10/31/2022 0 Comments Wave killed wildlife masse![]() ![]() This has been the West’s summer of extremes. Stokes: How can we plan for the future in California? In mid-August, water levels in Lake Mead, the giant reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, fell so low that the Interior Department declared the first official water shortage in the lake’s 85-year history and announced cuts in the promised water allocations to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico. The juniper tree is facing systemic decline in Arizona and Utah, and because of the extreme aridity, previously burned forests across the West appear to be regenerating more slowly. Salmon and other fish species throughout the Pacific Coast states have suffered enormous losses because of declining water levels and rising water temperatures. Power systems have teetered under increased demand from the heat and distribution outages caused by the fires (while also, as in previous years, sparking some of the fires). The fires have produced apocalyptic orange skies and emitted harmful particulates to trigger air-quality emergencies. In 2020, a record 4.2 million acres burned.) As of Monday, more than 1.6 million acres have burned in California alone, a similar number to the acres burned at this time last year. The heat and drought have contributed to record wildfires burning across Oregon, California, and other states. Drought conditions have been reached this year in virtually every western state, including Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, an expanse of at least 1.1 million square miles. Record heat this summer has battered not just the Northwest, but also the Southwest (where California’s Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, or 54.4 Celsius, possibly the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth). The severity of the threat has been matched only by its breadth. ![]() (John Locher / AP)Īcross the western United States, 2021 is the year when the unimaginable became the unavoidable. Record heat battered the Southwest in 2021, including California’s Death Valley, which logged possibly the highest temperature recorded on Earth. “And climate models are telling us that some things that are coming are not necessarily what we are familiar with.” “Once in a while, Mother Nature can throw surprises at us, and what we have experienced in the past is not always a good predictor of the future,” he told me. The heat wave, he suggested, might have represented a meteorological black swan: “a rare dynamical interaction that has always been possible, but so rare that in 70 years of data we never observed a weather pattern that was qualitatively similar.” But there was also, he said, a second, “scarier” explanation for the surge, which led to hundreds of excess deaths across Washington and Oregon, as well as mass die-offs for shellfish that were literally baked in their shells: The climate is changing in ways we don’t entirely understand. Rohde offered two explanations for such a unique event. “It is not that common,” he said drily, “to find results that look impossible.” Truly unprecedented events that shatter any previous experience, he said, have been much rarer. But, he told me, it’s much more common for extreme events to match a rare high point with at least some historic precedent-hence the idea, say, of the thousand-year flood. Rohde allowed that such seemingly impossible events do in fact “sometimes” occur. He reiterated that the Northwest temperatures reached this summer were outside the boundaries “of what we thought was possible.” But the broiling temperature that the Northwest reached-108 degrees Fahrenheit at one point in Seattle, 121 degrees in British Columbia-was so far beyond the observed experience, he explained, that it exceeded even statistical models’ outmost potential extremes for the area.Ī few weeks later, I caught up with Rohde, the lead scientist for Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research group that analyzes current and historical climate data, via Zoom from Zurich, where he’s now living. Looking through a report that analyzed temperature patterns for the region over the past 70 years, he noted, “the heatwave was statistically ‘impossible.’” Obviously, the heat wave wasn’t literally impossible, given that, after all, it happened. ET on September 8, 2021.Ī fter this summer’s first searing heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest, the environmental scientist Robert Rohde posted an unusual observation on Twitter. ![]()
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