Arizona was deadly hot during the month of July. We know this. But it didn’t convince the climate deniers that maybe, just maybe, it might be smart to consider that climate change could be responsible.
Every single day of July had reached 110 degrees or hotter, demolishing the previous record for the longest 110-plus-degree streak that Phoenix — nicknamed the Valley of the Sun for a reason — had ever seen. Most of those days were above 115 degrees, and most nights, the low stayed above 90 degrees, setting records on both fronts.
All told, the average daily temperature — the average of the high and low — was 102 degrees, or more than 7 degrees above normal for July, which is also a record, according to the National Weather Service.
Meanwhile, dozens of people have died amid the extreme heat. Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, recently brought in new refrigerated storage containers to hold all the dead bodies, a tactic it first employed during the peak of the pandemic.
But among some Arizona Republicans, saying this summer has been especially hot is akin to saying the 2020 election was especially free and fair or that Covid-19 is an especially deadly virus.
With extreme and growing heat waves almost certainly fueled by climate change, Arizona might, in theory, be the kind of place where lawmakers grapple with this new reality. But the politics of climate change are just as paralyzed here as the rest of the country. Or perhaps it’s even worse, with the Arizona GOP taken over by its fringe elements in recent years and largely refusing to acknowledge the issue at all. Democrats, meanwhile, lament that their leaders aren’t doing nearly enough to address the heat — even as heat-related deaths are climbing.
Even the most ardent climate change deniers don’t deny that the Valley is hot. Instead, the heat skeptics question how hot it is, exactly, along with who’s saying it’s hot and why.
“This weather is normal,” Justine Wadsack, a hard-line Republican in the state Senate, tweeted recently. “If ya can’t stand the heat in Arizona, you’re welcome to leave.”
Some conservatives suggest thermometers, like past vote counts, are rigged because they’re placed at the sun-scorched asphalt airport. Others say a national media frenzy is intended to promote the left’s climate change narrative and drive people to seek government solutions to a naturally occurring phenomenon.
The campaign account for failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for example, accused Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of “pushing mass hysteria in an effort to declare a climate emergency” and blamed the heat-related deaths on “the METH their policies allow to flow freely on our streets.”
One of Arizona’s most vocal heat-skeptical lawmakers is GOP state Rep. Justin Heap. He’s engaged in frequent online skirmishes in which he dismisses the “media narrative” of climate change and suggests it’s part of a push on behalf of “global elites” who stand to benefit from massive government subsidies on green technology.
“Apparently the national media has decided we are all insufficiently frightened about climate change so it’s time to portray normal summer heat as the apocalypse,” he wrote recently.
It’s true that the New York Times recently declared Phoenix “hell” and July “an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience” in one of more than a half-dozen recent pieces about how Phoenix was coping with the heat wave.
Is it too much hype about the heat?
The Times’ description isn’t necessarily wrong. But Heap told POLITICO Magazine that this summer is no different than past ones — it’s always unbearably hot.
“I don’t recall feeling that this July was particularly hotter than any other July that I remember,” says Heap, a native of the Phoenix suburb of East Mesa, when asked about his comments during a recent Twitter Spaces event. “It’s just that all of a sudden, every media story was telling me it was hotter than it’s ever been.”
Phoenix was, in fact, hotter than it has ever been, at least in terms of days over 110 and 115 degrees. No, the Sonoran Desert city didn’t break its all-time high of 122 degrees, set back in 1990. But it did have three days that reached 119 degrees last month.
Heap acknowledges micro-climate change. Clearly, cutting down vegetation and pouring concrete makes the desert hotter, he says. It’s a well-known phenomenon in the desert called the urban heat island effect. And Heap even believes that greenhouse gasses could have the same effect on the entire globe, to some degree.
What he can’t stomach is the idea that the heat is an urgent problem that the government must address.
“I think it is pretty clear that it’s true: Human beings have some effect on our climate,” he says. “And it’s possible that CO2 emissions contribute to it. … The issue that I have with it is the solutions that are presented are always the same, which is basically to say we have this massive climate change and the only way it can be fixed is through massive government control.”
I’d love to know what he thinks should be done, Apparently, government action is such a grotesque impingement on “freedom” that it’s better to fry to death that allow it to deal with the problem at the scale it’s actually happening. (And I hate to bring it up but it actually requires a global effort. Oh no.)
These are the same people who think asking people to wear a mask or get vaccinated during a deadly pandemic is worse than being in a concentration camp. So I guess it’s not surprising.
Meanwhile …. oh my God
At least 36 people confirmed dead. Unbelievable.
