Fourth, our capacity to forecast climate impacts tends to be embarrassingly off. The best recent example is the United States in mid-2021. A high-pressure system locked some warm air over the Pacific Northwest. Some of that air then descended from the Cascades, triggering compression effects. The result? Normally cloudy, rainy, grungy locales mutated into open ovens for weeks. Portland, Oregon, repeatedly clocked temperatures above 120 degrees. I’ve seen many climate models that suggest the inevitability of hotter deserts or a hotter American South, but none have projected that
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