{"id":469489,"date":"2025-12-24T20:55:27","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T20:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/469489\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T20:55:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T20:55:27","slug":"this-month-is-on-track-to-be-phoenixs-hottest-december-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/469489\/","title":{"rendered":"This month is on track to be Phoenix’s hottest December ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month is likely to be Phoenix\u2019s hottest December on record. The previous record was set just last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As of Wednesday, this month\u2019s average temperature has been 62.9 degrees, which is nearly 7 degrees hotter than normal for December. Last December\u2019s average temperature was 62.3 degrees.<\/p>\n

Five days this month have broken daily heat records with highs in the 80s.<\/p>\n

The warm winter weather is partly a result of La Ni\u00f1a conditions in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

\u201c[La Ni\u00f1a is] a cooling of the central Pacific Ocean. And since the Pacific Ocean is so big, when you cool down a part of it, it changes the weather patterns across the world, particularly across the United States,\u201d said Randy Cerveny, professor of geographical sciences at ASU.<\/p>\n

But, Cerveny told KJZZ\u2019s The Show<\/a>, climate change makes the impact more extreme.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder normal circumstances, when we have this kind of a big \u2018ridge\u2019 over top of the Western United States, we would have good, warm temperatures. But the fact that they are setting records is part of the underlying climate change.\u201d Cerveny said.<\/p>\n

The climate research organization Climate Central ranks Phoenix\u2019s temperatures for the last few days in the \u201cextreme\u201d category of its Climate Shift Index scale<\/a> \u2014 the second-highest ranking in the scale.<\/p>\n

That means the kinds of temperatures Phoenix has had this week are at least four times more likely as a result of human-caused climate change, and conditions like this would have been very unlikely in pre-industrial times.<\/p>\n

\"Climate<\/p>\n

Climate Central ranks Phoenix\u2019s temperatures for the last few days in the \u201cextreme\u201d category of its Climate Shift Index scale \u2013 the second-highest ranking in the scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This month is likely to be Phoenix\u2019s hottest December on record. The previous record was set just last…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":469490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,1589,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-469489","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-az","11":"tag-phoenix","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115776542202949447","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}