Massive heat waves present in most all of the western United States

From an Article by Jason Samenow and Matthew Cappucci, Washington Post, August 17, 2020

The weather in the West has gone off the rails. Since late in the past week, the blistering heat has set scores of high-temperature records. The heat has fueled violent thunderstorms unleashing a barrage of lightning strikes, igniting a rash of fires. Lightning even filled the sky over the San Francisco Bay area on Sunday and Monday, where such displays are rare.

The punishing heat forced rolling blackouts in California on Friday for the first time in 19 years, affecting up to 2 million people. More may be necessary this week as the punishing heat lingers.

The extreme weather stems from a massive, unusually intense heat dome over the Southwest. It developed late in the past week and is now near peak intensity. It is forecast to hold in place for at least another week, although its strength will gradually ease.

The heat is a “heat storm”

Excessive heat warnings and heat advisories smother the western United States, affecting much of California (except for the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada range); all of Nevada; much of western and southern Arizona, including Phoenix; western Utah, including Salt Lake City; central and eastern Oregon and Washington; and large parts of Idaho and Montana, all the way to the Canadian border. Over 56 million Americans are under some sort of heat alert.

Heat is the leading cause of the weather-related deaths in the United States in many years. “Long duration heat spells like this one can be extremely dangerous, be sure to limit your outdoor exposure and stay hydrated!” tweeted the National Weather Service forecast office serving Las Vegas, which is under an excessive-heat warning through at least Wednesday.

Heat wave ‘Hugo?’ New coalition seeks to name hot weather like hurricanes.

Since Friday, scores of long-standing heat records have fallen. Several of these records have not only met or exceeded previous marks for the day they occurred but also for the entire month of August. Some of the August records include:

>> Phoenix hit 117 degrees Friday, tying its highest temperature during the month.
>> Oakland hit 100 degrees Saturday for the first time on record during August.
>> Needles, in California’s southeastern desert, set an August record of 123 on Saturday.
>> Sacramento set an August record of 112 degrees Sunday.

The searing 130-degree high temperature in Death Valley on Sunday has captured international attention. If confirmed, it will become the highest temperature measured on the planet during August and the third-hottest in any month. It would also be the highest temperature observed on Earth since at least 1931. The only hotter two temperature measurements prior to that are disputed by some experts.

Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, potentially Earth’s highest temperature since at least 1931

Death Valley could flirt with 130 degrees again Monday afternoon. In fact, it is forecast to see highs at or above its previous August record of 127 degrees through Wednesday. Highs of at least 124 degrees are forecast through Sunday.

While not as extreme as Death Valley, the heat in Phoenix has also been unforgiving. After posting its hottest month on record in July, it has hit at least 110 degrees for five straight days. Highs are forecast to remain near or above 110 degrees for the entire week. It has reached at least 110 degrees on 40 days in 2020, crushing the previous record of 33 such instances in 2011.

In California, the heat resulted in scores of record highs over the weekend including around Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento. Early Sunday morning, a bizarre “heat burst” raised the temperature 20 degrees in two hours in Fairfield, about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco. The temperature shot from around 80 to 100 degrees in the hours around sunrise.

Because of the demand for cooling, California endured rolling power outages Friday. Utilities urged residents to conserve energy to reduce the chance of additional blackouts.

“Conservation is critical to help reduce the need for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to direct the state’s utilities, including PG&E, to implement rotating outages in order to reduce load,” wrote PG&E on its website Monday. “With the weather forecasted to be even hotter, PG&E urges customers to be prepared for power outages.”

Thunderstorms are occurring more frequently

Fueled by the heat, a round of booming thunderstorms that produced a spectacular lightning show early Sunday morning awakened residents in the Bay Area. A surge of moisture ejecting north from former Tropical Storm Fausto near the Baja Peninsula contributed to the rare summertime storms. The storms ignited a number of new wildfires through their pinpoint lightning strikes.

The National Weather Service in San Francisco issued an unusually large severe thunderstorm warning that covered more than 7,000 square miles from Monterey Bay to the Bay Area and north into Napa Valley. The office warned of “erratic outflow wind gusts of 50 to 70 mph wind gusts, [and] frequent lightning.” The warning, the largest ever issued by that office, was six times larger than the state of Rhode Island.

“This 20 year forecaster cant recall such a widespread [thunderstorm] event on the heels of such a heat wave,” wrote one meteorologist in the office forecast discussion late Sunday.

The storms were preceded by an extraordinary roll cloud, marking the leading edge of cool air associated with the storms working up the Santa Cruz Coast.

A second round of thunderstorms occurred early Monday morning but with considerably fewer lightning strikes. That’s because moisture at the mid-levels of the atmosphere was scant in comparison to Saturday night. Concern was growing that “dry thunderstorms” could spark lightning strikes with little to no rainfall to quell the flames.

“Any thunderstorms that do develop will move quickly with lightning strikes outpacing any (unlikely) wetting rains at the surface,” the National Weather Service wrote.

More thunderstorms, including some dry thunderstorms, were expected throughout the day Monday. One webcam revealed four small fires ignited by lightning in one area Monday morning.

Extreme fire behavior is now widespread

The anomalously hot and dry conditions have acted as a breeding ground for wildfire growth, supporting extreme fire behavior and making the concerns surrounding dry lightning that much more pressing.

National Weather Service offices in California blanketed much of the state in red flag warnings to account for fire danger exacerbated by the heat wave.

Hazards include a “high probability of fire starts with any lightning,” according to the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “Rapid spread of fire [is] possible depending on terrain and local wind conditions.”

Even after any thunderstorms pass, persistent hot, dry conditions will sap vegetation of moisture and litter the ground with fuel ripe for fire growth. A number of other wildfires continued to rage Monday, taking advantage of the parched conditions to blaze at full fury.

On Saturday, the rapidly expanding Loyalton Fire in Lassen County, Calif., between Reno, Nev., and Lake Tahoe, produced a barrage of extreme fire tornadoes that prompted a first of its kind “fire tornado warning.”

A freak fire tornado warning was issued in California on Saturday amid swarm of spinning blazes

The souped-up version of a tornado warning mentioned the potential of fire tornadoes and 60-mph winds, cautioning “this is [an] extremely dangerous situation for fire fighters.”

The Loyalton Fire had burned some 36,295 acres as of Monday morning, and was only 5 percent contained.

Farther south in Southern California, the Lake Fire was burning in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles. It had claimed more than 18,300 acres by Sunday night, and was still raging to kick off the workweek. The fire was 12 percent contained.

An extreme heat dome, likely made more intense by climate change

The exceptionally hot and dry conditions are made possible by a significant ridge of high pressure, colloquially referred to as a “heat dome.” Air inside the system sinks and warms, while drying out and eradicating any widespread shots of rainfall.

On weather maps, a rare number appeared as a testament to how significant the heat dome is: 600. That describes the height in dekameters, or tens of meters, that the halfway point of the atmosphere’s mass is above the surface.

When air warms, it expands. When it cools, a volume of air shrinks. An air mass this hot expands a lot, causing a column of air to grow and raising the atmosphere’s halfway point. With this particular system, that level is 6,000 meters — or about 19,700 feet — above the surface.

This level “represents a threshold that is coincident with record heat over the Western United States,” wrote Ryan Maue, a meteorologist who operates the website weathermodels.com, in a Twitter message.

Instances of heat domes exceeding this 6,000-meter level used to be rare but have increased dramatically in recent years. Maue examined data back to 1958 and found almost all of the high-powered heat domes have occurred since 1983 — with the overwhelming majority of them occurring since 1990.

“[T]he 6000-meter club “heat domes” are certainly becoming more frequent b/c of climate change, now a nearly annual occurrence,” he wrote in a Twitter message.

Scientists have found the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves worldwide are increasing because of human-caused climate change. A 2019 study found the planet has entered a “new climate regime” with “extraordinary” heat waves that global warming is worsening.

### Save the EARTH one VOTE at a time! YOUR VOTE COUNTS! ###

From an Article by Michael E. Mann, Washington Post, November 2, 2018

PHOTO in NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: Thick smoke covers a beach near the village of Sarti in Halkidiki, northern Greece, as a wildifire rages in the area on October 25th.

Summer 2018 saw an unprecedented spate of extreme floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires break out across North America, Europe and Asia. The scenes played out on our television screens and in our social media feeds. This is, as I stated at the time, the face of climate change.

It’s not rocket science. A warmer ocean evaporates more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse flooding from coastal storms (think Hurricanes Harvey and Florence). Warmer soils evaporate more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse droughts (think California or Syria). Global warming shifts the extreme upper tail of the “bell curve” toward higher temperatures, so you get more frequent and intense heat waves (think summer 2018 just about anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere). Combine heat and drought, and you get worse wildfires (again, think California).

Climate scientists have become increasingly comfortable talking about these connections. Much like how medical science has developed key diagnostic tools, we have developed sophisticated tools to diagnose the impact climate change is having on extreme weather events.

One of these tools, “extreme event attribution,” can be thought of as climate science’s version of an X-ray. In this case, a climate model is run both with and without the human effect on climate. One then compares how often a particular extreme event happens in both the “with” and “without” cases. If it occurs sufficiently more often (i.e., beyond the “noise”) in the former case, a study can “attribute” and quantify how climate change affected the extremeness of the event.

The scorching European heat wave this summer, according to one such study, was made more than twice as likely by global warming. The record rainfall in North Carolina from Hurricane Florence was, according to another study, increased by as much as 50 percent by warming oceans.

The climate models used in these sorts of studies represent remarkable achievements in the world of science. But no tool is perfect. In our medical analogy, some injuries — such as soft tissue damage — are too subtle to be detected by an X-ray. So medical professionals developed even more sophisticated tools, such as MRI. Similarly, some climate-change impacts on extreme weather are too subtle to be captured by current generation climate models.

In a study my co-authors and I recently published in the journal Science Advances, we identified a key factor behind the rise in extreme summer weather events (such as the ones that played out in summer 2018) that — as we demonstrate in our study — is not captured by current generation climate models.

Using an alternative approach based on a combination of models and real-world observations, we showed that climate change is causing the summer jet stream to behave increasingly oddly. The characteristic continental-scale meanders of the jet stream (its “waviness”) as it travels from west to east are becoming more pronounced and are tending to remain locked in place for longer stretches of time.

Under these circumstances — when, for example, a deep high-pressure “ridge” gets stuck over California or Europe — we usually see extreme heat, drought and wildfire. And typically there’s a deep low-pressure “trough” downstream, stuck over, say, the eastern United States or Japan, yielding excessive rainfall and flooding. That’s exactly what happened in summer 2018. The spate of extreme floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires we experienced were a consequence of such jet stream behavior.

Our study shows that climate change is making that behavior more common, giving us the disastrous European heat wave of 2003 (during which more than 30,000 people perished), the devastating 2011 Texas drought (during which ranchers ranchers in Oklahoma and Texas lost 24 percent and 17 percent of their cattle, respectively), the 2016 Alberta wildfire (the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history) and yes, the extreme summer of 2018.

Just as climate models almost certainly underestimate the impact climate change has already had on such weather extremes, projections from these models also likely underestimate future increases in these types of events. Our study indicates that we can expect many more summers like 2018 — or worse.

Climate-change deniers love to point to scientific uncertainty as justification for inaction on climate. But uncertainty is a reason for even more concerted action. We already know that projections historically have been too optimistic about the rates of ice sheet collapse and sea-level rise. Now it appears they are also underestimating the odds of extreme weather as well. The consequences of doing nothing grow by the day. The time to act is now.

>>> Michael E. Mann is director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center and co-author with Tom Toles of “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.”

Attribution is a serious activity with global climate scientists

From an Article by Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, July 27, 2018

With wildfires raging the world over, a new preliminary analysis conducted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) and reported by the Guardian found that the global climate crisis notably increased the likeliness of last year’s Hurricane Harvey and “Lucifer” heat wave, as well as the current heat wave sweeping across Northern Europe and fueling fires in the Arctic Circle.

“This is something that society can and should prepare for. But equally there is no doubt that we can and should constrain the increasing likelihood of all kinds of extreme weather events by restricting greenhouse gas emissions as sharply as possible.”
— Friederike Otto, University of Oxford

“We found that for the weather station in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, the current heat wave is just extraordinary—unprecedented in the historical record,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and WWA.

The researchers found that climate change made the heat wave in Northern Europe more than twice as likely, Hurricane Harvey three times more likely, and the Lucifer heat wave 10 times more likely.

“By comparing extreme weather with historical measurements and with computer models of a climate unaltered by carbon emissions, researchers can find how much global warming is increasing the risk of dangerous weather,” the Guardian explained. This analysis differs from a full study that would require “many climate models to be run on high-powered computers, which takes months.”

Summarizing their conclusion, Friederike Otto of the University of Oxford and WWA told the newspaper, “The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable—the world is becoming warmer, and so heat waves like this are becoming more common.”

While “most heat wave studies have been done on large scale averages, so European-wide temperatures,” Otto noted that “in this study, we have looked at individual locations, where people live, to represent the heat wave people are actually experiencing.”

The heat wave that has fueled more than 50 fires in Sweden in recent weeks has also caused excessive heat throughout the U.K. and Europe—including in Greece, where a fire killed dozens earlier this week.

Pointing to recent comments from British politicians who are demanding concrete action to prevent such events from becoming the “new normal” and endangering thousands or even millions of lives, 350.org echoed their call and highlighted worldwide rallies planned for September 8th to demand a future free of fossil fuels.

“What was once regarded as unusually warm weather will become commonplace, and in some cases, it already has,” Otto concluded. “So this is something that society can and should prepare for. But equally there is no doubt that we can and should constrain the increasing likelihood of all kinds of extreme weather events by restricting greenhouse gas emissions as sharply as possible.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Comment from 350.org on July 27, 2018

So true. The intense heat so many people are experiencing just goes to show – climate change is here, now. It will get worse – so we have to do better. Let’s all take action and #RiseForClimate on September 8th.

See also: http://350.org/rise

— 350 dot org (@350) 9:28 AM – July 27, 2018

How Extreme Heat & Heatwaves Impact Public Health

>>> From an Article by Climate Nexus, July 20, 2017

Exposure to extreme heat and heatwaves is already a significant public health problem and a leading cause of weather-related mortality in the U.S.

Center for Disease Control and Prevention defines extreme heat as “summertime temperatures that are substantially hotter and/ or more humid than average for that location at that time of year.” Climate change amplifies the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme heat events. As global warming intensifies, more heat records are broken every season.

According to Center for Climate Change and Health, extreme heat causes more deaths than any other type of natural disaster. Between 1999 and 2010, more than 7,100 people died from heat-related illness in the U.S. This is an average of 618 deaths per year.

Many urban areas worldwide have also witnessed a significant increase in the number of heat waves between 1973–2012. Urban heat island effect, which has a higher daytime maximum temperature and less nighttime cooling compared to surrounding rural areas, poses a greater risk to city residents.

For example, during the 2006 California heat wave, more than 650 deaths, additional 16,000 emergency room visits and a 10-fold increase in hospital admissions for heat-related illnesses have been recorded. Furthermore, continuously rising temperatures from climate change are projected to result in an increase of between 2,100 – 4,300 deaths in California in 2025 and an additional 6,700 – 11,300 deaths in 2050.

Small children, the elderly and other groups including people with chronic illnesses, low-income populations and outdoor workers, are at higher risk for heat-related illnesses.

Heat stroke: According to American Public Health Association, heat stroke is the most serious heat-related illness. It occurs when the body cannot control its temperature, causing the sweating mechanism to fail and the body cannot cool down. If proper emergency treatments are not given, heat stroke can cause death or permanent disability.

Respiratory illness: A Johns Hopkins study found that the risk of hospitalizations for respiratory distress increased with higher temperatures. Breathing in hot air can exacerbate respiratory disorders (e.g. chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and bronchospasm) and promote airway inflammation.

Cardiovascular illness: National Institute of Environmental Health Science writes that cardiovascular illnesses are already the leading cause of death in the U.S., but extreme heat is causing higher incidences of cardiovascular diseases (e.g. strokes and dysrhythmia).

Dehydration, heat cramps, heat exhaustion are all also common health effects caused by extreme heat and rising temperatures, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

For more information on the science of how climate change causes extreme heat and heatwaves, visit Climate Signals.

Extreme Heat Enhanced By Global Warming

What science can tell us about the links between global warming and massive heat waves

From an Article by Chris Mooney, Washington Post, July 21, 2016

The Capitol can be seen as a jogger runs along the National Mall on July 21 in Washington, where area temperatures are forecasted to reach the upper 90s for the next few days.

The United States is witnessing a massive, dangerous heat wave, as a huge system of high pressure covers the central part of the country. It’s a big enough deal that yesterday President Obama even tweeted about it, including a map showing the maximum heat index in some parts of the Midwest and Southeast reaching 110 or 115 degrees on Saturday.

Here in Washington, temperatures could break 100 degrees Friday or over the weekend.

This will, inevitably, lead to much talk of climate change in the coming days. So it’s important to separate the scientific wheat from the chaff and figure out what science can, and can’t, reliably say about the link between an event like this and a warming planet — especially in a year that, on a global scale, has shattered past temperature records for six out of the last six months.

And the gist is that when it comes to extreme heat waves in general — heat waves that appear out of the norm in some way, for instance in their intensity, frequency, or duration — while scientists never say individual events are “caused” by climate change, they are getting less and less circumspect about making some connection.

“As predictable as the sunrise, some will say heat waves always happened,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society. “Yep, so did home runs in baseball, but the steroid era brought more and longer home runs. A new National Academies study suggests that ‘heat waves’ may be one of the primary climate change markers like home runs were in baseball.”

[It’s official: We can now say global warming made some weather events worse]

In other words, when a planet warms, the odds shift in favor of more intense or long lasting heat waves. That’s just plain logic.

Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences report in question notes that, “Confidence in attribution findings of anthropogenic influence is greatest for those extreme events that are related to an aspect of temperature, such as the observed long-term warming of the region or global climate, where there is little doubt that human activities have caused an observed change.”

“In particular, for extreme heat and cold events, changes in long-term mean conditions provide a basis for expecting that there should also be changes in extreme conditions.”

And we’ve definitely already had changes in not only “long-term mean conditions,” but in heat waves themselves. The U.S. National Climate Assessment found that U.S. heat waves have already “become more frequent and intense,” that the U.S. is shattering high temperature records far more frequently than it is shattering low temperature records (just as you’d expect), and that it is seeing correspondingly fewer cold spells.

As for future projections, meanwhile, the assessment added that “Climate models project that the same summertime temperatures that ranked among the hottest 5% in 1950-1979 will occur at least 70% of the time by 2035-2064 in the U.S. if global emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to grow.”

However, pointing all of this out is not the same as making a specific attribution for this specific heat event — rather, it is saying that attribution can be made for this class or type of event. Beyond that, specific attribution requires active research, and an attention to the actual temperatures, duration and other aspects of the weather phenomenon. That’s because, as Shepherd notes, there are always heat waves, even in a stable climate.

Typically, in such an attribution study, scientists will use sets of climate models — one set including the factors that drive human global warming and the other including purely “natural” factors — and see if an event like the one in question is more likely to occur in the first set of models. Researchers are getting better and better at performing these kinds of studies fast, in near real time. So don’t be at all surprised if we see such a study for the current heat wave event — just as we saw for, most recently, the devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, which was tied to an extreme marine heatwave off Australia’s northeastern coast.

But in the meantime, some scientists and experts aren’t holding back.

“With every heat wave, probably the number one question is, is it climate change, or is it not? Well the answer is, it’s both,” said Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe on a press call Thursday. “We get heat waves naturally, but climate change is amping them up, it’s giving them that extra energy, to make them even more serious, and have even greater impacts.”

Hayhoe didn’t attempt a specific attribution of the current heat wave, any more than Shepherd did. Rather, she’s once again articulating the general connection.

“We are not used to having heat waves that are extreme as the ones we see today,” she said.

It’s important to underscore, as Hayhoe did, that this event poses severe risks to health — particularly for children and the elderly — and also to crops across the U.S. heartland. She pointed to an extreme 2003 heat wave that affected Paris and Europe, and which has indeed been connected to climate change through statistical attribution analysis. That event killed hundreds of people in Paris and London, and a recent study attributed at least some of those deaths, themselves, to climate change.

So these links are real, if not always simple to characterize. Now, it’s all about watching this current event carefully, taking preparations, and seeing what scientists have to say once they run their analyses.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net