Maybe forgo the fireworks this year.
Lytton, British Columbia’s story is yesterday’s news. Like the town itself. A wildfire last week turned 90 percent of it to ash when temperatures reached 49.6 C (121 F).
CNN reports:
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable.
Moscow reported its highest June temperature ever: 34.8 C degrees (95 F) on June 23. A weather station in Verkhoyansk, Siberia (above the Arctic Circle) recorded 38 C (100 F) on June 20. Iraq declared a public holiday in several provinces (including Baghdad) when temperatures there exceeded 50 C (122 F) on Thursday and the electrical grid failed.
Twenty-five miles east of Juneau, Alaska, melting glaciers generated a 2.7 magnitude ice quake last week. In Portland, victims of the heat have collapsed on their walks to cooling centers; others arrived on stretchers with “body temperatures so high their central nervous systems had shut down,” reports the Washington Post.
Experts tell CNN it is unlikely that heat waves striking across the northern hemisphere at the same time is coincidence.
“We carried out a quick attribution study to get some fast answers to ‘What is the role of climate change?'” said UK Met Office meteorologist, Nikos Christidis, who has been developing simulations to carry out such analysis.
“We found that without human influence, it would be almost impossible to hit a new record and such a hot June in the region,” he said, referring to an area including those affected in Canada and the US.
Christidis said in the past, without human-caused climate change, extreme heat in the Northwest US or Southwest Canada would have occurred “once every tens of thousands of years.” Presently, it can occur every 15 years or so, Christidis said.
And perhaps every other year by the end of the century if the world cannot contain greenhouse emissions.
Dying of thirst is next:
A snow drought in the West appeared early last winter, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. The paltry snowpack, paired with well-below normal rainfall and extreme heat, is at the core of the region’s water-supply concerns.
On Thursday, the US Drought Monitor reported 93% of the West is in drought, the most expansive drought in that region in modern records.
These reports read like the script of a disaster film.
The Washington Post again:
The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts and its worst drought in decades.
“Climate change has loaded the weather dice against us,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.
“These extremes are something we knew were coming,” she added. “The suffering that is here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently.”
Yeah, that’s us.
If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, studies suggest, the Earth could be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. The Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Huge numbers of species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone they are uninhabitable.
“It’s a very different planet at those levels,” Wehner said. “This is really serious. As a society, as a species, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to this. And some things are not going to be adaptable.”
Sunscreen won’t be much help at that point. Perhaps a stillsuit?
