It’s a Dry Heat

There is, evidently, a small section of rural land in the northeast corner of the state of California where temperatures have actually cooled over the last five decades. For the rest of us, the news is not so good.

“Cities in California have been warming at a rate two to three times faster than the rural parts of the state,” says Steve LaDochy, a professor of geography at California State University, Los Angeles. “Global warming is usually stated as one degree Celsius over the last century. In places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the temperature has risen two degrees.” For the most part, climate change models have been assuming that global warming’s influence will be uniform. We should be so lucky. “[Southern Californians] will feel the effects sooner,” he says.

That’s because we’ve got a confluence of factors on our hands, a spiraling dance of urban planning, greenhouse gas emissions, and cyclical drought patterns. Humans in general are cooking the upper atmosphere with CO2, but a new report LaDochy co-authored with two other scientists – including Southern California’s favorite weatherman Bill Patzert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena – shows that we, in particular, are adding insult to injury in the form of the mushrooming heat island we’ve constructed.

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The consequences are not just more intense sunburn and higher air conditioning bills. The heat, say ecologists and water experts, is sucking up our water supply.