https://www.vox.com/climate/354222/death-valley-extreme-heat-record-climate-change
If even Death Valley is in trouble, what does that mean for the rest of us?
I mean... tbf that's literally the first place I would think of, in the USA at least, that would do so?
The Sahara would be another, world-wide.
As this article literally stated, with these two sentences within three sentences of one another:
Death Valley is extremely well adapted to this kind of heat — 120 degrees Fahrenheit is not quite such a big deal for this place.
Yesterday reached 118 and today is forecasted for 121
To me, it's either a big deal or its... not? A discussion of how long the temperatures remained at or near those peaks would have been much more impactful, imho.
They did eventually wrap around to some kind of a point:
But even worse is the potential for the conditions that we’re used to seeing in Death Valley becoming more recurrent in the places near Death Valley. The way Death Valley is now might be the way that surrounding areas of the desert could become if climate change stays on its trajectory.
So this whole article could be summarized in just these words: "desert areas might expand in the future [frowny emoji]". Click the article anyway if you want to support this level of "journalism", but now at least you don't have to.
Death Valley appears to be a very contained thing. When I was there, the temperature in Las Vegas was 108. When we started down into the valley the temperature started to rise dramatically. Half way down, it hit 117 and I had to stop to get out to see what it felt like.
But then the temperature kept going up as we went down into the valley. We hit 126 for a while approaching Badwater, and it was 124 when we got out at Badwater.
And this was in May, around 15 years ago.
The point is that when you go there, you see that Death Valley is a meteorological phenomenon created by, and contained by the geography of Death Valley.
Yes, 108 is hot, but there was an almost 10 degree increase as soon as you crossed the ridge into the valley and started down. The idea that Death Valley climate will somehow spread to the surrounding area just doesn't make sense.
Thank you so much for your first-hand account.
Unfortunately, the makers of this article have already gotten their clicks, and so do not care about such "facts" as might have made the point of their having shared this story with us meaningless and therefore deprived them of such clicks from a cheap easily-written story.:-( (assuming they even bothered to write it at all rather than simply farm it out to AI)
Which can make conservatives correct when they claim that "climate change isn't real" - and point to articles like this to prove their case, which since this article may indeed be easily disprovable, emboldens them further. Which paves the way towards Trump winning the White House again.:-(
I wanted to see truthful stories about climate change from this community. I suppose technically the concept that "desert areas might expand in the future" is the truth but... not quite what I had in mind:-D. At the very least, I suspected what you confirmed: that it was mere fear-provoking BS - which under some conditions might unironically work well, but not being as unsubstantiated like this one is?
Instead of anything useful we'll just have a reality series called Beat the Heat about survival and finding love during these turbulent times, gonna be good. Truck commercials and all!