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Climate Change Leading to Warmer Nights in Phoenix

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The unprecedented Pacific Northwest heatwave is now largely over, but media coverage concerning climate change continues, as it should. Climate change is among the world’s biggest and most sustained stories. Even as new research demonstrates that mortality associated with climate change is rising, humanity continues to steer a general status quo course for the most part.

One of the most perverse effects of climate change is warmer nights. Nights no longer provide respite from the day’s increasingly intense heat. Phoenix provides a good illustration. There, the frequency of 80° and 90° minimum temperatures has been increasing. The increase in 80° nights has been sufficiently dramatic that each year beginning in 2000 has had a larger number of such cases than the 30-year moving average.