On Top Of Withering Drought, California Smashes Heat Records

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/12/3470113/california-heat-records/

by Tom Kenworthy Posted on August 12, 2014

Caught in a withering drought, California is also shattering a 120-year-old record for heat.

For the first half of 2014, the state has been an average of 4.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, and 1 degree warmer than the previous record set in 1934, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

“In the business of climate science, this is a shattering of a record,” said Jonathan Overpeck, of the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. As for what’s driving this unprecedented heat, Overpeck told the Palm Springs Desert Sun, “We are fairly certain that the unusual warmth is mostly due to human-caused global warming.”

California’s current drought, Overpeck added, is a “global warming drought” and a harbinger of things to come.

“I’m just ‘Wow,’ looking at these trends,” Richard Heim, a drought expert with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, told USA Today regarding the records being broken in California. “Can it get any worse? Well, the models say yeah. But how much more can we take as a society, as individual people. And how much more of this can the infrastructure and policies that have been put in place to deal with this at the state level, federal level, local level, how much more of this can you guys take?”

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