Much of the globe is boiling, from Athens to Asia. And the suffering is by no means confined to Phoenix or the Southwest or even the entire U.S. This heat wave’s unusual severity stems from its long duration - we’ll be a month into it by the time this reaches your e-mailbox - combined with the unusually hot nighttime temperatures, which exacerbate the impacts of those daytime highs. The minimum temperature in Phoenix has stayed above 90 for almost as long. The mercury has shot past 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix every day for a month. It’s utterly abnormal, whether you’re going by the dictionary definition of “normal” or the meteorological* one. (Death Valley reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees short of the record.) That’s led some on social media to downplay the calamity: It’s summer. Unlike last September’s California heat wave or the deadly scorcher in the Northwest in June 2021, this one isn’t smashing all-time high temperature records. But we also need to overhaul our built environment to make it and the people who live in it more resilient to the impacts of global warming. Urgent action is needed on many fronts - including, yes, a halt to fossil fuel combustion and its greenhouse gas emissions. It should serve as yet another alarm bell reminding us that human-caused climate change is here. for much of the summer, endangering public health, increasing wildfire risk, straining the power grid and rendering cities nearly uninhabitable.
This is just an extreme example of the brutal heat wave that has gripped a good swath of the Western U.S. By 5 a.m., it had cooled down to a relatively refreshing 107 degrees Fahrenheit. But this brain-roasting temperature was recorded not at the hottest point of the day, but at midnight.
That may seem unremarkable - this is Death Valley, after all, where the visitor center is named after Furnace Creek. In Southern California, the Badwater Basin weather station in Death Valley National Park reached 119.6 degrees Fahrenheit on July 17. This is an installment of the Landline, a fortnightly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.
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