Climate change will reshape the Inland Empire by 2048 - San Bernardino County Sun

Climate change will reshape the Inland Empire by 2048 - San Bernardino Sun

Today, 2023 is going down as the hottest year on record.

Twenty-five years from now, 2023 is likely to go down as one of the coldest years in decades.

“Unfortunately, we know” what climate conditions in the Inland Empire will look like in 2048, said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College. “For more than a decade now, we’ve known what it’s going to look like.”

Between 1985 and 2005, there were an average of seven days a year in the Inland Empire where temperatures were over 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the next 25 years, Miller said, experts expect there to be at least 35 days a year that hot.

This year, Phoenix had 55 days where temperatures topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit, including 31 days in a row over the summer.

“The Saguaro cactus were boiling on the inside and dying,” Miller said.

Phoenix’s year is a preview of what the Los Angeles region will look like within the next 25 years, he said.

Instead of it being too hot for Saguaro, the National Park Service has warned that nearly all of Joshua Tree National Park may be too hot for Joshua trees to grow by the end of the 21st century.

“I think we need to get used to living on a planet that is not the planet we grew up on,” Miller said.

But not everyone is so pessimistic about the future of the Inland Empire.

“There’s people who live in Phoenix. That’s warmer than where we are,” said Francesca Hopkins, an associate professor of climate change and sustainability at University of California Riverside, who is more upbeat about the future. “I think we need to have a hopeful outlook, because a lot of people don’t have a choice” about living here.

She agrees that the Inland Empire is going to continue heating up through 2048, with temperatures typically four to five degrees Fahrenheit higher, with summer highs around 115 degrees. But, she said, the region can adapt, just as residents of Las Vegas and Phoenix have.

Still, Hopkins’ biggest concern about the Inland Empire’s climate future is extreme heat.

“We’re already one of the hottest regions of the state and we’re just going to have even more extreme heat going forward,” she said. “The heat waves are going to be more severe. We’re going to get less relief at night. And we’re going to have more heat waves.”

Air-conditioning will help for those who have access to it. Mostly.

“One can say ‘well, I have air conditioning; I’m going to be fine in my house,’” Miller said. “But the heat in the house is pumped out of the house to cool the house down. So where does it go? It stays.”

And nighttime temperatures won’t drop as much as they once did, offering little relief for sweltering communities.

Hopkins particularly worries about unhoused residents, people living in trailer parks, and farm workers and others who work outside all day.

Traditionally, wealthier cities and neighborhoods in Southern California were insulated from some aspects of extreme weather by their landscaping, which provide shade and cool their neighborhoods down.

But a UC Riverside study published this fall suggests that this “ luxury effect” is no longer able to keep up with the extreme temperatures now hitting Southern California.

“The effect of income, as a mediator of heat, was decreasing,” said Dion Kucera, a post-doctoral researcher at UC Riverside, and a co-author of the study. “Wealthy regions are getting hotter, just as poor regions are getting hotter.”

Hopkins thinks there’s still going to be a role for landscaping cooling down Inland Empire communities, even if it’s more water-conscious than the lawns and greenery that many areas have today.

“It is really still valuable to have outdoor public spaces that are shaded,” she said. “Continuing to have shade trees will be very important. I think it’s important to think about what sort of shade trees we can plant now that will still survive in the future.”

And there will be greenery in some less-welcome places.

White Christmases were already a rarity in Southern California when Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” in 1940 — in La Quinta, according to some accounts — including lyrics about how sunny and green Beverly Hills is in December. By 2048, Miller said, the San Gabriel Mountains will be permanently snow-free, impacting area water supplies even as much of the year is hotter and drier.

In December 2023, residents of San Bernardino Mountain communities are still recovering from a devastating winter storm that dumped up to 11 feet of snow on the mountains in February and March. Storms like that will still happen, just less frequently and less predictably, according to Miller.

“We’re going to get years like last winter,” he said. “They’re just going to be fewer and far between.”

The weather outlook in 2048 will be for more and longer-lasting droughts but also more intense rainstorms dumping more rain over shorter periods, leading to flash flooding, according to Miller. And of course, there’s the ever-present threat of wildfire, which will just get more common in the Inland Empire over the next 25 years.

“For those who live in the deserts and the foothills, all of these forces also accelerate the number and intensity of wildfires,” Miller said.

And that means home insurers will likely end up reshaping where people can afford to live in California.

“In the Inland Empire, the draw is affordable housing, whether it’s the mountains, the desert or the foothills. But those are going to be the places most heavily impacted,” Miller said. “Why would I buy a house in a place where the water rights are not assured and I can’t get fire insurance?”

Expect to see more “in-fill” housing, increasing the density of existing residential areas instead of extending further into wildfire-prone foothills and deserts.

The American Southwest “exploded” in population after World War II, Miller said, based on factors that are no longer true.

“Cheap energy and cheap water are gone,” Miller said. “We’ve had a good run. But the run we’ve had was dependent on conditions that no longer exist.”

And that’s going to have repercussions for the Southern California’s business climate.

“The very drivers of this region’s economy, which was largely pushed by agriculture, logistics and the tourism industry, are all going to be damaged by these climate changes,” Miller said.

And warehouses are making things worse, he said, with truck traffic putting more air pollution into the air, as well as creating large areas of man-made materials that absorb and radiate heat in neighborhoods.

Agriculture, which is using the majority of California’s water supply, won’t be able to continue to do business as it has, and will likely need to switch to crops that require less water and are more tolerant of higher temperatures, according to Miller.

“It’s going to be just too hot,” he said. “You can pour as much water on crops as you want, but if they’re burning on the inside, it’s not going to help.”

The Inland Empire won’t be alone in grappling with these changes. Miller predicts that by the end of the century, New Hampshire will have a climate similar to North Carolina’s today.

And Rust Belt cities, which saw populations plummet in the late 20th century, will rebound, he says, as access to the Great Lakes, with 20% of Earth’s fresh water, will be increasingly important in a hotter, drier world. And climate change will make the Great Lakes’ infamous winters milder as winters get warmer.

But climate patterns won’t settle down anywhere in the United States during the 21st century, according to Miller.

“I think any grandchild you love will wonder, in time, what the hell you were doing,” Miller said. “Or rather, what you were not doing.”

In comparison, Hopkins remains somewhat optimistic about Californians’ ability to adapt and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

“We have the technology,” Hopkins said. “We can do this.”

And if she’s right, and humans figure out ways to adapt, while minimizing further damage by switching away from the use of fossil fuels, that could also mean solving one of Southern California’s most persistent problems.

“If we manage to address climate change and reduce fossil fuel pollution, it’s going to have a huge impact on our air quality,” she said.

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