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Election Day Breaks Heat Records

Across the U.S., millions of voters cast their ballots in record or near-record daily heat.

2024 voters.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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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Sparks

What the L.A. Fires Are Doing to the City’s Air

The Santa Ana winds are carrying some of the smoke out to sea.

Los Angeles during wildfires.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

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Sparks

The New Age of Wildfire Is Overwhelming America’s Clean Air

A pre-print study from smoke researcher Marshall Burke and others shows how fires are eating into air quality gains.

Fires and smokestacks.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

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Sparks

7 Very Trumpy Things Trump Said About Clean Energy Today

Low-flow showerheads, electric heaters, and, of course, wind turbines all came in for a drubbing.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

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