It isn’t your imagination. This summer in California is the hottest ever recorded
Drought. Wildfires. And, for the country as a whole, temperatures worse than the Dust Bowl.
In a further bit of evidence of the reality of climate change, California has just experienced its hottest summer on record, according to new data released by the federal government.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average temperature in California reached 77.3 degrees from June to August. That topped the previous record of 76.5 degrees in summer 2017.
Although summer didn’t end until Sept. 22, the federal agency defines the “meteorological summer” as June 1 to Aug. 31.
The report didn’t surprise Bill Patzert, a retired climate specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
“Climate change is not an existential threat,” Patzert said. “This is a reality; this is not a threat anymore.” He said the warming climate has contributed heavily to the state’s wildfire problems, turning the forests into tinder.
“The eco-system is in transition here because of these warming temperatures. It’s much drier for longer periods of time. It’s much hotter.”
In its monthly climate report, the federal agency noted that the Dixie Fire in Northern California became the second-largest wildfire in the state’s history, while the Caldor Fire imperiled the Lake Tahoe area.
Meager snowpack and extreme drought in California
The report didn’t mention other climate impacts that Californians endured this summer, including the deepening of one of the worst droughts ever. A spring heat wave evaporated a major portion of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, depriving California of an estimated 800,000 acre-feet of water — nearly enough to fill Folsom Lake.
A series of heat waves threatened the state’s power grid, as temperatures zoomed past 110 degrees in early July and California barely avoided rolling blackouts.
The grid manager, the Independent System Operator, called for two straight nights of voluntary conservation this week, and also petitioned the Biden administration for a 60-day waiver of federal air-pollution regulations in order to run some gas-fired power plants at maximum capacity.
California was one of five states experiencing the hottest summer ever, joining Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Utah. Sixteen other states had summers that registered in their top five. The Pacific Northwest heat wave earlier this summer killed hundreds of people.
Nationwide, the high temperatures generated a dubious milestone for weather.
The average temperature during meteorological summer for the contiguous U.S. was 74.0 degrees ... 2.6 degrees above average,” the agency said. “This technically exceeds the record heat of the 1936 Dust Bowl Summer, but the difference is extremely small.” The margin was less than 0.01 degrees.
The Dust Bowl was the prolonged drought that plagued the Southern Plains during the Great Depression.
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 1:39 PM with the headline "It isn’t your imagination. This summer in California is the hottest ever recorded."