How hot was July in Phoenix? Too hot to be a cactus. Too hot to hold a handrail. Hot enough that children were getting second-degree burns on their feet from the surfaces of patios, balconies, and sidewalks that reached 160 degrees. Hot enough that people with temperatures 10 degrees above normal were being injected with frigid IV fluids. So hot that you could be scalded by the first blast of sunbaked water to come out of the garden hose.
On Monday, the mercury plateaued at a merciful 108 degrees—relief, after 31 straight days of highs over 110 degrees. That streak nearly doubled the old record, of 18 straight days above 110, set in 1974.
As if the heat weren’t enough, Phoenix has also lately experienced some water worries. In May, Western states reached a deal to ration the dwindling bounty of the Colorado River. In June, Arizona decided to limit the building of new subdivisions in the area, citing a lack of available groundwater.
Naturally, the reaction from more temperate climes has been one part concern, two parts morbid curiosity, three parts smirk. We’ve been waiting 130 years to say “I told you so,” ever since John Wesley Powell, who led the first federal expedition down the Colorado River, bluntly proclaimed: “There is not sufficient water to supply these lands.” In 2009 Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Phoenix will be like Jericho or Ur of the Chaldees, with the shriveled relics of golf courses and the dusty hills of swimming pools added on.”
Yet in spite of all that, this very weird, very hot summer is delivering a different lesson: that climate change will not operate in a linear, predictable manner, causing half a century of southern migration to recede north like a wave washing back into the sea.
Because while the heat in Phoenix is extreme by anyone else’s standards, it’s just a few degrees removed from the average July high of 106.5 in a state where everyone but homeless residents has air conditioning. On the other end of the Sun Belt, in Florida, a New York Times reporter tried to get Floridians to talk about their record-breaking water temperature. They mostly just said it was nice.
Instead, it’s the northern U.S. that feels newly vulnerable this summer. Extreme rainstorms have devastated New England (a region sometimes cited as a climate change winner), while wildfire smoke has choked the Midwest, giving Chicago its worst air quality in a generation. Vermont saw its second “100-year” rainstorm in a decade, turning small-town main streets into raging rapids. For two days, New York City experienced the worst air quality in the entire world.
Two years ago, during a summer of extreme weather events, my colleague Nitish Pahwa wrote about the experience of returning home to Michigan, a state he’d long considered a back-pocket climate refuge. After disaster after disaster unleashed by torrential rains, he concluded, “the rickety future bequeathed to my generation and those coming is far too frightening to be managed by planning.”
Nevertheless, Michigan is often held up as a climate magnet for future generations of migrants, with two cities listed among America’s least risky climate refuges, according to Moody’s. With its freshwater port and mild summers, “climate-proof” Duluth, Minnesota, has drawn some climate refugees as well. This idea of climate planning has given birth to a cottage industry of real estate platforms that assess the risk profile of a particular property, sometimes along multiple axes. Still, disaster risk is complicated. Even a city at low risk of burning down, like Indianapolis, can spend days choking on toxic wildfire smoke.
A warming world is, by nature, unpredictable. Buffalo, New York, is another place that fancies itself a climate refuge. It’s an appealing idea from a narrative standpoint, since Buffalo’s industrial base was undercut by labor-busting Sun Belt factories while its population drained to low-tax Southern states. There’s even a local economic development project, Be in Buffalo, dedicated to promoting this concept. But in December, the city found itself marooned in a blizzard that lasted for 37 hours—the longest snowstorm ever recorded below 5,000 feet, according to an after-action report from researchers at New York University. Thirty-one people were killed.
It is, of course, difficult to establish the connection between a freak lake-effect snowstorm and a changing global climate, just as it is hard to say for sure that Vermont would not have experienced two 100-year storms in a 10-year interval. In the long run, extreme heat, drought, and rising sea levels seem likely to challenge places like Phoenix and South Florida more than freak storms and burning forests will damage New England and the Upper Midwest. But there’s still room for a lot to go wrong in the meantime.
