By 2050, parts of Los Angeles County are forecast to experience triple or quadruple the number of days of extreme heat if nothing is done to control greenhouse gas emissions, placing further demand on the region’s drinking water and electricity.
That could mean that by mid-century, downtown Los Angeles could see an average of 22 days of extreme heat — days in which the high temperature exceeds 95 degrees — up from an annual average of six days recorded between 1981 and 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing two new reports by UCLA scientists.
The San Gabriel Valley could see the number of extreme heat days rise from 32 a year to 74 and Long Beach, from four days a year to 16, according to the reports cited by The Times Thursday.
The results point to a hotter, drier future as Los Angeles faces climate change, according to The Times. Proof of rising temperatures is already in the historical record: The annual average in 1878 in downtown Los Angeles was 62 degrees; by 2014, it was 68 degrees.
The forecast rise in temperatures, published this week in the Journal of Climate, was done by calculating global simulations of climate change to a neighborhood scale if nothing is done to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, The Times reported.
Places in Los Angeles County farther inland, especially the valleys, will feel the pain the worst because of their distance from the Pacific Ocean, which has a moderating effect on extreme temperatures, said Alex Hall, a professor at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and co- author of the study, according to The Times.
“Climate change is inevitable in this region,” Hall said. “We have to adapt to climate change.”
In analyzing the forecast rise in temperatures, researchers at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation published a separate analysis warning that water systems in areas such as the San Gabriel Valley will find their supplies of drinking water heavily taxed by the days of withering heat, according to The Times.
—City News Service