A couple of summers ago in B.C. people experienced an unusual weather phenomenon. It was called a heat dome. It trapped heat inside the invisible dome. Some described the weather as ‘stagnating.’ This dome trapped hot air inside it across western Canada and the northwest US. In Manitoba we felt the effects though we were not inside the heat dome. For the first time ever, Christiane and I held back, by one day, our planned trip to our un-air-conditioned cottage.
During that week amazing things happened. As Jonathan Watt explained in the Guardian “The Canadian national heat record was broken last Monday, smashed Tuesday, and then obliterated last Wednesday when Lytton’s monitoring system registered 49.6ºC.”
Yet the new Canadian heat records were only the beginning of the story as BC moved from a heat dome to a heat bomb.
As Jonathan Watts reported,
“After the insufferable heat came choking fire. Firs the forest burned, then parts of the town. On Wednesday evening major, Jan Polderman, told people to evacuate. ‘It’s dire. The whole town is on fire,” he said on TV. It took, like a whole 15 minutes form the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.’
Police stations and hospitals reported a surge in heat-related deaths—486 in British Columbia, and dozens more south of the border.
The psychological, political, and economic effects are harder to quantify but, for many, there was a sense of bewilderment that these northern territories were hotter than the Middle East. David Phillips, the Canadian government senior climatologist, summed it up in an interview with CTV, ‘I mean, it’s just not something that seems Canadian.’
More people in more countries are feeling the weather belongs elsewhere. Across the border, in Washington state, the maximum heat measured at Olympia and Quillayute was 6C higher than the previous all-time record, according to the Weather Prediction Center. In Oregon, the town of Salem hit 47C, smashing the previous record by 9C. Several areas of California and Idaho also saw new highs. The previous week, northern Europe and Russia has also sweltered in an unprecedented heat bubble. June records were broken in Moscow (34.8C), Helsinki (31.7C) Belarus (35.7C), and Estonia (34.6C).
Did you notice that. 486 people dead in BC from heat in a place that is considered having a moderate climate!
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 Lymyakon, Russia, widely considered to be the coldest place on Earth, was hotter (31.6C) than it has ever been in June. This followed a staggeringly hot spell in Siberia last year that lasted several months.
Yes, you read that last one right Siberia!
Things are getting weird and uncomfortable, but hardly anyone seems to care.