California Isn’t Cooling

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), summer 2020 was the hottest on record for the United States. Interestingly, a climate change skeptic, David Legates, was just hired for a top position at the NOAA.

Despite Legates' appointment, the vast majority of peer-reviewed research shows that climate change is real and the Earth is warming. Per California specifically, a report published in IOP Science’s Environmental Research Letters found that: “State-wide increases in autumn temperature (~1 °C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (~30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%). As a result, the observed frequency of autumn days with extreme (95th percentile) fire weather—which we show are preferentially associated with extreme autumn wildfires—has more than doubled in California since the early 1980s. We further find an increase in the climate model-estimated probability of these extreme autumn conditions since ~1950, including a long-term trend toward increased same-season co-occurrence of extreme fire weather conditions in northern and southern California. Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century, though a pathway consistent with the UN Paris commitments would substantially curb that increase.”

Experts including the Environmental Protection Agency support these findings and indicate that climate change will worsen, causing California to heat further.