The assholes who speak of "global warming" really mean "California warming".
People who live in California are too stupid to realize that not every
global citizen lives in California.

Projected California Warming Promises Cycle Of More Heat Waves, Energy Use
For Next Century

ScienceDaily (July 14, 2008) - As the 21st century progresses, major cities
in heavily air-conditioned California can expect more frequent extreme-heat
events because of climate change.

This could mean increased electricity demand for the densely populated
state, raising the risk of power shortages during heat waves, said Norman
Miller, an earth scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Katharine
Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University. If the electricity
were generated using fossil fuels, this could also mean even more emissions
of heat-trapping gases that cause climate change.

Their results were published in the online version of the Journal of Applied
Meteorology and Climatology. Co-authors included Maximilian Auffhammer, of
the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley, and
Jiming Jin, formerly of the Earth Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab and now
at Utah State University.

"Electricity demand for industrial and home cooling increases near linearly
with temperature," said lead author Miller, a climate scientist and a
principal investigator with the Energy Biosciences Institute in Berkeley.
"In the future, widespread climate warming across the western U.S. could
further strain the electricity grid, making brownouts or even rolling
blackouts more frequent."

When projected future changes in extreme heat and observed relationships
between high temperature and electricity demand for California are mapped
onto current availability, the researchers discovered a potential for
electricity deficits as high as 17 percent during peak electricity demand
periods.

Climate projections from three atmosphere--ocean general circulation models
were used to assess projected increases in temperature extremes and
day-to-day variability, said Hayhoe. Increases range from approximately
twice the present-day number of extreme heat days for inland California
cities such as Sacramento and Fresno, to up to four times the number of
extreme heat days for previously temperate coastal cities such as Los
Angeles and San Diego before the end of the century.

This year, California experienced an unusually early heat wave in May and is
currently in the midst of its second major heat wave of the summer, one that
has already broken high temperature records for several more California
cities and increased fire and health risks. One hundred and nineteen new
daily high temperature records were set during the May heat wave, including
the earliest day in the year in which Death Valley temperatures reached
120oF (on May 19, beating the old record of May 25 set in 1913).

In the future, the authors say, the state should brace for summers dominated
by heat wave conditions such as those experienced this year. Extreme heat
and heat wave events have already triggered major electricity shortages,
most notably in the summer of 2006. Given past events, the results of this
study suggest that future increases in peak electricity demand may challenge
current and future electricity supply and transmission capacities.

Similar increases in extreme-heat days are likely for other U.S. urban
centers across the Southwest, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as
well as for large cities in developing nations with rapidly increasing
electricity demands.

Risk of electricity shortages can be reduced through energy conservation,
said Hayhoe, as well as through reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases in
order to limit the amount of future climate change that can be expected.

Miller and Hayhoe also contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Miller is currently leading the
BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) project on biofuel productivity
potentials, including biofuels' impact under changing climate conditions.
The EBI is a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley,
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lawrence Berkeley
National Lab dedicated to the development and analysis of the impacts of
sustainable biofuels. Miller is also a member of the U.N. Earth Science
System Partnership Working Group on Bioenergy.