USA: A joy of summer is vanishing fast
As the climate warms up, cool summer evenings are becoming a distant memory.
By Robinson Meyer
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[...] Across the lower 48 states, summer nights are now warmer than they have been at any other point since 1900, according to data from the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Daily minima—in other words, the temperature at the coolest part of the night—are regularly hotter now than they were even during the warmest years of the Dust Bowl. Daytime highs have actually yet to eclipse that mark.
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Warm nights can also be more dangerous, in some cases, than scorching days. If a heat wave strikes only during the day, then elderly or poor people without air conditioning can open their windows and cool off at night, research has found. But if temperatures remain dangerously elevated through the night, then people’s bodies have little time to cool off.
Knowing when any one weather event is related to climate change can be hard. So let’s be clear: Warmer nights—even more than hot days—are a symptom of human-caused climate change. At the most basic level, the planet is warming because carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases trap the sun’s heat and prevent it from radiating back into space. You are noticing that effect now when the sun sets … and temperatures don’t.
Many climate-related trends must be compared with the 1950s or 1880s to stand out. But I’ve noticed this symptom worsen in the few decades I’ve been alive. It’s not like I’m particularly old: I was born in the early 1990s, and many of my childhood summers at the beach date back less than two decades. Yet in the interval between then and now, something about my home changed. An act as simple as sleeping with the windows open—once a cherished everyday ritual—became a rare and special treat. Make no mistake: In the coming years, climate change will hurt things, harm people, and trouble the natural world in ways far worse than this. It already is. But it will also rob us of expectation and tradition, and force us to live on a planet far less lovely than the one we were born to.