high temperatures set in cities in the coming days.
“This type of heat is unusual for the month of June,” said Julie Malingowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS), adding that most heatwaves that have historically affected the western US occurred in July and August. The triple-digit heat is expected to extend from Tuesday through Saturday in some areas, with little reprieve overnight, and the NWS Climate Prediction Center anticipates that temperatures will continue to be higher than normal through the summer.
The heatwave has elevated wildfire concerns in the west, which is already in the grips of a drought disaster. Significant fire potential has been declared across six states by the National Interagency Fire Center, and the heat has the potential to drive strong gusty winds exceeding 40mph through the parched landscapes along the Pacific coast.
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An exceptional outbreak of extreme heat is set to engulf the West for much of the upcoming week, toppling records and bringing conditions that are extremely dangerous for some. Highs in spots could flirt with 120 degrees as sweltering temperatures exacerbate existing drought concerns and bolster the odds of a dangerous and deadly fire season.
Nearly 40 million Americans could see highs in the triple digits, with hundred-degree heat extending all the way north to the Canadian border.
The heat could last for much of the week, its effects especially acute in the Southwest, before a pattern change this weekend.
The record-setting temperatures predicted are made more likely in a world beset by human-induced climate change.
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As you can see, my lovelies, we're set to experience record-breaking temperatures out West. Arizona and Nevada are exceedingly likely to see the hottest days in recorded history. The risk of droughts, wild fires, and permanent short-term damage to vegetation is elevated and, judging by the damage wrought by wild fires in 2020, states like California are in for a rough time.
2021: This year’s wildfire season is predicted to be another severe one. From January 1 to June 8, 2021 there were about 26,700 wildfires, compared with 20,216 in the same period 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. About 792,000 acres were burned, compared with 558,724 in 2020. On June 8, 10 states reported active large fires including Arizona which had four fires burning. The Telegraph fire has been burning since June 4 and has destroyed 71,756 acres in Pinal County, according to Arizona Interagency Wildfire Prevention. The Mezcal fire burned 65,825 acres since it started on June 1 in Gila County and was 23 percent contained on June 8.
2020: In 2020 there were 58,950 wildfires compared with 50,477 in 2019, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. About 10.1 million acres were burned in 2020, compared with 4.7 million acres in 2019. Six of the top 20 largest California wildfires fires occurred in 2020, according to CalFire’s list. Wildfires in California have burned a record 4.3 million acres, damaging or destroying 10,500 structures and killing 33 people.
In August a series of lightning strikes started hundreds of fires across Northern California. Dubbed the August Complex Fire, they are the largest fires in California’s history, together burning 1.03 million acres in six counties and continuing into November. Another fire, the SCU Lightning Complex Fire, located in five counties in northern California near San Francisco, is the third largest fire on record in the state, burning almost 400,000 acres. The LNU Lightning Complex Fire spanned five counties and was nearly as large and caused $2 billion in insured losses, according to Aon. The North Complex Fire, encompassing three counties, burned 319,000 acres and was the 6th largest fire in the state’s history. The SQF Complex Fire was the 18th largest California fire, burning 171,000 acres. The CZU Fire that burned 86,500 acres caused $2.4 billion in insured losses, according to Aon
On September 28 a state of emergency was declared in California in response to the wildfires that burned through Napa, Sonoma and Shasta Counties, where tens of thousands were forced to evacuate. In October, the Glass Fire in Napa County and Sonoma County burned about 67,500 acres and destroyed 1,555 structures. State authorities ordered 70,000 residents of Sonoma and Napa Counties to evacuate, including the entire city of Calistoga in Napa Valley. The Glass Fire caused $2.9 billion in insured losses, according to Aon. The Creek Fire in Fresno and Madera counties has burned almost 400,000 acres into November, destroying 850 structures.
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As you can see, I'm not exaggerating when I say it's hot as Hell. Of course, at the moment, I'm mostly talking about concrete details and local weather. We have yet to arrive at the massive sweating elephant in the room that needs a hundred fans aimed at it to avoid heat stroke. I'm talking, of course, about global warming.
Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.
They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.
Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.
Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.”
Mainstream scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.
U.S. President Donald Trump has often cast doubt on global warming and plans to pull out of the 197-nation Paris climate agreement which seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.
Sixty-two percent of Americans polled in 2018 believed that climate change has a human cause, up from 47 percent in 2013, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
SATELLITE DATA
Monday’s findings, by researchers in the United States, Canada and Scotland, said evidence for global warming reached the five sigma level by 2005 in two of three sets of satellite data widely used by researchers, and in 2016 in the third.
Professor John Christy, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville which runs the third set of data, said there were still many gaps in understanding climate change. His data show a slower pace of warming than the other two sets.
“You may see a certain fingerprint that indicates human influence, but that the actual intensity of the influence is minor (as our satellite data indicate),” he told Reuters.
Separately in 2013, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is “extremely likely”, or at least 95 percent probable, that human activities have been the main cause of climate change since the 1950s.
Peter Stott of the British Met Office, who was among the scientists drawing that conclusion and was not involved in Monday’s study, said he would favor raising the probability one notch to “virtually certain”, or 99-100 percent.
“The alternative explanation of natural factors dominating has got even less likely,” he told Reuters.
The last four years have been the hottest since records began in the 19th century.
The IPCC will next publish a formal assessment of the probabilities in 2021.
“I would be reluctant to raise to 99-100 percent, but there is no doubt there is more evidence of change in the global signals over a wider suite of ocean indices and atmospheric indices,” said Professor Nathan Bindoff, a climate scientist at the University of Tasmania.
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It's an old report on an old study that corroborrates the findings of even older studies, but I figured I should show a little work instead of lazyposting and memeing the whole time. All the same, have a few more sources. Yes, the last one is cheeky. Now get yourself a nice, ice-cold glass of lemonade while I move on to my next point. It's sweltering outdoors and you've earned it.
So what does this mean for us in the long-term? Not good things as it turns out. Desertification, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, etc. will have an adverse effect on the environment, public health (bonus article on food production), and, most terrifying of all, the economy (most important source). So, in short, we're not doing too hot. Or are we doing too hot? I don't know. You get what I mean.
To make this a touch more personal, we can add a bit of corporate shenanigans to this wonderful concoction, at least in my home state.
Texas’ main power grid struggled to keep up with the demand for electricity Monday, prompting the operator to ask Texans to conserve power until Friday.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a statement Monday that a significant number of unexpected power plant outages, combined with expected record use of electricity due to hot weather, has resulted in tight grid conditions. Approximately 12,000 megawatts of generation were offline Monday, or enough to power 2.4 million homes on a hot summer day.
ERCOT officials said the power plant outages were unexpected — and could not provide details as to what could be causing them.
“I don’t have any potential reasons [for the plant outages] that I can share at this time,” said Warren Lasher, ERCOT senior director of systems planning, during a Monday call with media. “It is not consistent with fleet performance that we have seen over the last few summers.”
The number of plants that were forced offline today is “very concerning” Lasher said.
“We operate the grid with the resources that we have available,” he said. “It’s the responsibility of the generators to make sure their plants are available when demand is high.”
The conservation request comes at a time of heightened anxiety around electricity after the state’s catastrophic February power outages left millions without power for days. Those outages, which were prompted by a severe winter storm, may have killed as many as 700 people, according to an analysis of mortality data by BuzzFeed News.
Of the plants offline, about 9,600 megawatts of power, or nearly 80% of the outages, are from thermal power sources, which in Texas are largely natural-gas-fired power plants. That’s several times what ERCOT usually sees offline for thermal generation maintenance during a summer day. Typically, only about 3,600 megawatts of thermal generation are offline this time of year.
“This is unusual for this early in the summer season,” said Woody Rickerson, ERCOT vice president of grid planning and operations, in a statement. He said the grid operator would conduct an analysis to determine why so many units are offline.
At this time, it “appears unlikely” that the ERCOT grid would need to implement outages, like it did in February, to reduce strain on the grid, Lasher said.
In April, ERCOT asked residents to cut back power use because of a high number of plants offline for maintenance, some due to repairs necessary from damage during the February winter storm.
Lasher said that ERCOT has completed 20 plant visits ahead of the summer peak season, and 11 more are scheduled for the next two weeks. Four of the plants that were inspected are currently on outage, Lasher said.
The grid operator estimates demand for electricity could exceed 73,000 megawatts on Monday. The previous record for June was 69,100 megawatts in 2018.
“[Electricity demand] is really driven by temperatures, and right now it is 99 degrees in Dallas, 97 degrees in Austin and 97 degrees in Houston,” said Joshua Rhodes, research associate at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin. He said at those high temperatures, people tend to crank up their air conditioning, which strains the grid. At the same time, he said, power plants have already had a rough year given the damage during the February outages, which may be causing new complications.
Texans can reduce electricity use by setting the thermostat to 78 degrees or higher; turning off lights and pool pumps; avoiding use of large appliances such as ovens, washing machines and dryers; and turning off or unplugging unused electric appliances.
Because what would a climate crisis be without widespread government and corporate malfeasance? I'm certain this hasn't been solely confined to my neighborhood either. But, as we sit baking like potatoes, why not have a candid discussion about climate change, its impact on health and economics, and the potential responses, both big-brained and small-brained, that we can propose to the problems posed by living in Satan's armpit. What say you, NSG, you incorrigible den of recluses, ne'er-do-wells, and utter pedants?
