There is a stigma about Los Angeles that suggests a detachment from reality. People are (artificially) beautiful, everything is image based, and of course the weather is always fantastic.

However, does that fantastic year round weather insulate one from the realities of climate change? Friend sent me a great article discussing how its hard to sympathize with friends back east who are sweltering in terrible humidity and 100+ temps.

Last summer broke heat records across America, and this summer is on track to do the same. But not here on the coast of Southern California. At my home on the east side of Los Angeles, I’ve only flipped on my air conditioner once this year, and it was just for a few hours.

Meanwhile, my friends who live in every other city are melting. The good people of Chicago and Boston and New York and Austin and Atlanta and Denver have suffered days and weeks of temperatures in the upper 90s and low 100s. But while the rest of the country flushes an angry red on meteorological maps of the lower 48, coastal California is a calm strip of yellow.

…it turns out summer is my time to brag. When I tell my friends who live on the East Coast—or in the Midwest, or in Texas, or pretty much anywhere but here—that I only ran my air conditioner once last year, they don’t believe me. Los Angeles has a reputation for having areal summer. Outsiders have seen stock footage of cars overheating on jam-packed freeways and wavy lines of heat emanating from sidewalks in direct sunlight. And it’s true. During many days, the temperature does creep up into the 80s. But the nights are a deliciously cool 60 degrees. (As my friend Zak likes to say, “There are seasons in Southern California: Day and night.”)

I found one paragraph particularly agreeable:

Over the course of any given week, there are many times I feel smug about my new life in L.A. Like when I take a slow drive through the hills at sunset with my windows rolled down, everything warm and golden. Or when I decide on a whim that I’d like to spend the day lolling about on one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in America. Or every time I slice an avocado that’s just been plucked from a backyard tree.

But July and August are when I feel sorriest for people who have chosen to live anywhere else.

It kind of makes me smirk that one of the more liberal places in the country is also the place that could most easily ignore the claims of global warming.