The crippling heat dome that’s made the last week miserable for large swaths of the country is set to end Monday afternoon for most, but prominent scientists, including the beloved Bill Nye, are sounding the alarm that similar heat waves are here to stay.
Theories that climate change is to blame for a spike in severe weather events in recent years has been repeated ad nauseam, but never has Nye given such a stark warning into what’s to come.
“It’s the beginning of the new abnormal,” he told ABC this weekend. “The latest research is that there’s not a turning point or a tipping point or a knee in the curve. It’s just going to get hotter and hotter and worse and worse and more and more extreme. This is a taste of the normal of the future unless we, humankind, get to work and address it.”
The recent heat dome, which evoked extreme heat warnings for thousands of cities from Philadelphia to Oklahoma City to Boise, made for a miserable weekend for hundreds of millions of Americans.
On Sunday, Central Park in New York City reached a boiling 94, about 15 degrees more than its daily average. Temperatures eclipsed 100 in Washington for the first time since 2012. Salt Lake City also hit the century mark, coming within one degree of its daily record two days after Phoenix tied its all-time daily heat record at 117. By Sunday evening, 123 million Americans remained under an extreme heat warning that urged them to stay inside.
A reprieve is in sight for those in the northeast. Bryan Ramsey, of the National Weather Service’s New York office, told The Daily Beast on Sunday that high temperatures in Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday will cool down into the mid-to-low 80s, which is still hotter than average for New York City in June—but much, much more comfortable than last week.
The rest of the northeast is expected to have a similar level of cooldown to start the week, he said.
However, portions of the midwest and great plains are still slated to be scorching to start the week, NWS forecasts show, and Ramsey says highs in the 90s could return to New York City by next week.
That remains in line with Nye’s warning, which said our warming world will only continue to produce record heat—which has been blamed for the deaths of over 1,300 muslims during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage—and more natural disasters if nothing is done to curb climate change.
“This is everything going the wrong way at once,” Nye said.
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