Hotter than Hell?
It was 110°F (43.3°C) here yesterday. 110.
My Facebook feed was full of people commenting on the misery temps like that were bringing to their lives. I took my daughter to a store, sat in the car for fifteen minutes with the A/C on full blast, and still had my back sweat-glued to the car seat. Stuck in rush hour traffic the other day, my car's thermometer told me it was 124° around us.
Sound God-awful? It is.
Climate change plays a significant role in Dry Run. It has to. Here in Austin during the summer, we're prisoners to the heat, chained to our A/C, hoping that whatever chores we have to do each day are please, please, please not outside.
So yeah, climate change has been on my mind.
When it was time to write Dry Run, I consulted extensively with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a helpful Austin-specific report that the city commissioned a few years ago. The IPCC data is not an easy read, but at nine pages, the Austin report is. And what it lays out isn't pretty.
If we only modestly change our response to climate change, we're looking at spending a third of the year with days over 100 degrees. Overall, temps will range from seven to eleven degrees higher, with the extremes being, well, more extreme. We'll be drier by fifteen to twenty percent, which may not sound like much, but in addition to the reduced rainfall, we can expect fewer days when it actually rains, then when it does rain, the heavens will open. In Austin, where we’re already prone to dangerous flash floods, we can't withstand those sorts of changes.
By the turn of the century under that scenario, no one will live in Austin by choice.
How is the weather in your area changing? Where do you see it in eighty years?
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*Weather and climate are not the same things. Weather describes the daily or short-term conditions you're likely to find. Climate looks at long-range patterns and behaviors. (So yesterday’s hellish temp isn’t a sure-fire indicator of climate change; it’s the pattern of increasingly hellish days we’ve had in Austin over the last x-number of years that are indicators of climate change.)
