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Temperatures may still be scorching, but hey, at least you probably don’t have to swim in the Seine.
The Midwest cooled off a bit over the weekend — but doesn’t mean extreme temperatures are behind us. More heat is in store this week for the Central Plains and the deep South. A heat dome developing in the Western side of the country will push hot air over to those regions, Bryan Jackson, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.
“Cities like Denver, Oklahoma City and Kansas City will have temperatures ranging from 95 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit the rest of the work week. That’s 6 to 12 degrees above historical averages,” Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at Accuweather, told me.
The conditions in the Southern Plains across the Gulf States into the interior Southeast will be even more extreme, as high humidity levels will make already high temperatures in cities like Houston, Memphis, Tennessee, Jackson, Mississippi feel 8 to 10 degrees hotter, Pastelok explained. To be clear, that means heat indexes as high as 110.
Over in the West, the heat will focus over eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, Nevada, and central and southern California. According to Pastelok, Boise, Idaho, will see temperatures above 100 degrees for most of this week — 8 to 14 degrees above historical averages.
Beyond sleeping in cardboard beds and swimming in the Seine (which is potentially still full of E.coli), athletes are having to deal with the intense heat in the city.
In 2021, Tokyo became the hottest Olympic Games ever, with daily highs averaging nearly 90 degrees and the heat index soaring well past 113 degrees. While Paris won’t come close to challenging that, it’s still been plenty hot. Temperatures in the French capital reached 97 degrees last Tuesday before settling back into the high 70s over the weekend.
To counter the heat, athletes were taking extra breaks to hydrate, but sometimes not even that was enough. “We were drinking hot water out there,” British tennis player Jack Draper told ABC News. USA gymnast-slash-golden girl Simone Biles also complained about the heat and having to go around in a bus without AC. Spectators also struggled, and volunteers had to use a water hose to spray those in the bleachers at a beach volleyball game.
The Park Fire is now the fourth largest wildfire in California’s history — and there might still be weeks before it’s quenched. As of this morning, only 31% of the fire had been contained, with one more county being added to the evacuation list. Hundreds of structures have been destroyed, and over 400,000 acres have been burned.
Looking at California’s fire season to date, the numbers are even more shocking. During the summer of 2023, the state responded to 119 wildfire incidents. So far this summer — and remember we still have all of August to go — the state has already responded to 321 wildfires, according to Cal Fire data.
The first couple of weeks of August will continue to see much of the same extreme heat the country has experienced so far this summer, according to Pastelok. In fact, the Southeast looks to be getting even hotter and more humid late this week and into next. In northern California and parts of Oregon, some cooling may happen around the middle of the month, but not enough to end the wildfire season. More significant opportunities for cooler weather in the region won’t start until September — or even October.
Seattle and Portland may get lucky with a more substantial drop in temperatures later in August, but the Northeast will continue hot and humid throughout all of this month. The location of the cooler weather will mostly be determined by storms, Pastelok explained. “If more storms hit the East coast, the cooling will drive into the Midwest,” he said. “If the storms drive into the Gulf, then warmth will remain back to the Midwest and cooling will be more confined to the northern Rockies and Northwest.”
Not even Antarctica is safe from bizarre temperatures this summer. Last month, an intense heat wave caused temperatures across the continent to average up to 50 degrees above normal. Temperatures were up 82 degrees from historical readings on some days.
The numbers confirm what climate scientists have been telling us for years: Climate change will be most intensely perceived in the polar regions, making temperatures soar even higher in the rest of the globe. Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at Berkeley Earth, told The Guardian that the heat wave in Antarctica was one of the main factors behind the scorching temperatures in the last few weeks.
Now major cities in China are also struggling under boiling heat. Shanghai issued its first red warning alert — the most severe temperature alert in the country — for the year last Thursday; the next day, temperatures along the country’s eastern coast hit 104 degrees. On August 3, the city of Hangzhou faced a high of almost 107 degrees, breaking its previous record set in 2022. Warnings have also been issued for the provinces of Fujian, Anhui, Jiangsu, among others, and intense heat is expected to continue through this week.
In Henan province, which had been battling a severe drought after months of no rain, the situation has taken a turn. In late July, the province was hit by a brutal typhoon, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands.
This year, China recorded its hottest July in history.
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Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.