Global warming may bring cooler summers near California coast

Ventura County Star: For most Californians, one effect of global warming will be the opposite of what they might expect: cooler summer days. In the first localized study of temperature changes in California, a San Jose State meteorology professor has discovered that summer temperatures declined measurably from 1948 to 2005 in areas near the coast — specifically in the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area, the state's two largest population centers.

Robert Bornstein presented his study, which has been preliminarily accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate, at the annual California Climate Change Conference this week. Previous studies have shown average high temperatures statewide have gone up over the last several decades, but, Bornstein said, those studies used data points spread out over wide areas. A closer look, he said, reveals that inland temperatures have risen faster than the statewide average, and coastal temperatures have actually declined….

California coast near Monterey, shot by Henryk Kotowski (Kotoviski), Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2