and we end the week with one of the
hottest days of summer and an official
heat wave that means three consecutive
days where temperatures reach 90 degrees
and above excessive heat warnings and
heat advisories are in place across the
entire state according to the national
weather service the heat index making it
feel well over 100 degrees and it's
dangerously hot it's been a season of
extreme weather really so is that what
we should expect going forward anthony
brockley is the co-director of the
rutgers climate institute and joins me
as part of our ongoing series on the
human stories of climate change peril
and promise
professor broccoli on its face the
temperatures that we're seeing right now
are pretty typical for summer but it's
this heat index yes that's really
pushing things over the edge
as often as the case it is that
combination of heat and humidity that
really makes conditions oppressive
one of the measures of how much moisture
is in the atmosphere is a quantity
called the dew point
and normally we consider it to be
extremely humid when the dew point gets
up above 70 degrees
this week we've seen dew points in the
upper 70s compared combined rather with
these temperatures in the 90s really
making things impressive
is this becoming a pattern here i mean
should we anticipate summers having more
stretches of these high heat indexes or
is this somewhat on par
during the 1960s and 1970s we would
average maybe less than 15 days a year
that reached or exceeded that 90 degree
mark
in the last decade that's now gone up to
just under 30 days a year in fact
we're already at 26 days so far this
summer with half of august and all of
september to go
so we have seen a trend towards more of
these uh heat waves and i guess is that
something that we should anticipate for
the future as well well as you know the
intergovernmental panel on climate
change released a report earlier this
week and one of the uh aspects of that
report was connections between climate
change and extreme weather events
and one of their findings was that
under a high carbon dioxide emissions
scenario
things that today maybe only happen one
out of every four
summers
might happen 60 to 90 percent of the
time toward the end of this century
but
our future is in our hands in the sense
that whether or not that happens depends
on how much
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases we put into the atmosphere in the
future
yeah there is a small window an
opportunity there for change let me ask
you just though very quickly because we
know about the dangers of being in hot
weather and what that can cause but
right now we're also seeing it coupled
with really poor air quality some of
that a result of the residual you know
these these wildfires that continue to
rage in other parts of the country
yeah so there's there's two
contributions to poor air quality first
of all typically when we do have these
heat waves
relatively light winds and strong
sunshine
uh
produce uh air pollution locally
but as you mentioned we're also this
summer seen on several occasions
smoke from the wildfires coming here
now part of the reason that's been
happening this year is we've had a
circulation pattern in the atmosphere
that's been favorable for bringing the
smoke from the western united states
here to the east
that pattern may not always be prevalent
but
we have seen it a lot this year
professor anthony brockley with rutgers
university thanks for your time my
pleasure
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