A Preview Of Coming Attractions If We Don't Change Our Behavior

WaPo reports that Americans are continuing to die from global warming:

"The 50-person refrigerator at the morgue in Fresno is full, primarily with the bodies of elderly people who are believed to be victims of a sustained blast of triple-digit heat that has tormented most of California in the past two weeks.

"I have never seen these kinds of numbers," said Loralee Cervantes, the coroner in Fresno, where she said the temperature outside her office yesterday was 110. "There are so many we can't keep up."

. . .


Most of the heat-related deaths occurred in the sweltering Central Valley. In Fresno, in the north of the valley, the coroner said many victims collapsed inside their homes and were found somewhere other than in their beds.

"Some people had power outages, some can't afford to pay their bills, some were using fans, and we had one case where a man was scared of the sound of his air conditioner," Cervantes said. She said most of the dead were 65 to 80 years old."

In addition to the deaths, continued strain on the electrical system left some without power: "With the heat wave, residents across Southern California have put up with multiple, widely scattered power outages as hundreds of overtaxed power-pole transformers have blown up or otherwise stopped functioning. More than 50,000 homes and businesses were without power yesterday.

The aging electricity-transmission grid in and around Los Angeles -- some of it built in the 1920s and 1930s -- could not handle the spiking power demands that came with persistent high temperatures -- on top of a booming population and houses full of air conditioners and computers, according to regional utilities.

"Transformer failure was driven by the prolonged heat wave, which since July 13 has meant that they cannot cool down at night," said Ron Litzinger, senior vice president for transmission and distribution at Southern California Edison."

Changes in the amount of electricity used by almost everyone, as well as physical changes to the landscape created by the population explosion, are creating precarious conditions: [Litzinger] said that in recent years power consumption per customer in the region has been double what the utility had expected, mostly because of air conditioners, computers, and assorted home electronics.

The heat wave comes at a time when ambient year-round temperatures in Southern California are on the rise.

In the past century, average temperatures in the region have risen about three degrees during the daytime and a whopping seven degrees at night, according to Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Houses, freeways, golf courses and shopping centers retain heat far longer than the native desert chaparral of Southern California.

"We have had an extreme makeover in the past century, with the population between Tijuana and Santa Barbara jumping from 1 million to more than 20 million," Patzert said.

Global warming in urban areas, often thought of as a function of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is also strongly correlated with urban and suburban development, Patzert said. He said most major cities in the world, including Washington, are getting warmer as they sprawl.

"The long-term trend here -- we are getting warmer," he said. "It is a preview of coming attractions, if we don't change our behavior.""

What we are seeing now is, as Patzert says "a preview of coming attractions, if we don't change our behavior."