The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented heat wave. While the West Coast has been feeling the worst of it in the past several days, climate scientists say Georgians shouldn’t relax yet. 

Georgia has so far seen a mild and wet summer, but with all-time record high temperatures across much of the rest of the country, including triple digits in the Pacific Northwest, many climate scientists are now sounding the alarm.

Sean Sublette with Climate Central believes that just because Georgia hasn’t seen record heat yet, the state should still prepare for the effects of rising global temperatures. GPB News' Sarah Rose spoke with him on the takeaways from this spike of warm weather.



Sarah Rose: I wanted to focus a little bit on the heat wave that we've seen in the last week or so. Why are we not seeing higher temperatures that other folks have seen on the West Coast?

Sean Sublette: So when we think about the summer, there's always going to be some summers that are a little hotter than others. And the long-term average, it's warming, but there are always going to be individual ones that aren't quite as high as others. That is tied back into the flow of the jet stream. For right now, what we've seen so far this summer is a lot of warming in the West and North. And when it's warm in the West and North, it is oftentimes not warm relative to average in the Southeast. It's been very hot in the West in particular, and to — to some extent in the northern tier states as well. But that's not been the case, again, relative to normal across the Southeast. That's largely due to the shorter-term jet stream fluctuations or ups and downs. And right now, there are a few more downs than there are ups over the Southeast. So that's why Georgia has not been quite as hot this particular summer. 

Sarah Rose: We've seen temperatures in the Pacific Northwest warm to nearly twice as much in the past 30 years as it has in the Southeast. How much of that can we attribute to climate change? 

Sean Sublette: Yeah, that's always a tough question, isn't it? I think what when I think about climate change and the Southeast and Georgia in particular, the warming that we see is a little more muted during the summer compared to the western United States, to be fair. Now, I think a lot of the reason for that is because the western United States is a more arid climate. They are drier by rule anyway. They're a climatologically drier place, so the soils are drier. So they heat up a lot more easily than they do in the Southeast. I mean, we're a fairly humid climate anywhere from, you know, New Orleans through — through Georgia and up to D.C. And it's a fairly humid climate in the summer. So for the same amount of energy coming in, you're going to have more of that energy going into warming water than to drying and heating up the land. So if you've got two surfaces — one is wet, one is dry — and you put the same amount of heat on top of both of them, the thing that is dryer heats up more. You know, they're both bringing in the same amount of energy, but the energy is going into drying out the other stuff rather than raising its temperature. The sole reason why you get out of a pool and the water evaporates and you cool off, the energy is going into evaporating the water as opposed to heating up the surface. And that's, by and large, what — what we've seen in the summers in the Southeast versus the western United States. They have less water, whether it's in the air or lakes or streams or whatever. So it heats up more easily than it does in the Southeast.

Sarah Rose: Is this just something that we're going to have to get used to?

Sean Sublette: Summers are going to be hotter. That's exactly right. Now, to be fair, what what has just happened in the Pacific Northwest is beyond the realm of expectation. And quite frankly, it surprised a lot of climate scientists that it went that much above any — any temperature in the recorded database there. So we need to be cautious that, oh, it's not it's going to suddenly be like that all the time. You know, the whole tipping points and thresholds arguments get tossed around a little bit too easily. But it does indicate — does give you reason to pause. It does give you reason to — to look at the data and to really come to acceptance that we're going to start seeing heat at levels where we haven't been used to seeing in the past. There was "just kind of hot" weather, you know, and "this is really hot," you know, which would happen once every 10 years, whatever that threshold is for any one part of the country. What you would characterize as "really hot" happens more frequently than it had in the past. Whether that's 100, 105, 95 in different parts of the country. That threshold, if you will, is going to occur more frequently than it has in the past. So, yes, we need to get used to summers that are going to get progressively hotter.

Sarah Rose: Building on that a little bit, and I know you're not really in the business of making predictions on lifestyle choices, but how do you think people's lifestyles in Georgia could change in the next 10 years, given that reality?

Sean Sublette: You know, I'm originally from the Southeast as well. Not from Georgia, but I'm from Virginia, which I know some Georgians don't think of as the South. But I know I got to take some pride in that. But there are similarities for sure with the climate. I mean, Atlanta is a little bit higher in elevation — that helps to some extent. It's not like Savannah or Macon. But what I think we all need to get used to in the Southeast is the fact that the summers are going to be more humid, they are going to get hotter and they are going to be more humid. So what does that mean? Well, that means the mosquitoes are going to show up earlier and they're going to last longer. That means the allergy season, the pollen that's going to kick in earlier, lasts longer. And it's going to be a lot longer before everything kind of dies out in the winter for the bugs to go away. The bugs are going to last longer. We might start getting bugs like they do in Florida as we go forward in the coming decades. Any kind of any kind of benefit we get from reduced heating bills is probably going to be offset by very high cooling costs once we get into the summer. Because the other thing to remember about cooling in the summer and a climate such as Georgia or Carolina or Virginia — a humid climate — it's a lot more energy. It's a lot more energy-intensive to cool air that is humid versus trying to cool air that is dry. Back to the argument we were talking about before: You go to the to the western United States, that air is dry. It's not as humid. So it's a little easier to cool it off. Here in the Southeast, the air is much more humid as well as hot during the summer. So it takes a lot more energy to cool it off. So that's going to really elevate your cooling costs, your air conditioning costs going forward in time. 

One of the other things I think important to remember is that marginalized communities in urban areas have the urban heat island effect, which makes hot air even worse, if you will. I mean, it might be 90, 95 degrees outside of Atlanta, but in some of the more urban cores, it can be easily 10 to 15 degrees hotter than that. And for places that may not have air conditioning, that's a big problem. That's where you start running into heat-related illnesses, heat stroke, hospitalizations. So we have to think about that when we design our infrastructure going forward.

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