A heat dome will send temperatures into the triple-digits across the West as fires burn | CNN
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Searing heat and fire danger will quickly ramp up as a summerlike heat dome parks over the region and makes it feel like July.

Daily temperature records will tumble as sizzling early season heat from a summerlike heat dome sends thermometers skyrocketing into the triple digits in parts of California and the West this week.

The official start of summer is just a few weeks away, but it will feel like July in much of the West as temperatures climb 20 degrees or more above average, the highest temperatures of the year so far for many locations.

Excessive heat warnings are in effect for more than 17 million people in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona this week. The warnings are the most extreme form of heat alert issued by the National Weather Service and are used when widespread, dangerous heat is expected.

The soaring temperatures are being caused by a heat dome, a large area of high pressure that parks over an area, traps air and heats it with abundant sunshine for days or weeks. The resulting heat becomes more intense the longer a heat dome lasts.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    All of this has a silver lining: Dumping this much CO2 into our atmosphere will clearly signal that something weird is going on at interstellar scales, so maybe what’s left of humanity will finally make first contact. This is compounded if we use nuclear weapons during the resource wars.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      Space is big, any civilization analyzing the composition of exo planet atmosphereres wouldn’t know for quite a while. It’s for more likely that they wouldn’t discover it until after several decades of passed, at which point it will have been too late.

      That, and there’s the fact that first contact almost universally goes bad for the group with less technology, which is us in this case.

      So you may as well just start playing the lottery.

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        The only hope I have left is a Star Trek civilization at some point in the future and this is the only path I see to it.

        Don’t take that from me.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
          3·
          5 months ago

          Star Trek required WWIII, a major nuclear conflict, and the Eugenics Wars for humanity to pull their head out of their asses and not immediately shoot the first Vulcans that came by to see what was going on with the warp drive that Zephram Cochran had just turned on.