My daughter lives in Tucson, and she said the monsoon season isn't producing much rain, but she said it could be because they had a rainy winter. It has been so hot that she can't go walking after work sometimes. I said go early, but she can't because of work.
Thanks a lot for bringing this to all of our attention. These sorts of granular projections about future weather are exactly what we need to convey the magnitude of the changes that are taking place. Since the researchers based this report on the heat index (which factors in humidity) and not absolute temperature, it make sense that Florida and Texas will be worse off than Arizona.
An opinion writer for the New York Times just published an eye-opening article about how the scientific community has progressed in the past 30 years from relative nonchalance about the pace of climate change to an increasing realization that catastrophic earth changes, once considered to be far-off or impossible, are already arriving and mounting with gathering speed (basically, they are coming around to the predictions being made by Jeanne, others on this site, and the likes of James Hansen).
The article illustrates that right now, the most severe projections of sea level rise by a government agency come from a 2017 report by NOAA, which projects that in a worst-case scenario, SLR is expected to reach 8.2 feet above current levels by 2100. That's still a long way off from the 20 feet of SLR that Jeanne and James Hansen have been predicting for 2100, but the author of the NYT article writes that "As we now know, all of those predictions [from the 1980s & 90s] turned out to be completely wrong. Which makes you wonder whether the projected risks of further warming, dire as they are, might still be understated. How bad will things get?"
@coyote Thank you again for your post. This work is tough and emotional and it helps me to get some positive support like you just gave.
The IPCC let the world down by taking a political view that sided with the fossil fuel industry rather than with science. They claimed they were just summarizing the 10,000 scientists who made up their membership, but it was like William Barr "summarizing" the Mueller Report. My favorite study, the one I quoted in this 2014 article I wrote on this site, showed the views of 150 or so climate scientists who replied to a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked these climate experts for their gut opinion of what sea level rise would be by 2100. A small number of courageous scientists were willing to take a stab at it.
In the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, the author shows repeatedly how the psyche is most accurate when an expert simply uses a gut sense about something rather than rely only on analytics. If you lack expertise, this gut sense does not apply to you. The famous anecdote was in one woman's view that a statue was a fake. The Getty Museum spent $100,000 on consultants and a year analyzing the relic before determining it was not a fake and spending $10 million on it. Before it was unveiled to the public an antiquities expert took one look at it and said it was definitely a fake! She turned out to be right. She used her considerable history of examining antiquities, and her gut sense. She did not do any chemical analyses nor did she do X-rays or whatever other high tech means the $100K consultants used. Just her gut sense.
It is the combination of knowledge and intuition that I am going for with figuring out climate change.
The climate scientist James Hansen is someone who uses both expertise and intuition. So I feel does Rachel Maddow in her journalism, although I haven't been watching her now for a couple of years, so can't attest to her ability now. But I used to watch Maddow regularly and noticed how expertly she combined in depth journalism with a keen intuition. I don't watch her any more because I get too upset at her findings and I feel I know enough about how dark Trump and his people are.
I really like what you said about expertise and intuition. I have found that my intuition is "ok". on it's own, but paired with something I have knowledge about, it is much better. I tend to be more "in the zone" then.