Category: Heat_MN PATA_Heat_And_Ramifications_2022_Related

Dangerous levels of heat are forecast in the South, West and Midwest on Monday, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…

San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento are all included in excessive heat watches or warnings over the Labor Day weekend.

A prolonged and intense heat wave has begun to swelter much of the Southwest this week — and by early next week, dozens of records are likely to have been set.
What to expect: The heat wave is forecast to culminate with a dangerously hot Labor Day weekend across much of California, Nevada, Oregon and surrounding states in the West.
Threat level: In Death Valley, California, which saw flash floods earlier this summer, September heat records could be threatened or toppled, with a high at or above 125°F this weekend.

The worst heat wave of the year is presenting a critical test for California’s overtaxed power grid, with officials warning rolling blackouts are possible without major conservation efforts during a week of scorching temperatures.
Extreme heat is expected to grip the vast majority of California for at least six days, perhaps even longer.

Massive incentives for clean energy in the U.S. law signed Tuesday by President Joe Biden should reduce future global warming “not a lot, but not insignificantly either,” according to a climate scientist who led an independent analysis of the package.
Even with nearly $375 billion in tax credits and other financial enticements for renewable energy in the law, the United States still isn’t doing its share to help the world stay within another few tenths of a degree of warming, a new analysis by Climate Action Tracker says. The group of scientists examines and rates each country’s climate goals and actions. It still rates American action as “insufficient” but hailed some progress.

Globally, July 2022 was the sixth-warmest July in the 143-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January-July) global surface temperature was also the sixth-warmest on record. According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook, there is a greater than 99% chance that 2022 will rank among the 10-warmest years on record but only an 11% chance that it will rank among the top five.

Most of the mechanical, electrical and architectural systems we count on every day were built to handle what the climate has always been, not what it is rapidly becoming.
That means, for instance, that Norwegian runways, Seattle streets and London bridges handle wind, rain and cold just fine, but a triple-digit heat wave? Not so much.

As the United States continues to trudge through a sweltering summer and with a warm fall on the way, new research underscores the potentially deadly ramifications of rising heat at night.
Published in The Lancet Planetary Health, data from Japan, South Korea and China show hotter night-time temperatures could lead to a 60 percent spike in mortality rates around the world by the end of the century.
Previous research on the deadly effects of rising heat has typically focused on excessive day-time temperatures, while “the risks of increasing temperature at night were frequently neglected,” explained study co-author Yuqiang Zhang of the University of North Carolina in a statement.

As cities race to amp up their heat mitigation efforts, some are replacing bare-bones cooling centers with full-service “climate resilience hubs” — offering everything from comfy A/C and phone charging to social services and emergency training.

The cement, glass and steel that give shape to urban life have also turned modern cities into dangerous heat sinks. Scorching sunlight gets absorbed, stored and slowly emitted in a bubble of warmth that can push city temperatures as much as 3°C (5.4°F) above the surrounding countryside. This dynamic, combined with the increasingly extreme heat waves produced by climate change, helped drive record-breaking highs in Delhi (49°C) and London (40.2°C) over the past few months. Thousands of citydwellers died in sweltering cities this summer.