A High Schooler’s Take on the Climate Crisis

From The Deseret News in Utah:

Opinion:
By Cash Mendenhall

On July 17, Salt Lake City met the record for the highest summer temperature in recorded history, and by the time you read this that record may very well be broken.

We’re heading into the depth of a scorching summer with a worrying lack of clarity: Today, 99% of Utah is under either extreme or severe drought levels, with eight of the last 10 years being classified as drought years. We’ve become so desensitized to statistics like these in Utah and the West that heat waves and droughts barely register as policy issues, slipping under the radar of a rapidly metastasizing climate disaster. Eastern Utah has reported a temperature change over the last century triple that of the global temperature increase.

As a high school student, my generation is facing a steep collapse in livability.

French Heat

It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even harder. Naturally, this causes a lot of people to speculate, or to outright declare, or to outright deny, that the frequency and severity of heat waves has been increased by man-made climate change, also known as “global warming.”

I decided to study a single location in Europe, the daily high temperature in a small region near the town of Beaune, France, known for centuries as an outstanding wine-making region.

I retrieved data from the ERA5 reanalysis, and for each year I isolated the data for summer, which is defined as the months of June, July, and August. Then I computed each year’s summer average temperature, giving this: