Climate change drove the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest

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The brutal heat wave that killed hundreds of people last week in the Pacific Northwest and Canada would have been “impossible” without climate change, a study published on Wednesday said, providing the latest evidence that global warming is making extreme heat more and more common. Dangerous.

In a preliminary analysis, called the Rapid Attribution Study, an international team of 27 scientists examined the links between human-induced climate change and a heat wave, finding that scorching temperatures are at least 150 times more likely to occur due to climate change. .

“Without climate change essentially, this event would not have happened,” Frederic Otto, one of the study’s authors and a climate scientist at Oxford University, told reporters on Wednesday.

What these and other climate attribution studies show, Otto said, is that “the probability of heat waves increases in greater numbers than any other type of extreme event.” heat waves [are] How climate change is killing us today.

Earlier this week, Multnomah County, Oregon, home to Portland, declared the latest heat wave a “major injury event,” after health officials identified 67 probable deaths linked to heat exhaustion, or hyperthermia. More than 107 people are suspected of dying from the heat across Oregon, as well as about 57 probable deaths in Washington state and more than 500 deaths in Canada. Local officials warned that it could take months to fully calculate the death toll from the heat wave.

The heat has driven more than 2,000 people to hospitals and urgent care clinics. It cracked open docks, closed businesses, and led to the mass deaths of oysters, mussels, starfish and other sea creatures along the coasts of Washington and British Columbia.

The heat wave set new records in high temperatures across Canada and the Pacific Northwest — 116 degrees Fahrenheit around Portland, 108 degrees near Seattle, and 121 degrees in the small Canadian town of Lytton — to the surprise of climate scientists. The staggering toll of the disaster is partly due to the fact that unprecedented temperatures persisted for several days in a part of the world where many people do not have air conditioning.

The research team leading the rapid attribution study focused on the affected regions with the highest populations, including Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.

“We had a problem right away,” said Gert Jan van Oldenburg of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Because the observed temperatures were much higher than what scientists had previously seen, or even thought possible, the models were initially unable to replicate them.

Ultimately, they modified the models to account for such dramatic events, estimating that the heat wave peak was a single event in 1,000 years that made it at least 150 times more likely to occur due to climate change. Climate change has also made the heat wave hotter—an estimated 3.6 degrees higher than if it had occurred before the Industrial Revolution. They conclude that such events will continue to get hotter and more frequent if climate change continues on its current path.

Scientists emphasized that they still don’t understand exactly how these high temperatures might form physically, which makes it difficult to know how likely another similar heat wave is.

“Everyone is worried about the repercussions of this event,” Van Oldenburg said. “This is something no one expected, no one thought possible. And we feel like we don’t understand heat waves as well as we thought. The big question for a lot of people is can this happen in other places?”

Van Oldenburg and his colleagues said they will continue to study the issue until they have an answer. “At the moment, we don’t know,” he said. “We need to continue this analysis.”

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