Which place do you think of when you think of hell on earth? death Valley? Siberia? Steinbach?  There are many candidates for that position.

A couple of years ago, British Columbia surprised the world.  And not in a good way. Most of us think of B.C. as the land of mild winters and mild summers. We have not thought of it as a place of extreme weather. That was then; this is now. Lytton B.C. is a place of extreme weather. The hottest place in Canada!

As Jonathan Watts of the Guardian said,

“If you have been drawing up a list of possible locations for hell on Earth before last week, Lytton would probably not have entered your mind. Few outside of British Columbia had heard of this Canadian mountain 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 website boasts: Lytton is the ideal location for nature lovers to connect to beauty and fresh air freedom.

However the village made headlines around the world last week for a freakishly prolonged intense temperature spike that turned the idyll into an inferno…Shocked climate change scientists are wondering how even worst-case scenarios failed to predict such furnace-like conditions so far north.”

 

Climate change is surprising a lot of us. And usually in a bad way. Like fires destroying large parts of Los Angeles.  Or Fort McMurray. Or people dying in a forest fire in Lac du Bonnet Manitoba. Welcome to the world of climate change.

Literally the temperatures in Lytton were off the charts. None of the computer models for climate change—no matter how extreme—predicted what happened there.

For a long time, climate scientists have been warning that one of the effects of climate change will not just be warmer weather, but will include more extreme weather events.

 Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact Research explained that the

“recent extreme weather anomalies were not represented in computer models that are used to project how the world might change with more emissions. The fear is that weather systems might be more frequently disrupted as a result of human emissions. He told the Guardian, “It is a risk—of a serious regional weather impact triggered by global warming—that we have underestimated so far.”

It seems that weather has arrived that is worse than the worst.