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Across the U.S., millions of voters cast their ballots in record or near-record daily heat.
If you’re sweating bullets in line, stay in line!
Across the United States, millions of voters cast their ballots in record or near-record daily heat, including in Rochester, New York, where it hit a sweltering 81 degrees Fahrenheit (it was also the city’s hottest November day on record). It also hit a record 81 degrees in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has not seen rain since October 6, and a record 78 degrees in Columbus, Ohio. In Hartford, Connecticut, the mercury likewise reached 78 degrees, tying the previous Nov. 5 record set in 2022. New York City and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, experienced their warmest Election Days since President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated the Republican governor of Kansas, Alf Landon.
That wasn’t all, either. It was the hottest Election Day in a century in Cleveland, Ohio, the hottest Election Day since 2003 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the hottest November 5th on record in Jackson, Kentucky. The overnight low in New Orleans, Louisiana, was 75 degrees, a full degree warmer than the average high this time of the year. And in many parts of the U.S., tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer.
While it’s far too soon to attribute the unseasonal warmth directly to global warming, as Clair Barnes, a research associate with the World Weather Attribution, once told me, “When you’re looking at heat extremes, there is almost always a climate change signal.”
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The Santa Ana winds are carrying some of the smoke out to sea.
Wildfires have been raging across Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, but only in the past 24 hours or so has the city’s air quality begun to suffer.
That’s because of the classic path of the Santa Ana winds, Alistair Hayden, a public health professor at Cornell who studies how wildfire smoke affects human health, told me. “Yesterday, it looked like the plumes [from the Palisades fire] were all blowing out to sea, which I think makes sense with the Santa Ana wind patterns blowing to the southwest,” Hayden said.
But with the Eaton fire now raging near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles, the air quality across large swaths of the city is deteriorating, Hayden said. That’s because the winds are now carrying a smoke plume as they travel down to the coast. And the situation is still changing rapidly.
At 6:30 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, the historic core of L.A. registered an air quality index of 105, according to the AirNow fire and smoke map, part of the federal government’s national air quality index. Anything over 100 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups such as asthmatics. In Pasadena and East Los Angeles, the AQI was in the high 180s, 190s, and even the low 200s, which ranks as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” for everyone.
The AirNow map is a joint effort of the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program and the Environmental Protection Agency, incorporating smoke plume data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellites, Hayden said.
It also shows readings from the EPA’s permanent air quality monitors set up across Los Angeles. And it includes data from cheaper, commercial sensors — from manufacturers such as PurpleAir — that people can set up in their homes and backyards. The AirNow site also calibrates the data from those commercial sensors so that they can be more accurately compared to the government’s more robust and scientific air quality sensors. (Many websites that display the PurpleAir data do not calibrate the data in this way, he said, which can lead to faulty readings.)
In recent years, wildfire smoke has become a major driver of America’s air pollution.
“We’ve been so successful that cleaning up our air through the Clean Air Act and other state-level activities that the air has been getting better for decades,” Hayden told me. “Now, with the growth of these huge wildfires emitting large amounts of pollution, that has undone some of the progress of all this awesome work over this past decade.
“It’s amazing what we can do when we choose to do so,” he said. “But it shows there’s more work needed to be done of how do we protect communities from this current and growing threat of not just wildfires, but the smoke from those wildfires as well.”
A pre-print study from smoke researcher Marshall Burke and others shows how fires are eating into air quality gains.
The Greater Los Angeles area is awash in smoke and ash as multiple fires burn in and around the city. It’s too soon to assess the overall pollution impacts from this rare January event, but we know the smoke is filled with tiny particles known as PM2.5, one of the most pernicious public health villains, associated with increased risk of respiratory and heart disease and premature death.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency tightened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for PM2.5 for the first time since 2012. The South Coast Air Quality District, which contains Los Angeles, is known for having some of the worst air quality in the country. State officials have already deemed it to be out of compliance — and that’s without even counting pollution from major wildfires. But new research raises questions about whether complying with the new standard will even be possible in many places due to the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires.
Marshall Burke, who published the not-yet-peer-reviewed findings in December, is a Stanford University researcher who has spent the past several years investigating how wildfires have affected PM2.5 exposure in the U.S. In a 2023 paper published in Nature, he and his co-authors found that over just six years, wildfire smoke eroded decades of air quality improvements throughout the country. The trend was particularly bad in Western states, of course — some of which saw more than half of their gains erased. The pre-print of the new paper updates those findings to include data from 2023. But it also goes deeper on what this means in light of the new air quality standards. The authors find that 34% of air monitoring stations registered PM2.5 above the regulatory limit because of smoke in at least one of the last five years.
Technically, wildfire smoke is completely unregulated. Jurisdictions can request to exclude “exceptional events,” such as days when PM2.5 spiked due to wildfire, from their calculations. But as the “smoke season” has grown longer and more places experience more days with degraded air quality due to smoke, local officials have not been requesting more exemptions. The researchers analyzed applications for exemptions since 2019, and found that they were more common on days with higher levels of wildfire smoke, but were still infrequent overall.
One reason might be that local pollution control officers don’t always recognize when smoke has pushed pollution over the limit on a particular day versus other factors. There is also a “substantial resource burden involved” in demonstrating the influence of wildfire smoke on ambient air quality, the paper says. Also, as smoke becomes more commonplace, it may be more difficult for officials to make the case that a given smoke event is “exceptional.”
In any case, if this low rate of applications for exemptions continues, many more regions may find themselves to be out of compliance with the new PM2.5 standard.
In the paper’s discussion section, the researchers posit that as wildfire smoke continues to get worse, either of two possible scenarios could play out. In the first, air quality districts affected by smoke get better at applying for exemptions and therefore achieve compliance with the Clean Air Act, even as local air quality and public health deteriorate. In the second, they find other ways to stay in compliance with the standards, such as by tightening pollution caps on power plants and factories. “Such mitigation could be cost effective in many regions where abatement costs remain low relative to the benefits of further air quality improvements,” the authors write, “but could become onerous if wildfire smoke concentrations continue to grow, as is expected under a warming climate.”
The first scenario is bleak, and the second comes with a pretty big caveat. But those aren’t the only options — we can also reduce the risk of wildfires with better land-use planning and management. Unfortunately, promising strategies like controlled burns can push PM2.5 levels over the standard, and those are not exempt from reporting the way that wildfires are — creating a perverse incentive not to do them.
Low-flow showerheads, electric heaters, and, of course, wind turbines all came in for a drubbing.
President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference after yesterday’s certification of his election win (four years to the day since the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots) was never going to be a normal one. And so it proved that Trump’s wide-ranging comments at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday hit some familiar climate and energy falsehoods alongside some eyebrow-raising new ones, the largest-scale of which was probably his threat to reverse President Biden’s newly announced drilling ban.
Biden signaled his move to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas drilling yesterday along most U.S. coastlines. The 625 million acres covered by the ban would include the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska. “I will reverse it immediately,” Trump remarked of the ban. “It’ll be done immediately. And we will drill, baby, drill.” He also added that “we’re going to be drilling a lot of other locations,” and used the opportunity to call the energy transition “the green new scam,” an old favorite of his.
While Trump’s threats were alarming, they’re also most likely empty. The drilling ban would be considered permanent under the law, and Trump would not be able to simply reverse it without the approval of Congress.
In addition to his comments on drilling, Trump briefly criticized Biden’s “love” of electric cars, and once again claimed that his administration was “going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way,” the lack of such a mandate notwithstanding. “This guy loves electric, and we don’t have enough electricity,” he said. “And then we have AI where we need more.” Trump isn’t necessarily wrong about “more” AI energy demand, and in case he’s reading this, we have a bit of recommended background for him on the topic.
Lest you think that Trump forgot his most beloved renewable energy talking point, he reiterated his hatred for wind power by adding, “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.” He noted “they don’t work without subsidy. … You don’t want energy that needs subsidy,” and repeated his blatantly false and conspiracy-driven claim that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy,” noting that offshore wind caused the beaching of “two whales” in a “17-year period.” As a reminder, Lauren Gaches, the director of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, previously told Heatmap that “there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales.” (Also worth noting: The oil and gas industry has long benefited from generous tax subsidies.)
Trump also went on to shout out … gas heaters? He claimed that Biden “wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater,” adding that gas heaters are “much less expensive,” “work much better,” and don’t make you “scratch and itch.” It’s not clear whether was talking about heat pumps or electric resistance heaters, both of which are powered by electricity. But gas furnace sales have been outpaced by heat pumps for several years running, with no widespread itch issues we can find. Trump also put low-flow showerheads on blast: “It’s called rain, comes down from heaven. And they want to do, no water comes out of the shower.” This hasn’t been true of low-flow shower heads for some time now, as my colleague Jeva Lange reported last summer, which are “specifically designed to ‘push out water that feels like a higher pressure even with a lower flow rate.’”
In conclusion, there is no time like the present to peruse Jeva’s fact-check of Trump’s climate and energy claims. We’re going to be hearing a lot more of them in the coming years.