PHOENIX — Add Summer 2024 to the record books.
We broke the 2023 record for the hottest summer ever in Arizona. If you feel like every summer is the hottest on record, you're right.
Since 2020, Phoenix has broken the record for the hottest June through September three times. Arizona's summers are getting hotter and longer.
Dr. Joellen Russell with the University of Arizona explained what is happening.
"About the same amount of radiation is coming in from the sun every year, so why are we getting hotter? Because less is getting out," she said. "It's those greenhouse gases that are basically like down in your sleeping bag...and the thicker the down...the more heat you trap."
Russell then talked about how the increasing temps can be fixed.
"The way to fix that is what we're already doing, which is adapting quickly...whether it's drip lines of trees for more shade...solar panels for extra help with the expensive air conditioning we're having to do now...also looking very carefully at how to cut our CO2 emissions. The ocean is taking up 90+ percent of the heat," she added. "The atmosphere, this hot atmosphere we're experiencing is really only two and a half to three percent...So it turns out that if we reduce our emissions enough, we will immediately not warm the atmosphere as much anymore."
It turns out, we are already doing enough, Russell told 12News.
"On the current trajectory the U.S. is already on, if we don't do anything differently, we will cut half of our emissions by 2034," Russell stated. "We have got this. We can do it. It's already happening."
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