Parts of the U.S. are scorching under record-breaking, triple digit temperatures.
A climatologist explains why heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense.
A climatologist explains why heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense.
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00:00You may be wondering why I'm wearing an ice pack on my head and that is because I live in the Pacific Northwest.
00:11We are talking an extremely dangerous heat wave and the reason for that is the folks in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in Canada are not used to this type of heat.
00:20They do not have air conditioning.
00:30It's 106 today, it's supposed to be 113 tomorrow and the next day.
00:36And usually it's about 75 degrees this time of year.
00:39Hon, why is your robe in the freezer?
00:48Because we're in the middle of a heat wave.
00:50Check it out.
00:54They look done.
00:55Yeah, my car smells like cookies.
00:57It's so hot they had to put the ACs under tents.
01:13Heat waves are increasing in at least three dimensions.
01:16One of them is duration, how long they last.
01:18One of them is intensity, kind of how hot they get at their peak.
01:21And the other is frequency, they're happening more often.
01:24What we used to call a very intense heat wave is now happening more often.
01:28And that's the case for most of the U.S. and most of the world.
01:35It is the clearest kind of physical, mathematical and logical relationship with the warming worlds.
01:41You also get public health concerns when the overnight low temperature, you know, kind of doesn't reset when the temperatures stay high overnight.
01:49While an afternoon high of 103 degrees may be more kind of captivating than an overnight low of 81 degrees.
01:56In a lot of cases, it's the lack of cooling overnight that's driving more serious consequences than the spiking of the temperatures in the afternoon.
02:07This decade is going to clearly be the warmest decade on record, replacing the decade before that, which replaced the decade before that.