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Californians tried to weather the extremes of a changing climate Friday, as a punishing heat wave that has helped fuel deadly wildfires had the state teetering on the edge of blackouts for a 10th consecutive day while a tropical storm barreled ashore with the promise of cooler temperatures but also possible flooding.
The abrupt swing in conditions even whipsawed weather junkies.
“This is perhaps the singularly most unusual and extreme weather week in quite some time in California — and that is saying something. Whew,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his western weather blog.
While the rains may be welcome in the drought-plagued state and will bring relief with more normal temperatures, deluges and more brutal heat waves are forecast to become regular fixtures as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.
« We’ll see these heat waves continue to get hotter and hotter, longer and longer, more wildfire-plagued, » said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “The odds of really intense precipitation are going up. And so that’s why we are worried about flooding associated with this remnant hurricane.”
California is just the latest casualty in a year of sometimes deadly heat waves that began in Pakistan and India this spring and swept across parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including China, Europe and others areas of the U.S.
Climate change also has exacerbated droughts, dried up rivers, made wildfires more intense and — conversely — led to massive flooding around the globe as moisture evaporating from land and water is held in the atmosphere and then redeposited by intense rains.
Scientists are reluctant to attribute any specific weather event, such as Hurricane Kay, now downgraded to a tropical storm as it heads into California, to global warming. But they say heat waves are exactly the type of change that will become more common.
The so-called heat dome that cooked California was stuck in place by an exceptional high pressure region over Greenland, of all places, that essentially created a meteorological traffic jam, said Paul Ullrich, a professor of regional climate modeling at the University of California, Davis.
