HOMETOWN HEAT SOME LIKE IT HOT

As many of you know, I was born in 1951 – and raised in the Kamm’s Corners neighborhood of Cleveland’s Far West Side.  Sure there were some hot summer days – but I fondly remember cool summer evenings and breezy summer days.

Not so much anymore, huh?

In late August, The New York Times published the results of an analysis conducted for the paper by the Climate Impact Lab – a group of climate scientists, economists and data analysts from the Rhodium Group, the University of Chicago, Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The article has a cool little link that you can use to determining how much hotter it’s gotten in any city on the globe.  Of course, I dialed in The CLE.

The data set goes back to 1960, when I was 9 years old.  Some results:

• Back then, the Cleveland area could expect about 2 days per year to reach at least 90 degrees.
• Today, the Cleveland area can expect 4 days at or above 90 degrees per year, on average.
• By the end of the century, models show there could be 14 of these very hot days.
• The likely range is between 7 and 26 days.

We are likely to feel this extra heat even if countries take action to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century, according to the study.  If countries continue emitting at historically high rates, the future could look even hotter.

The future projection shown here assumes countries will curb emissions roughly in line with the world’s original Paris Agreement pledges (although most countries do not appear on track to meet those pledges).

So much for those cool summer evenings and breezy summer days...

Z