[D66] [JD: 137] A Week After the Pacific Northwest Heat Wave | Inside Climate News

[R.O.]

insideclimatenews.org
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07072021/pacific-northwest-heat-wave-attribution-study-climate-change/>



  A Week After the Pacific Northwest Heat Wave, Study Shows it Was
  ‘Almost Impossible’ Without Global Warming - Inside Climate News

Bob Berwyn
8-10 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The high temperatures in late June that killed hundreds of people in
Oregon, Washington and Canada were so unusual that they couldn’t have
happened without a boost from human-caused global warming, researchers
said Wednesday when they released a rapid climate attribution study of
the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.

The temperatures were so far off the charts that the scientists
suggested that global warming may be triggering a “non-linear” climate
response, possibly involving drought
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02072021/dry-springs-hot-summers-southwest-united-states/>
magnifying the warming, to brew up extreme heat storms that exceed
climate projections. 

Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the Pacific
Northwest heat wave at least 150 times more likely, and increased its
peak temperatures by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the study by World
Weather Attribution
<https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/analysis/heatwave/> concluded. 

“I think it’s by far the largest jump in the record that I have ever
seen,” said Fredi Otto <https://twitter.com/FrediOtto>, a University of
Oxford climate researcher and co-author of the study. “We have seen
temperature jumps in other heat waves, like in Europe, but never this big.”

The extreme temperature spike shook up some fundamental assumptions
about heat waves, said co-author Geert Jan van Oldenborgh
<https://twitter.com/gjvoldenborgh>, of the Royal Dutch Meteorological
Institute. 

“It was way above the upper bounds,” he said. “It was surprising and I’m
shaken that our theoretical understanding of how heat waves behave was
so roughly broken. We’ve dialed down our certainty.”

If global warming has pushed the climate past a heat wave tipping point,
he added, “we are worried about these things happening everywhere.”

The Pacific Northwest heat wave should be a big warning, said co-author
Dim Coumou <https://twitter.com/DimCoumou>, with the Institute for
Environmental Studies at VU Amsterdam and the Royal Netherlands
Meteorological Institute. It shows climate scientists don’t understand
the mechanisms driving such exceptionally high temperatures, suggesting
that “we may have crossed a threshold in the climate system where a
small amount of additional global warming causes a faster rise in
extreme temperatures.”

In an unrelated study
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90138-1.epdf?sharing_token=XWZRLMrwEjLimKAwDqi8R9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MXXrl9T_DJai7v-hCJoxYX98GcqwkqHWa43OSb202U3YMEjOgbQreHIao3_FYwHRfa-igk2YzCsNxG6uc6l0aHEr41tHVQGgeHBBD7izfbQM4DcZnKSjS7qAzxbYyfNQo%3D>
published July 6, European Union researchers studying climate tipping
points found additional evidence that human-caused warming could be
“abrupt and irreversible,” partly because the current warming is so fast
that the climate system can’t adjust. Even the “safe operating space of
1.5 or 2.0 degrees above present generally assumed by the IPCC might not
be all that safe,” said co-author Michael Ghil, with the University of
Copenhagen.

About 800 people died across the Pacific Northwest during the heat wave,
a number that will probably still go up as officials examine medical
records and statistics in the coming weeks and months. The peak
temperature was 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit on June 29 in Lytton, British
Columbia. After setting heat records for Canada on three consecutive
days, the town was mostly destroyed by a wildfire driven by hot winds in
the dried out forests nearby. In addition to contributing to several
major wildfires in the region that are still burning, the heatcooked
growing fruit <https://twitter.com/pmagn/status/1412621024617648130> and
scalded foliage on trees and other vegetation
<https://twitter.com/SallyNAitken/status/1412148255153016848>. 

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service
<https://twitter.com/CopernicusECMWF/status/1412674464349921281> said
Wednesday that the average June temperature was the highest on record
for North America and the fourth-highest on record globally. In early
July, extreme heat boiled over in northern Scandinavia, with parts of
Finland reporting record-breaking temperatures. Persistent heat across
northeastern Russia is fueling fires there that are emitting record
levels of carbon dioxide
<https://twitter.com/Pierre_Markuse/status/1412454135073542145> for this
time of year. And in the West, yet another spasm of dangerous heat is
building <https://twitter.com/Weather_West/status/1412532684782411778>,
potentially peaking this weekend in central and eastern California.


    *The Deadliest Climate Extreme*

Release of the attribution study of the Pacific Northwest heat wave
coincided with other new research with dire heat warnings. 

A study led by Monash University scientists published Wednesday in /The
Lancet Planetary Health/ gives a comprehensive evaluation of heat deaths
around the world from 2000 to 2019, a period when the global average
temperature rose by nearly a full degree Fahrenheit. It attributes about
637,550 deaths during each of those years to high heat, including about
224,000 deaths per year in Asia, 78,000 in Europe and 19,000 in the
United States. 

The high death toll in the Pacific Northwest was “sadly, no longer a
surprise but part of a very worrying global trend,” said Maarten van
Aalst <https://twitter.com/mkvaalst>, with the Red Cross Red Crescent
Climate Centre <https://twitter.com/RCClimate> and University of Twente,
noting that heat waves were the world’s deadliest climate disasters in
2019 and 2020. 

In the U.S., heat is the leading weather-related killer, said Kristie L.
Ebi <https://twitter.com/kristie_ebi>, of the Center for Health and the
Global Environment at the University of Washington. But with good
planning, nearly all those deaths are preventable, she said. 

Communities need effective heat action plans that prepare for what are
now completely unexpected heat extremes. Early warning and response
systems, and community outreach programs, with neighbors checking on
each other during heat emergencies, are among the best tools for saving
lives, van Aalst said. There is also research showing that staff and
scheduling changes at hospitals and ambulance services, based on extreme
heat forecasts, can prevent deaths. 


    *Loading the Dice for Weather Extremes*

The new attribution study bolsters previous warnings about the need to
prepare for more extreme heat waves in a rapidly warming climate, said
Otto, one of scientists working on the attribution study. The findings
should be considered in the context of what societies are resilient to,
and what they can adapt to, she said.

“This is not something you would plan for, or expect to happen,” she
said. “The models of today are not a good indicator of what to expect at
1.5 degrees (Celsius) of warming. Most societies are sensitive to small
changes, and this is not a small change, it’s a big change. We should
definitely not expect heat waves to behave in the same way they have in
the past.” 

Global warming has jacked up the odds for rare events, like 100-year
floods, to happen every few years, said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner
<https://twitter.com/CarlSchleussner>.

“We haven’t seen what a once in a 50 year event looks like now, in a
climate altered by humans,” he said. “People are relating to those
extreme events as really exceptional, and they are not. We are on the
way to leaving the climate window of the Holocene, of the last 8,000
years where we’ve been enjoying a stable climate.”


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Already, the world has warmed about 1.2 degrees from the pre-industrial
average, he said, enough to fuel exceptional and dangerous heat extremes.

“It’s not really comprehended or understood what a climate change of 1.2
degrees is,” he said.

He warned that change is non-linear with global warming, meaning that a
small rise of the average global temperature can spur a proportionately
bigger increase in dangerous heat. Studies show that extremes like the
2003 European heat wave that killed about 70,000 people would have been
nearly impossible without human caused warming and, with just another 1
degree Fahrenheit of warming, are likely to happen every other year by
the 2040s.

“Our climate experience doesn’t prepare us to understand the scale of
what’s going on,” he said. “People talk about loading the dice and
throwing sixes. Global warming is loading the dice so we’re throwing
sevens now, something impossible previously.”


        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.

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