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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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<h1 class="reader-title">Global Warming Cauldron Boils Over in
the Northwest in One of the Most Intense Heat Waves on Record
Worldwide - Inside Climate News</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Judy Fahys</div>
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<p>The latest in a seemingly <a
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082020/climate-extremes-record-heat-wildfires-hurricane-laura-floods/">endless
series of heat waves</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In a <a
href="https://twitter.com/BenNollWeather/status/1409513163750580229">Twitter
thread</a> over the weekend, Ben Noll, a
meteorologist with the <a
href="https://twitter.com/niwa_nz">New Zealand
National Institute of Water & Atmospheric
Research</a>, 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. </p>
<p>On Sunday, the heat <a
href="https://twitter.com/wspd7pio/status/1409353691287592970">buckled
roads</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57634700">all-time
record</a> for the nation and one of 40 records
set in British Columbia that day, according to the
BBC. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/NWSPortland/status/1409378393678774274">11
towns</a> in northwest Oregon and southwest
Washington state recorded all-time high
temperatures, many surging past the previous
maximums by 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://forecast.weather.gov/wwamap/wwatxtget.php?cwa=pqr&wwa=excessive%20heat%20warning">through
Monday</a> and, in some areas, extended into <a
href="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">Thursday</a>.
“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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/temperatures-off-the-charts-as-australia-turns-deep-purple-20130108-2ce33.html">added
new shades of dark purple</a> to their maps to
show unprecedented temperatures.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“I shudder to think what the mortality rate will be
from this event,” said Phil Mote, a climate
scientist with the <a
href="https://twitter.com/OSUCEOAS">College of
Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon
State University</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>North Seattle College climate scientist <a
href="https://twitter.com/huprice">Heather Price</a>
taped aluminum foil inside her windows to try and
protect her family of four as temperatures reached
the 90s early Sunday morning. She <a
href="https://twitter.com/huprice/status/1409302753264824322">used
a handheld thermometer</a> to check how much it
cooled their home.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“Residents are not happy about the failure of
access to public water with this heat,” she said.</p>
<p><a
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012021/climate-change-west-droughts-wildfire/"><strong>Related:
Climate Change Ravaged the West With Heat and
Drought Last Year; Many Fear 2021 Will Be Worse</strong></a></p>
<h2><strong>Where There’s Unprecedented Heat, There’s
Fire</strong></h2>
<p>Fire meteorologist John Saltenberger, of the
Northwest Coordination Center in Portland, keeps an
eye on the risk of wildfire across Oregon and
Washington. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Oregon had just <a
href="https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn#Oregon">two
large fires</a> burning Monday totalling less than
8,000 acres, and Washington had none, according to
the National Interagency Fire Center.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”<strong><br>
</strong></p>
<p><strong><br>
</strong></p>
<p><strong>An Underestimated and Underreported Threat</strong></p>
<p>The current Western heat wave is remarkable by
almost any standard, said University of Reading
climate scientist <a
href="https://twitter.com/ChloBrim">Chloe
Brimicombe</a>. 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. </p>
<p>“Heat waves are our alarm system for the climate
emergency,” she said. “If there are more heatwaves,
our emergency is getting worse.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Globally, extreme heat killed at least <a
href="https://www.who.int/health-topics/heatwaves#tab=tab_1">166,000
people between 1998 and 2017</a>, according to the
World Health Organization. In the United States, the
EPA cites studies estimating 1,300 heat deaths
occurred annually in recent decades. <a
href="https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/us-heat-waves">Federal
research shows</a> the heat wave season in
Portland and Seattle is 40 to 60 days longer than in
the 1960s.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><a
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052021/extreme-heat-risks-climate-change/"><strong>Related:
Extreme Heat Risks May Be Widely Underestimated
and Sometimes Left Out of Major Climate Reports</strong></a></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“And the hotter it gets,” he said, “the larger the
attribution will be.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/gjvoldenborgh">Geert Jan
van Oldenborgh</a>, a climate scientist with Royal
Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who has
co-authored several previous <a
href="https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/analysis/heatwave/">climate
attribution studies</a>.</p>
<p>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<strong> </strong>as many climate
models project, “and we don’t know why,” he said.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“These are things that were all projected by
climate models 20 years ago, and we’re experiencing
them now,” O’Neill said.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062019/heat-deaths-cities-climate-change-paris-agreement-half-degree/">unheeded
warnings</a>.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>“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.” </p>
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<p><br>
</p>
<div>
<h4>Reporter, Mountain West, National
Environmental Reporting Network</h4>
<p>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.</p>
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<h3> <a
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/profile/bob-berwyn/">
Bob Berwyn </a> </h3>
<h4>Freelancer</h4>
<p>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.</p>
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