Far outside Washington, D.C., the Associated Press reports:
A wildfire that forced people to flee a small town in British Columbia that had set record high temperatures for Canada on three consecutive days burned out of control Thursday as relatives desperately sought information on evacuees.
The roughly 1,000 residents of Lytton had to abandon their homes with just a few minutes notice Wednesday evening, after searing the previous day under a record high of 121.2 F (49.6 C).
The province’s public safety minister, Mike Farnworth, said Thursday afternoon that most homes and buildings in Lytton had been destroyed and some residents were unaccounted for.
The British Columbia Wildfire Service said the Lytton blaze was raging out of control over an area spanning roughly 80 square kilometers (30 square miles). Several other fires were burning in the region as a heat wave baked western Canada.
Smoke from the wildfires created its own clouds, generating lightning that started even more fires. Hundreds of “sudden deaths” across Canada are still under investigation.
“This is the beginning of a permanent emergency,” Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, told MSNBC this week. “We have to tackle the source of this problem, which is climate change.”
“I fear for the future of humanity”
David Wallace-Wells adds at New York Magazine:
Elsewhere in Washington State, the roads were melting and agricultural workers as young as 12 and as old as 70 were starting their shifts at 4 a.m. to try to harvest the region’s cherries and blueberries before the fruit was fried by the heat. In Sacramento, residents complaining that the tap water tasted too much like dirt, thanks to the ongoing drought that may be the worst the American West has seen in millennia, were told to “add lemon.” In Santa Barbara, people have been advised to jerry-rig DIY “clean-air rooms” in preparation for the coming fire season, now already in full swing — months ahead of what used to mark the beginning of peak activity in the fall. Suppliers of sparklers were shuttered headed into the Fourth of July weekend. In Alaska, at the edge of the heat dome, the climate writer Eric Holthaus noted, “calving glaciers are producing ‘ice quakes’ as powerful as small earthquakes as they crumble into the sea.” It was hotter in parts of Canada and Oregon, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather pointed out, than it has ever been in the history of Las Vegas, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Portland’s Jean Flemma directs the Ocean Defense Initiative. She told Axios on Sunday, “If our decision makers do not take this heat wave as a harbinger of things to come and act quickly to adopt the climate change policies we all know are needed, I fear for the future of humanity.”
And well she should. Climate crises have occured repeated across the globe in recent years. Yet the memory of them fades almost as soon as the smoke settles and the air clears, warns Wallace-Wells:
Earlier this month, a heat wave across the Middle East saw five countries hit temperatures above those seen in the western U.S. and Canada. In Pakistan, 20 children in a single classroom collapsed from heat stress and were rushed to the hospital. Already, scientists have discovered that across Pakistan and throughout the Persian Gulf, regions have reached combinations of temperature and humidity that are literally beyond the human threshold of survivability. The term for this measure is “wet-bulb temperature,” and it is sure to become terrifyingly more familiar in the years ahead, just as “red flag warning,” “fire tornado,” and even “carbon dioxide equivalent” and “1.5 degrees Celsius” have in the years just past.
“What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for?” the writer Sarah Miller asked Wednesday, in a brilliant, raw blog post, republished by Nieman Lab, meditating on the limits of climate communication in the face of rolling disaster. “What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?”
Saying is not the issue. Doing is. And back in Washington, D.C., doing too little too late is S.O.P.