Reaching A Hundred Degrees Daily

UNLESS I'M DREAMING, and for the record I wish I were, the daytime temperature in Pheonix reached one hundred degrees for the twentieth consecutive day recently, a new record. Nowadays it seems that almost everything that happens regarding the weather is a new record, in our era of increasingly extreme weather and advancing climate change. Today, in the first week of September, the temperature in Phoenix will be one hundred and ten, perhaps not a new record, but close. As the days grow much shorter throughout September and Otober, the sun has less opportunity (time) to pour heat into the atmosphere,so, normally, September and then October become cooler. September has throughout my life been a month in which there are a few eighty degree days, but more often cool days, as summer comes to an end. Now, September feels like Atugust, and October, which I remember as once a cold weather month, has become, within the past twenty years or so, a summer month. For the past decade, temperatures in October have been regularly reaching eighty fivve to ninety degrees, much more summer like than autumnal. The string of hundred degree days in Pheonix has a foreboding sound to it, an ominous harbinger of impending catastrophe. In the American mid south, throughout much if not most or all of the United States, it begins to seem inevitable that within a few years, there will be summers in which the temperature reaches one hundred degrees on June first, rises above a hundred every day the entire summer, and is still rising to that degree on Labor Day. Three solid months of one hundred degree daytime temperatures, the entire summer. Probably within the next decade. Phoenix has already nearly reached that point. The entire American southwest cannot be far behind, nor can most of the rest of the country. The carbon currently in the atosphere ensures precisely that result, and we humans are only adding more, millions and billions of tons of it, every day, as we begin to fight climate change far too little too late. Our transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy is indeed proceeding, and beginning to pay off, but, alas, far too belatedly and with insufficient vigor to prevent near future disaster. The hundred degreee days and the wildfires of the American west will spread east, all the way to the Atlantic. The further east one goes in America, the more heavily forested the land is. To date, there has not been severe or persistant enough drought to trigger mass wildfires in teh east of the sort commonly, indeed almost constantly burning across California and the rest of the west, but that too seems destined to change. In many areas, wildfires have, over the years, been quenched so effecively that millions of acres of forest have not been burned in decades, even centuries. Therefore, these millions of acres are heavily littered with dead branches and dead trees on the ground, providng perfect fuel for fast moving fire. Projets to clean out the underbrush and instate controlled burnings might reduce the risk somewhat, but not enough. the inevitable prolonged droughts of the climate changing future will all but guarantee that every region of the United States that is forested will sooner than later fall victim to huge, out of control wildfires. We'll see how many consecutive days of one hundred degree days Phoenix and other cities experience next summer, and in the summers of the next decade. The smart money is on the "many". Most of us alive now are going to directly, dramatically experience the extreme conditions of climate change, and we are not going to like it. Our only choice is to frantically develop astmospheric carbon sequestration technology, and cross our fingers.