In this free-for-all-Friday Trent talks about the heat in Phoenix has gotten worse and the effects it will have on his old hometown.
Transcript:
Trent Horn (00:00):
Feeling hot, hot, hot. It’s summer. It’s feeling hot, hot, hot, especially if you live in the American Southwest. I live in Dallas. It can get hot here but not as brutal as the Southwest, which is where I grew up. So I’m a little bit more adapted for Dallas’ summers than really anywhere else in the country. I mean, that’s why one reason we moved here is because I prefer hot summers to cold winters. But I want to talk about today about my old stomping grounds. Phoenix went back there recently. That was just right at the beginning of June and it was already hitting 106 degrees and it’s got no signs of slowing down. I just want to talk about that. Why? Because it’s free for all Friday. Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology. Friday on the Council of Trent. Longstanding tradition since the beginning of this podcast.
(00:45):
What has it been now? Eight years. I talk about whatever I want to talk about. Today I am talking to you about the city of Phoenix like the bird, the fiery bird rising from the ashes. Something is on fire when it comes to living there. And I just wonder, is the city just eventually going to melt? So I went back, I got to see some friends and it was really nice to see them. I was staying at an Airbnb, had a pool in the back. It’s so funny actually when you’re in Phoenix, I mean I’ve noticed this here in Dallas too by the end of the summer, but even just like a month, a few weeks into summer when it’s really hot, you’ll have a swimming pool and it will eventually start to just feel like a bathtub. It is not refreshing at all to get into.
(01:28):
But this is actually nice because I went there beginning of June. It was warm. The water wasn’t that cool even during the day, but at night it was really nice and refreshing to get into. And that’s one of the hard things when you live in Phoenix. If you want to enjoy swimming there, you kind of have to go at night. Now, I will give you this. It’s sort of fun at night there. When it’s a hundred degrees at night and you don’t have the sun bearing down on you, it’s just like this warm blanket enveloping you and you just kind of sit out and enjoy the summer nights. It can be nice because you don’t have the sun just like absolutely wearing you down. So I remember once actually in our backyard in Phoenix, I was trimming this really big set of bushes in the backyard.
(02:03):
I thought I’d be out there only for like five minutes, but it was like 110 degrees, but I thought, well, it’s just five minutes. I’ll be okay. But I went out there for five minutes, was cutting bushes and I came back inside. I was shaking. You don’t understand how fast heat stroke can set in there. So let me read a little bit from here. Phoenix has always been known for its hot desert climate, but in recent decades, the city has experienced a dramatic increase in extreme heat. Oh yeah. Because when I was a kid, I grew up in Phoenix. I moved there, I want to say in like the late ’90s is when I moved there, late ’90s. And I graduated high school and college there in the early 2000s. So that was almost like 30 years ago when I got there. It was hot in the summer, but it was not awful.
(02:48):
And it didn’t like stretch all the way into November and start in the beginning of like April. It was only for a part of the year. It didn’t like creep into more than half the year, but the records show it is just getting hotter there. I cannot believe it. In 2020, Phoenix set a record with 53 days reaching at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Think about that for a minute. 53 days. That’s like what? It’s about 15% of the year, one out of seven days, about on out of every seven days. The temperature is over 110 degrees. When it gets past 110, like when you go outside, right? 70 feels nice. 80, a little warm, but still nice. 90, it’s kind of warm outside. 100, you’re like, oh, it’s hot. 110 is like, “I am dying. I’m dying out here. What is happening?” The record was broken just three years later where the city experienced 54 days of 110 degrees in 2023 and the record climbed in 2024, 56 days above 110 degrees during that.
(03:52):
I knew it. It says here in the 90s that Phoenix averaged only 21 days a year above 110 degrees. And this was said the summer of 2023 was particularly alarming. It had a streak of 31 days where it was at or above 110 degrees, which is crazy. That broke the previous streak. 18 days that was said in 1974. Residents face weeks of relentless heat with a little relief. Hospitals, emergency responders and cooling centers struggled to meet the growing demand. Even days above 100 degrees have become more common. In 2024, Phoenix experienced a record 113 days with temperatures above 100 degrees, 113 days. It’s a third of the year. One out of three days. A third of the year, it’s over a hundred degrees. My friends really would enjoy it if I moved back to Phoenix and I hear it. I love them. They’re great people.
(04:46):
It’s home to me. There’s a lot that I enjoy there, but I didn’t leave Phoenix. Phoenix left me, man. It left me in the dust, in the sizzling dust of that frying pan of a city. 113 days. Can you imagine just an entire just one third of your year is that hot. And it gets the heat there. You have no idea, by the way. People say, “Oh, it’s a dry heat.” Yeah, so is an oven. When you touch things, it can burn you. Yo fall down on pavement. You can get burned. I love there is a clip from Arested Development where the mom tells her son, or no, he goes to Phoenix and it realizes it’s really hot. And he’s like, “Oh, I’d never move there.” And she says, “Well, I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona.” So it has gotten absurdly hot there.
(05:41):
I don’t know if I could ever handle it if I moved back, but it says, “One reason Phoenix is warming faster than surrounding desert areas is the urban heat island effect. As the metropolitan area has expanded, natural desert landscapes have been replaced with roads, parking lots, buildings, and surfaces that absorb and retain heat. Concrete and asphalt store solar energy during the day and slowly release it at night preventing temperatures from cooling as much as they once did. As a result, nighttime temperatures keep rising and it reduces opportunities for residents and infrastructure to recover from the daytime heat. The growing population also places pressure on the water supplies. I don’t know how the city’s going to last. I really don’t. Like you go there, you know what the popular thing is people do in Phoenix year round? They play golf. Green golf courses. They have them.
(06:28):
And I don’t even remember there being a lot of water rationing when I lived there or even when I visited. But it says that Phoenix relies heavily on water from the Colorado River, which has experienced declining flows because of drought and reduced snow pack in the rocky mountains. Higher temperatures increase evaporation rates and water demand, particularly during the summer months. Energy use is a problem. They have Palaverian nuclear, so it shouldn’t be a problem for them, but it could still overwhelm the electrical grid. Even if they can produce the power, if the grid’s overwhelmed, you still have a problem in distributing it because people use air conditioning so much. Phoenix shown remarkable resilience throughout its history, but adapting to a hotter future will require significant planning and investment. Tree cover, increasing shade, water conservation. But honestly, what are you going to do? People keep moving there.
(07:11):
You keep building the city out further and further, more pavement, more concrete. I feel bad, like the poorer areas in Phoenix, you can tell they’re poorer and worse for people because they don’t have trees. If you have at least big trees to provide shade, it does really help. Although what’s crazy is I know actually some of the richest areas in Scottsdale don’t have trees either. People love just showing off their houses. They have large hedges keep privacy, but they don’t have trees. They blast the AC and they don’t really care. So that is what’s going on in Phoenix. If you were a Phoenician, feel free to leave a comment at Trenorandpodcast.com for our community there. Would love to hear some of your thoughts, but yeah, I just cannot believe how hot it’s getting there. Maybe you live in another city that’s experienced things getting hotter.
(07:57):
The only the future will tell who knows where people will have to go to eventually get away from the heat, but that is where Phoenix is like. What will the summer of 2026 bring? Only the good Lord knows. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you have a very blessed weekend.