The article’s headline is sensationalist and it does not offer evidence for the claim that this heat wave is “driven by climate change”. The person quoted in th

The article’s headline is sensationalist and it does not offer evidence for the claim that this heat wave is “driven by climate change”. The person quoted in the body of the article makes a less certain claim: > “It’s always difficult to immediately quantify how much impact climate change has had on a climate extreme, but there is plenty of evidence to show that high temperatures and heat waves have become worse due to climate change,” he wrote. “Heatwaves across the contiguous United States have occurred more often and lasted longer since the 1960s, which is consistent with a warming climate due to climate change.” Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, maintains a public facing weather blog that analyzes such events. He had a recent post (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatures-are-being.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...) that suggests this is more of a chance convergence of various factors, including an air compression caused by air sinking off the Western slopes of the Cascade mountain range. More specifically he says: > Finally, a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event. Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well. Professor Mass has also promised a future blog post analyzing this event further in the context of global warming.