2021 has been hot enough.
By Soumya Karlamangla Aug. 30, 2021
There’s a dark joke about this year’s extreme temperatures that has been haunting me for weeks: This is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives.
The prospect is nothing short of terrifying given what this year has wrought.
In June, sky-high temperatures in the Pacific Northwest killed as many as 600 people. Several hikers have been found dead in California in recent weeks, most likely because of temperatures that were above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Globally, July ranked as the hottest month in recorded human history.
So, from my Los Angeles apartment that regularly crosses 85 degrees indoors, I called some climate scientists and asked them, “Is every upcoming summer going to be even hotter than this one?”
The short answer was: Yes, generally.
Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me that each recent decade had been unmistakably warmer than the one before it, so it’s highly probable that future years will continue to break heat records.
“We should act like that’s going to be the case: that this will be the coldest summer when we look forward,” he said.
A United Nations report this month found that the Earth is locked into intensifying global warming for the next 30 years because countries have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long. Preventing further warming is within reach, but would require a coordinated and immediate worldwide effort, the report found.
The effects of climate change can be seen locally. The average high temperature in July in L.A. has risen by more than two degrees since the 1960s, as it has in Boston, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and several other cities.
And it will probably keep climbing. In Los Angeles County in 1990, the average annual maximum temperature — an average of the high each day — was 74 degrees. In 2090, the average maximum temperature will be somewhere between 80 and 82 degrees, according to state projections.
“The climate that your children are going to experience is different than any climate that you have experienced,” Paul Ullrich, a U.C. Davis professor of regional and global climate modeling. “There was no possibility in your life span for the types of temperature that your children are going to be experiencing on average.”
But still, that doesn’t mean that 2022 in your city will definitely be warmer than 2021 has been. There are year-to-year fluctuations within this overall warming, especially at the local level. In California, for example, the climate phenomenon El Niño could make for an unusually chilly year.
“It’s really important not to set up these falsely simplistic expectations for the public,” said Julien Emile-Geay, climate scientist at the University of Southern California. “If we do put out the expectation that everything is gradually getting warmer, and then next year if it’s cooler, people will say, ‘Ha ha, climate change doesn’t exist.’”
Here’s another way of thinking about this: The hottest year on record worldwide was 2016, followed by 2020, so it’s not as if each consecutive year is warmer than the one that came before it.
But the larger trend is clear. The top seven warmest years on Earth were in the past seven years.
To read the article in the New York Times click here