Lots of stories in the news about record high temperatures in Southern California, and almost as many nutters claiming it’s evidence of global warming. I can’t prove they’re wrong, they can’t prove they’re right. Let me tell you what I know for sure.
In 1978, on the day we moved into our first new house in Northern California’s Sacramento Valley. the high that August day was 118 degrees. Was it atypically miserable? Certainly it was. Did it presage a string of record high temps? Not even close. That early August day was a very hot outlier, not the norm.
Where that house is located, summer highs up to 110 are considered normal, if unpleasant. There is every good chance what is happening in SoCal is exactly the same, a “very hot outlier.”
Now, if it begins happening summer after summer, that would be a different story. So far, that is not the case. Right now it is a data point, if we get a whole string of them, several years in a row, we can begin to claim we see a trend.
West of the Sierras, California has always been a not-quite-desert, technically a savannah climate. Rain, when it falls, almost always is between November and March and mostly between December and February. Rain between June and October is almost vanishingly rare and insignificant. And years when more than 17-19” of rain falls are uncommon, if not unknown.
Like Israel, if you irrigate CA, the crops grow like crazy but finding the water to do so takes effort, money and environmental trade offs that drive the Sierra Club nuts. The not-irrigated hillsides grow mostly brush which burns enthusiastically in late summer. None of this is new. It wasn’t so traumatic when fewer people lived there and less area was paved.
