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'We're screaming into the void.' Across the U.S., heat keeps breaking records
By Julia Simon,
5 days ago
When Joe Pascale moved to the desert city of Palm Springs, Calif., about 17 years ago it was hot, but in the mornings and evenings there was a break from the heat.
“You could get up in the morning and it would be relatively cool and you could enjoy outside, even in the dead of summer,” he says. “The mornings would be just brilliant.”
“That doesn't exist for us anymore, and it's a huge loss,” he says.
Last Friday, the city broke its all-time high temperature record when it hit 124 degrees . Even in the early mornings this week, the temperature has still been in the low 90s or high 80s.
Pascale recognizes the connection between his increasingly hot city and climate change, caused largely by humans burning fossil fuels.
“Sometimes we feel like we're screaming into the void,” Pascale says. “There's a problem that we need to be addressing.”
Last year was the hottest year on record for the world. The U.S. is warming up at a faster rate than the global average , which means the effects of global warming will be more pronounced.
“We're going to continue [breaking temperature records] as long as we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere,” Russell says.
In 2015, at a U.N. conference in Paris , most countries of the world agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. 1.5 degrees is a threshold that scientists say could unleash more severe climate change impacts.
Given that global fossil fuel use is still increasing, it’s unlikely — but not impossible — that the world will stay below that 1.5 degrees threshold, according to many international scientists .
“But a 1.5 degree target is not a magic number,” says Katharine Hayhoe , climate scientist and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit.
Even if the world can limit warming to 1.5 degrees, more temperature records will continue to fall, Hayhoe says.
“We scientists have known for a long time — for decades — that as the world gets warmer, we're going to see our temperature extremes [increasing],” she says. “Climate change is already affecting the people we love, the places we love, and the things we love.”
The good news is that the world has proven and scalable climate solutions, Russell says.
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