If you were drawing up a list of possible locations for hell on Earth, the small mountain village of Lytton in Canada would probably not have entered your mind until this week.
Few people outside British Columbia had heard of this community of 250 people. Those who had were more likely to think of it as bucolic.
Nestled by a confluence of rivers in the forested foothills of the Lillooet and Botanie mountain ranges, the municipal Web site says: “Lytton is the ideal location for nature lovers to connect with incredible natural beauty and fresh air freedom.”
Illustration: Yusha
However, this village has over the past seven days made headlines around the world for a freakishly prolonged and intense temperature spike that turned the idyll into an inferno.
US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have told worried populations to brace for more. Shocked climate scientists are wondering how even worst-case scenarios failed to predict such furnace-like conditions so far north.
The recent extreme weather anomalies were not represented in global computer models that are used to project how the world might change with more emissions, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research director Johan Rockstrom said.
The fear is that weather systems might be more frequently blocked as a result of human emissions.
“It is a risk — of a serious regional weather impact triggered by global warming — that we have underestimated so far,” Rockstrom said.
In Lytton, it felt as if the weather itself had stagnated. Trapped by a vast heat dome that enveloped western Canada and the northwestern US, temperatures had nowhere to go but up.
In Lytton, the Canadian national heat record was broken on Monday last week, smashed on Tuesday and then obliterated on Wednesday when the local monitoring station registered 49.6?C.
After insufferable heat came choking fire. First the forest burned, then parts of the town.
On Wednesday evening, Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman issued an evacuation order.
“It’s dire. The whole town is on fire,” he said on TV. “It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.”
By Thursday, satellite images showed an eruption of blazes around the village and a widening smoke cloud across the region.
Police stations and hospitals reported a surge of heat-related deaths — 486 in British Columbia, and many dozens more south of the border.
Roads buckled as asphalt expanded. At least one city suffered power cuts.
The psychological, political and economic effects are harder to quantify, but for many, along with the horror came a sense of bewilderment that these northern territories were hotter than the Middle East.
Environment and Climate Change Canada senior climatologist David Phillips summed it up in an interview with CTV.
“I mean, it’s just not something that seems Canadian,” Phillips said.
More people in more countries are feeling their weather belongs to another part of the world.
Across the border, in Washington state, the maximum heat measured at Olympia and Quillayute was 10?C higher than the previous all-time records, the US Weather Prediction Center said.
In Oregon, the town of Salem hit 47?C, smashing the previous record by 9?C. Several areas of California and Idaho also set new highs.
The previous week, northern Europe and Russia also sweltered in an unprecedented heat bubble. June records were broken in Belarus (35.7?C), Estonia (34.6?C), Helsinki (31.7?C) and Moscow (34.8?C).
Further east, Siberia experienced an early heat wave that helped to reduce the amount of sea ice in the Laptev Sea to a record low for the time of year. The town of Oymyakon, Russia, which is widely considered the coldest inhabited place on Earth, was hotter (31.?6C) than it has ever been in June.
This followed a staggeringly protracted hot spell in Siberia last year that lasted several months.
Copernicus Climate Change Service director Carlo Buontempo said there was a clear human fingerprint on this “very freakish” event.
Without emissions from vehicles, farms and industry, the record temperatures in the western North America would be expected only once in tens of thousands of years, but the probability rises along with the greenhouse gas, he said.
“In the present-day climate, getting an extremely hot June is common, and is likely to occur twice in three decades. However, an analysis from many computer models suggests that by the end of the century these extreme temperatures are more likely than not,” Buontempo said. “Human influence is estimated to have increased the likelihood of a new record several thousand times.”
Rising temperatures can be seen across the world. Even in the Middle East 50?C was once an outlier, but parts of Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan and the US and are now approaching or passing that mark.
However, the intensity of the heat in North America this year and Siberia last year has taken many scientists by surprise and suggested extra factors might be involved in northern latitudes.
One theory is that the temperature spike might have been caused not just by global heating, but by slowing weather systems that get stuck in one place for an extended period, which gives them time to intensify and cause more damage. This was an important factor in the devastation in Texas in 2018 caused by Hurricane Harvey, which sat above Houston for several days rather than blowing inland and weakening.
Blocked high pressure fronts were also blamed for the blistering heat wave in Europe in 2019.
Experts at the Potsdam Institute and elsewhere believe the rapid heating in the Arctic and decline of sea ice is making the jet stream wiggle in large meandering patterns called Rossby resonance waves, trapping high and low-pressure weather systems that get stuck in one location for a longer time.
This theory remains contested, but Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said this week’s unexpectedly fierce heat at Lytton and elsewhere should prompt climatologists to consider additional effects of human activity.
“We should take this event very seriously,” he wrote in an e-mail.
“You warm up the planet, you’re going to see an increased incidence of heat extremes. Climate models capture this effect very well and predict large increases in heat extremes, but there is something else going on with this heat wave, and indeed, with many of the very persistent weather extremes we’ve seen in recent years in the US, Europe, Asia and elsewhere, where the models aren’t quite capturing the impact of climate change,” Mann said.
Regardless of which interactions are to blame, scientists are agreed that the simplest way to reduce the risk of further temperature jolts is to cut fossil fuel emissions and halt deforestation.
“It appears that this heat wave is still a rare phenomenon in the current climate, but whether it stays that way depends on our decisions,” said Friederike Otto, associate director of the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. “If the world does not rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use and other sources of greenhouse gas emissions like deforestation, global temperatures will continue to rise and deadly heat waves such as these will become even more common.”
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