Californians tried to weather the extremes of a changing climate on Friday, as a punishing heat wave that has helped fuel deadly wild fires had the state teetering on the edge of blackouts for a 10th consecutive day while a tropical storm barrelled ashore with the promise of cooler temperatures but also possible flooding.
The abrupt swing in conditions even whipsawed weather junkies.
“This is perhaps the singularly most unusual and extreme weather week in quite some time in California — and that is saying something. Whew,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his western weather blog.
While the rains may be welcome in the drought-plagued state and will bring relief with more normal temperatures, deluges and more brutal heat waves are forecast to become regular fixtures as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.
"We'll see these heat waves continue to get hotter and hotter, longer and longer, more wildfire-plagued," said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.
“The odds of really intense precipitation are going up. And so that's why we are worried about flooding associated with this remnant hurricane.”