[D66] [JD: 129] Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in the Northwest in One of the Most Intense Heat Waves on Record Worldwide - Inside Climate News

[R.O.]

insideclimatenews.org
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29062021/pacific-northwest-heat-wave-climate-change/>



  Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in the Northwest in One of the Most
  Intense Heat Waves on Record Worldwide - Inside Climate News

Judy Fahys
13-17 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The latest in a seemingly endless series of heat waves
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082020/climate-extremes-record-heat-wildfires-hurricane-laura-floods/>
around the world hit the Pacific Northwest last weekend and will
continue through the week, showing that even regions with cool
coastlines and lush forests cannot avoid the blistering extremes of
global warming.

Temperatures across most of Oregon and Washington spiked 20 to 30
degrees Celsius above normal, with even hotter conditions expected
through Tuesday driving concerns about impacts to human health,
infrastructure and ecosystems.

In a Twitter thread
<https://twitter.com/BenNollWeather/status/1409513163750580229> over the
weekend, Ben Noll, a meteorologist with the New Zealand National
Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research <https://twitter.com/niwa_nz>,
reported that Portland, Oregon would be hotter than 99.9 percent of the
rest of the planet on Sunday. “The only places expected to be hotter:
Africa’s Sahara Desert, Persian Gulf, California’s deserts,” he tweeted. 

On Sunday, the heat buckled roads
<https://twitter.com/wspd7pio/status/1409353691287592970> as
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington reached a record
temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, 12 degrees hotter than its
previous record of 92, which was set in 2015. And the western Canadian
community of Lytton reached 116 on Sunday, an all-time record
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57634700> for the nation and
one of 40 records set in British Columbia that day, according to the BBC. 

Meanwhile, in Washington and Oregon east of the Cascade Mountains, the
heat was expected to endure through the week, after reaching a projected
high of 117 on Tuesday. At least 11 towns
<https://twitter.com/NWSPortland/status/1409378393678774274> in
northwest Oregon and southwest Washington state recorded all-time high
temperatures, many surging past the previous maximums by 4 or 5 degrees
Fahrenheit.

Excessive heat warnings covered western maps from British Columbia,
Canada, to Montana in the east, and south to the U.S.-Mexico border. The
heat wave shattered all-time temperature records on Saturday and Sunday
with triple-digit temperatures, according to the National Weather
Service. But still higher temperatures were forecast for Monday and
Tuesday, as the “unprecedented event” continued to scorch the landscape
and put health at risk through the week.

“Dangerously hot conditions today with temperatures lingering in the
upper 90s on Tuesday with potentially dangerously hot heat index values
up to 111,” said the NWS excessive heat warning that remained in place
through Monday
<https://forecast.weather.gov/wwamap/wwatxtget.php?cwa=pqr&wwa=excessive%20heat%20warning>
and, in some areas, extended into Thursday
<https://forecast.weather.gov/showsigwx.php?warnzone=ORZ507&warncounty=ORC059&firewxzone=ORZ641&local_place1=Pendleton%20OR&product1=Excessive+Heat+Warning&lat=45.6722&lon=-118.787>.
“Extreme heat and humidity will significantly increase the potential for
heat related illnesses, particularly for those working or participating
in outdoor activities.” Health officials advised people to reschedule
outdoor activities slated for Monday, The Seattle Times reported.

The intensity of the heat wave, measured by how far temperatures are
spiking above normal, is among the greatest ever measured globally. The
extremes are on par with a 2003 European heat wave that killed about
70,000 people, and a 2013 heat wave in Australia, when meteorologists
added new shades of dark purple
<https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/temperatures-off-the-charts-as-australia-turns-deep-purple-20130108-2ce33.html>
to their maps to show unprecedented temperatures.

And the more extreme the temperature records, climate scientists said,
the more obvious the fingerprint of global warming will be on the heat
wave. But even among climate scientists, the biggest concern was the
immediate impacts of the record shattering temperatures.

“I shudder to think what the mortality rate will be from this event,”
said Phil Mote, a climate scientist with the College of Earth, Ocean and
Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University
<https://twitter.com/OSUCEOAS>. Research shows that early season heat
waves like this one are deadlier than those happening later in the year
because people haven’t acclimatized yet, he added.

Local weather service offices warned people to cool themselves with a
reminder that heat was the leading cause of weather-related fatalities
between 1991 and 2020. But experts and officials warned that people in
the region, where there are fewer people with air conditioning than
without it, are ill-equipped to protect themselves from persistent
triple-digit temperatures. 

North Seattle College climate scientist Heather Price
<https://twitter.com/huprice> taped aluminum foil inside her windows to
try and protect her family of four as temperatures reached the 90s early
Sunday morning. She used a handheld thermometer
<https://twitter.com/huprice/status/1409302753264824322> to check how
much it cooled their home.

“This really is a public health emergency,” she said. “Of all disasters,
heat kills the most people. The data is out there, and it’s worse in
cool climates.” Even though Seattle has opened wading pools and spray
parks that have been closed since early in the Covid-19 pandemic, some
public water fountains are still turned off to prevent spread of the
coronavirus.

“Residents are not happy about the failure of access to public water
with this heat,” she said.

*Related: Climate Change Ravaged the West With Heat and Drought Last
Year; Many Fear 2021 Will Be Worse*
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012021/climate-change-west-droughts-wildfire/>


    *Where There’s Unprecedented Heat, There’s Fire*

Fire meteorologist John Saltenberger, of the Northwest Coordination
Center in Portland, keeps an eye on the risk of wildfire across Oregon
and Washington. 

It’s not only the historic temperatures increasing the wildfire
potential, but also what might follow, with winds kicking up across the
rangelands east of the Cascade Mountains as the heat wave extends for
another week, he said. But Saltenberger’s concerns also extend beyond
the current weather patterns to some troubling long-term trends that he
was following through the spring.

Never have the three months from March to May been drier in 125 years of
record-keeping, he said. He also recalled a climate study that showed
how, over four decades, the number of rainy days during the fire season
is declining in the Northwest.

“Heat alone isn’t really sufficient to trigger the risk of large costly,
fires,” he said. “Heat, overlaid with lightning or heat overlaid with a
strong wind event—now that’s a different matter.”

“Less rain during fire season means more hot, dry days, which means
higher fire danger and more fires and more burned areas,” he added. “And
2021 appears to be going right along with that trend.”

Oregon had just two large fires
<https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn#Oregon> burning Monday
totalling less than 8,000 acres, and Washington had none, according to
the National Interagency Fire Center.

But Saltenberger’s latest seven-day outlook for Washington and Oregon
projected that wildfire risk is rising for the drier, inland landscapes
in both states east of the Cascade Range. Beginning Wednesday, the
probability of large fires triggered by lightning and fueled by a
“critical burn environment,” rises to high risk levels, his Monday
wildfire forecast said.

“Fire danger indices continue rising as the heat wave amplifies over the
entire region,” it said. “Significant fire potential ramps up starting
today due to the combination of heat, rising fire danger indices and
easterly winds that will eventually switch as a thermal trough moves
across the Cascades.”*
*

*
*

*An Underestimated and Underreported Threat*

The current Western heat wave is remarkable by almost any standard, said
University of Reading climate scientist Chloe Brimicombe
<https://twitter.com/ChloBrim>. But such events are becoming more
common, to a large degree because of the 1.2 degree Celsius global
average temperature increase since the industrial revolution has pushed
the heat wave needle into the red zone, she said. 

“Heat waves are our alarm system for the climate emergency,” she said.
“If there are more heatwaves, our emergency is getting worse.”

Some of her recent research shows heat threats are underestimated and
under-reported, and that poor, vulnerable communities suffer the most,
with developing countries taking the biggest hit.

The Arizona Republic reported earlier this month on the steep increase
in people suffering severe burns from surfaces like pavement during heat
waves. Over the summer of 2020, the Arizona Burn Center Valleywise
Health reported 104 people being admitted with burns from hot pavement,
almost all of whom required surgery for their injuries, a fact that
shocked Brimicombe. “I hadn’t fathomed the idea of (third-degree) burns
(during a heat wave),” she said. 

Globally, extreme heat killed at least 166,000 people between 1998 and
2017 <https://www.who.int/health-topics/heatwaves#tab=tab_1>, according
to the World Health Organization. In the United States, the EPA cites
studies estimating 1,300 heat deaths occurred annually in recent
decades. Federal research shows
<https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/us-heat-waves> the heat
wave season in Portland and Seattle is 40 to 60 days longer than in the
1960s.

Heatwaves threaten food crops and are already triggering mass migration.
They also have ecosystem impacts, such as widespread fish die-offs in
dried-out streams and potentially harmful algal blooms in lakes and
coastal areas. Extreme heat can drive sudden forest mortality, killing
trees already weakened by drought.

*Related: Extreme Heat Risks May Be Widely Underestimated and Sometimes
Left Out of Major Climate Reports*
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052021/extreme-heat-risks-climate-change/>

Karin Bumbaco, a research scientist at the University of Washington who
serves as Washington’s assistant state climatologist, called climate
change attribution “a really great question, and it is one that’s hard
to answer.” She said it won’t be possible to tease apart how much
natural variability and how much man-made warming can be blamed for the
current Northwest heat wave until scientific studies examine what
happened, which typically takes months or years. 

“But, you know, even without that being done, it’s a safe assumption, in
my view, to blame increasing greenhouse gases for some portion of this
event—Washington state is warming, the Pacific Northwest is warming,
globally we’re warming,” she said. “As we shift that baseline, we’re
going to see more and more of these extreme events.”

For climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, the Pacific Northwest extreme heat is
shocking. He said on Twitter that scientists will find a clear global
warming fingerprint on the heat wave, with the exact influence of global
warming linked with how hot it gets.

“And the hotter it gets,” he said, “the larger the attribution will be.”

Scientists with World Weather Attribution have already launched a study
to identify how global warming intensified the Pacific Northwest heat
wave, with initial results expected in early July, said Geert Jan van
Oldenborgh <https://twitter.com/gjvoldenborgh>, a climate scientist with
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who has co-authored several
previous climate attribution studies
<https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/analysis/heatwave/>.

That research could help explain a worrying trend. In some regions, like
northwestern Europe, heat waves in the last 20 years have become warmer
about twice as fast**as many climate models project, “and we don’t know
why,” he said.

Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist and associate professor at
Oregon State University, agreed the trend in the Northwest is for more
extreme heat events and even higher temperatures, based on a growing
body of climate research. Temperature records, shorter winters, drought,
the doggedness of a heat dome over the West and even tropical cyclone
data from the western Pacific—they all point to what’s come to be called
the “fingerprint” of global warming on weather, he said. 

“These are things that were all projected by climate models 20 years
ago, and we’re experiencing them now,” O’Neill said.

For some climate scientists actually feeling the heat, the fact that
climate models have been predicting events like the current heat wave
for decades means their discomfort is matched by frustration over the
unheeded warnings
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062019/heat-deaths-cities-climate-change-paris-agreement-half-degree/>.


“I’m hoping this heatwave is going to wake some folks up,” Price, the
North Seattle College climate scientist, said. “People think they are
living in the climate they grew up in, but it’s gone. The best we can do
now is soften our landing in a heated world.” 


        Reporter, Mountain West, National Environmental Reporting Network

Judy Fahys has reported on the West for decades from Washington, D.C.,
and Salt Lake City. After covering the environment, politics and
business at the Salt Lake Tribune, she fell in love with audio
storytelling as the environment and public lands reporter for NPR
Utah/KUER. Previously, she spent an academic year as a Knight Science
Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work
has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, High Country
News and Outside magazine and aired on NPR. She serves on the board of
the Society of Environmental Journalists.


      Bob Berwyn <https://insideclimatenews.org/profile/bob-berwyn/>


        Freelancer

Bob Berwyn an Austrian-based freelance reporter who has covered climate
science and international climate policy for more than a decade.
Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and
public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor
and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20210701/e7c625ad/attachment-0001.html>