If You Thought Last Week Was Hot …

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a weekly “green tip” to our readers. This week’s tip was written by Éva Milan Engel.

Americans are feeling intensifying impacts of the climate crisis: extreme heat across the country, including the miserable “heat dome” that gripped California last week, record-breaking floods across the South and Midwest, drought in the West stressing water supplies that millions depend on, and more wildfires threatening more communities.

A new online tool has been designed to help us better understand the real-time, climate-related hazards happening around us. Last week, the Biden Administration launched a first-of-its-kind climate resiliency website called Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (resilience.climate.gov), or CMRA, which offers maps and charts to show climate hazards and potential future conditions for communities across the country.

The assessment tool shows the likelihood of extreme heat, drought, wildfire, flooding and coastal inundation. It predicts where we will be with each of those scenarios in the early part of this century (2015-44), mid-century (2035-64) and late century (2070-99).

The tool allows users to toggle between two scenarios: lower emissions (we manage to drastically reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases) and higher emissions (global emissions continue to increase).

Naturally, I entered “Pacific Palisades, CA” on the site. Here’s what I found:

The interactive tool predicts that the number of 90-plus-degree days the Palisades will experience will balloon in the coming years. Lower emissions scenarios predict 59 days. Higher emissions scenarios predict 69 days through 2044.

Hot days increase even more from 2070 to 2099. In a lower emissions scenario, there will be 74 days above 90 degrees. In a higher emissions scenario, it’s 96 days above 90 degrees. That’s one-quarter of the year just like last week.

In a lower emissions scenario, by late century, Palisadians can expect at least seven days per year with temperatures over 105 degrees. Otherwise, look for 16 days over 105 degrees.

I encourage everyone to visit the website and share this useful interactive tool. We should all be aware of the projected effect of the climate crisis on our community.