With record heat, Kansas is in danger of not cooling off
In keeping time with May, that tied with 2016 for the hottest on record, and a decade of the highest recorded temperatures, researchers say that Americans should expect hotter than normal temperatures this summer and potentially for the rest of the year.
From January through June, 2020’s temperatures has ranked it as the second hottest year on record and has a 50% chance of being the hottest year on record, according to NASA and NOAA data. If 2020 makes the grade, this would mean the last seven years would be the seven warmest years on record, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.
Most of Kansas is expected to have higher than normal temperatures this summer, except for the very eastern part of the state, according to an analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. This exception, which centers around Missouri, is the only part of the country not expected to have rising temperatures.
A new study from Columbia University, found that the number of days Kansas has with extreme heat and humidity has more than doubled from 40 years ago and that in some places globally, the temperatures are reaching a point where humans will be unable to tolerate the continued rise.
The rise in temperatures is due to a combination of factors, but primarily climate change and trapped greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to Dan Collins, seasonal forecaster with the NOAA.
“The recent years have tended to be warmer than the period in the 1980s and 1990s,” Collins said. “We don’t get as many of the ‘near normal’ and ‘below near normal’ years anymore.”
Killing more people than any other weather incident, heat poses a specific risk for older people. A study found that more than 80% of those who die from heat-related illness are over 60 years old. It can also negatively affect livestock and agriculture.
“Climate change takes the weather things that already impact us in a bad way and tends to make them worse,” said Sean Sublette, a meteorologist with Climate Central. “The kind of heat that we used to get once every 15 years, now comes with every two or three years. It’s the intensity and the frequency of these high impact weather extremes.”
Since 1895, when temperature data begins, Kansas has experienced an average temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Surprisingly, the rise in temperature doesn’t come from high points during the day, but with the nights as they aren’t cooling off as much.
From 1895 to 2019, the average maximum temperature in Kansas has increased 0.3 degrees, but in the same time period, the average minimum temperature has risen nearly 3 degrees.
“From an agricultural perspective and from a heat stress perspective for animals, as well as humans, not being able to cool down at night sometimes is more dangerous than having really hot temperatures during the day because there’s no abilities for a system to recover,” said Karin Gleason, a climate scientist at the National Center for Environmental Information. “Those overnight temperatures are where we are seeing the biggest changes across the country.”
An analysis by Climate Central found that while the U.S. continues to break records for hottest temperatures, there are less and less records broken for colder temperatures.
“The coolest years aren’t as cool as they used to be. We haven’t been near those levels since the late 1980s,” Sublette said. “In a warming atmosphere you will still have cold spells, but the cold spells will, in general, not be as frequent and not be as intense.”
Conservation efforts, even on the individual level, can make a difference in mitigating climate change.
“We can’t stop it,” Sublette said. “But we can slow it down and manage it. The sooner we decide as a society to start generating energy in ways that don’t burn fossil fuel energy, the better we will be off in the long run.”
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
