In the early afternoon of Friday, July 6, 2018, those of us on the Gaviota Coast were experiencing unprecedented temperatures, as did most of Southern California. Around 3 p.m., an already hot day suddenly became an extremely scary heat event. Over the next four hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of heat-related damage occurred on agricultural land across the Gaviota Coast, and new high temperature records throughout Southern California were set.
It is hard to say what the future climate has in store for us in Southern California, but the July 6 event was a wakeup call. Many climate scientists have predicted a general “heating up and drying out,” but there are also others who claim the opposite. Despite these divergent arguments, I can recall some past predictions that seem spot on.
In 2004, Lisa C. Sloan — currently the vice provost and dean of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where she had been a professor of Earth Sciences — and her graduate student, Jacob Sewall, published the article “Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice Reduces Available Water in the American West” in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Their study “simulate[d] the effects of reduced Arctic sea ice” and resulted in “a significant reduction in rain and snowfall in the American West.” Our drought in California with its “ridiculously resilient high pressure atmospheric ridge” has seemingly followed their prediction to a T.