By Matthew Cappucci 8 July 2021 (The Washington Post) – Last week, a “thousand-year” heatwave baked the Pacific Northwest and adjacent British Columbia with widespread highs topping 100 degrees, resulting in a death toll in the hundreds. Lytton, Canada, climbed to 121 degrees and established new national records three days in a row before the town burned […]
8 July 2021 (Reuters) – California’s power grid operator on Thursday issued a “flex” alert for Friday, asking consumers to conserve energy from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. as high demand driven by extreme heat could trigger a capacity shortfall on the state’s electric grid. If the grid is still unable to meet power needs […]
7 July 2021 (World Weather Attribution) – During the last days of June 2021, Pacific northwest areas of the U.S. and Canada experienced temperatures never previously observed, with records broken in many places by several degrees Celsius. Multiple cities in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington and the western provinces of Canada recorded temperatures […]
By Seth Borenstein 4 July 2021 (AP) – As outlandish as the killer heatwave that struck the Pacific Northwest was, it fits into a decades-long pattern of uneven summer warming across the United States. The West is getting roasted by hotter summer days while the East Coast is getting swamped by hotter and stickier summer […]
By Brian Kahn 29 June 2021 (Gizmodo) – Air temperatures during record-setting heatwave in the Pacific Northwest were bad enough. But the ground was on a whole other level. Stunning new satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3 satellite shows ground temperatures reached as high as 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) in Wenatchee, Washington. Apparently […]
By Brittany Roffel 2 July 2021 (CBC News) – The BC Coroners Service has reported 719 sudden deaths in the past week, triple the number that would normally occur in the province. “We are releasing this information as it is believed likely the extreme weather B.C. has experienced in the past week is a significant […]
By Svetlana Skarbo 30 June 2021 (The Siberian Times) – More than 2,000 people are deployed in extinguishing wildfires raging around Russia’s coldest inhabited territory, Yakutia, now in the third year of an extremely intense season of wildfires. The first of them ignited as early as the beginning of May right outside the world-famous Pole […]
By Megan Burbank 30 June 2021 (The Seattle Times) – As the Puget Sound region coped this week with extreme heat caused by climate change, one of the art world’s most audacious commentaries on the issue reemerged across the Atlantic. A 2009 work of creative vandalism from British artist and agitator Banksy, Subject to Availability, was sold […]
By Sarah Kaplan 3 July 2021 PORTLAND, Oregon (The Washington Post) – The emergency department at Oregon Health Sciences University had rarely been this busy, even during the worst stages of the covid-19 pandemic. Physicians raced to provide fluids to patients who arrived breathless, dizzy, and drenched in sweat. Others were brought in on stretchers, […]
By Sarah Moon, Jon Passantino, and Rebekah Riess 29 June 2021 (CNN) – “Since the onset of the heatwave late last week, the BC Coroners Service has experienced a significant increase in deaths reported where it is suspected that extreme heat has been contributory,” Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe said in a statement. The coroner’s service […]
