Climate change The record-breaking heat wave in the Northwest was 150 times greater

Yes, the blame for climate change.

Global warming caused by humans has driven this it is likely that hundreds of people were killed last week in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere said that the unprecedented weather event was 150 times more likely, according to him. an analysis Made by World Weather Attribution. The a team of scientists from around the world he concluded that the extreme heat wave would be “almost impossible” without climate change, as it has already warmed the planet to about 2.2 ˚F (1.2 ˚C).

Scientists have long held to fix a single weather event about climate change, and generally maintained that heat waves, droughts, fires, and hurricanes would become more frequent and severe. More satellite data records, higher computing power, and high-resolution climate simulations have given researchers more confidence, often within a few days, saying that global warming has significantly increased the likelihood of specific disasters. (See 10 advances in technology 2020: the imputation of climate change.)

Last week’s extreme temperatures it demolished the heat records of a bygone era they removed power from the towns and villages of the region tens of thousands of homes, and put more than 2,000 people in emergency rooms for heat-related illnesses in Washington and Oregon.

So far, officials have reported more than 100 heat-related deaths in those states, according to the report varied the media. In addition, there were nearly 500 “sudden and untimely deaths” in British Columbia, about 300 more than usual in the corresponding five-day period.

It is likely that the higher temperatures in the world exacerbated the effects of the unusual atmospheric conditions that occurred last week, when a so-called heat dome caught hot air in much of the region. If so, similar events could occur once or twice a year if temperatures rise by 3.6 ˚F (2 ˚C), the researchers found.

A more worrying, albeit smaller, possibility is that greenhouse gas emissions have pushed the climate system into an unknown and under-understood threshold, where global warming is leading to sharper-than-expected rises in extreme temperatures. This theory will need further research to evaluate. The researchers said the strong heat waves will exceed the levels predicted by current climate models.

“It should not be broken at four or five degrees Celsius (‘ seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit ’),” said Friederike Otto, head of the World Weather Attribution and associate director of the Institute for Environmental Change at Oxford University. . “It’s such an extraordinary event that we can’t rule out the fact that we’re experiencing extreme heat today. We were expecting it to only come at higher levels of global warming.”

Another one heat wave is expected to push temperatures to three digits across parts of the Northwest in the coming days.