7 ms·
Village of Lytton, B.C., evacuated as mayor says 'the whole town is on fire'
- devetec 5y agoClimate change isn't coming. It's already here.
- canadianfella 5y agoSo deep
- encryptluks2 5y agoThat is like saying after a major earthquake... oh, fracking caused it. There is absolutely no way to say that climate change is responsible for this or the heat "dome" or whatever they called it here in the PNW. If you look at the averages, you can see that there are annual fluctuations. There are many factors to consider, not just that global warming is responsible for everything.
- throwawaysea 5y agoAgree. This is the third or fourth front page HN discussion about the recent couple days of heat in the Pacific Northwest, and all the discussions have been full of hot takes about climate change that unscientifically try to establish a cause without any statistical analysis or evidence. Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatures-are-being.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...): > 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.
- _Microft 5y agoYou cannot say what is responsible (if that’s possible at all) but you can say whether climate changes makes events more (or less) probable than they used to be. Such statements are usually based on simulations (ensembles) where the number of occurrences of particular events is counted. An example that‘s easy to understand is probability of precipitation from the weather forecast: if it says that the probability of rain is 72% at a particular place, then it means that rain was observed in 72% of the simulations (which are run with slightly different parameters to account for uncertainty in starting conditions). This is a simplified description but maybe it helps?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoClimate change has always been coming and here. That’s what it is, changing. No one actually argues this. I think you mean man made crisis. But, was it man made crisis in 1937 when the previous record was set? Why was that just cyclic or random weather event but this has to be a smoking gun? It not effective to ”weather isn’t climate… unless it’s used to argue climate change”. That isn’t helpful. Holding up a snowball or pointing at rain is just a shallow reinforcement to people that don’t really understand the topic and that goes both ways. Instead maybe be helpful and put together the temperature trend for that city over 100 years if you want to get people on board the idea that it’s rapid warming. Or discuss non-political solutions. Or try to not bandwagon finger wag for what should be a level-headed discussion.
- tsimionescu 5y agoWhile you are right in principle, right now Lytton is not just experiencing record temperatures, it's experiencing temperatures 5 C higher than anything encountered in the last 100-150 years (highest peak known before was 44.4C in 1941, 29 June 2021 was 49.6C): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_in_Canada#Highest_temperatures_ever_recorded_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i... Edit: corrected values to use the previous record for Lytton instead of the previous record for all of Canada.
- elevenoh 5y agoLytton BC hit 49.6 degrees yesterday. For perspective: China's all time high temp record: 50.5 degrees. Australia: 50.7 Canada broke its heat record 3 days in a row. 486 Sudden deaths in BC during this heat wave, 3x the normal # of sudden deaths.
- throwawaysea 5y agoAre you sure you’re not quoting the surface temperature for Lytton as opposed to the air temperature?
- pkulak 5y agoNo. That was the temperature of the damn air. It's nuts.
- ericye16 5y agoIt's air temperature: https://twitter.com/ECCCWeatherBC/status/1410017678216024067 https://twitter.com/ECCCWeatherBC/status/1410017678216024067
- bch 5y ago> Are you sure you’re not quoting the… Yes. https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/daily_data_e.html?StationID=51598&timeframe=2&Day=30&Year=2021&Month=6# https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/daily_data_e.html...
- senectus1 5y agoyikes... been through weather like that in Australia a couple of times. but yeah I can't imagine houses and people (and animals) in Canada are accustomed or designed to handling anywhere near that.
- bch 5y ago> I can’t imagine the […] people […] in Canada are accustomed Absolutely not. I don’t live in Lytton, but close, and similarly hot. What is usually called a hot spell would be 34, 35, maybe 36 degrees. The last 3 days we’re well into the 40’s, approaching 50. I went out today and it was about 46 degrees. It hurt my eyes of all things. It’s brutally hot, and by the time I was done (I walked down to river to check temperature, maybe 20-30 minutes) I was spent. Not for this Canadian. > houses Well, we get hot summers, and cold winters, so houses should be well insulated (which serves both hot and cold) and air conditioners are common. So not completely unprepared, though it can be hard for A/C to keep up. Edit: As I think of it, the Fraser Valley was fantastically hot, as was the rest of the lower mainland, which is usually mild weather (typical “pacific north west”) and I think less likely to have A/C installed. The Interior/Okanagan (Incl Lytton) are used to long hot summers, but not 50 degrees.
- swader999 5y agoThe fire resources and corruption there in BC are just as severe as this weather. I won't live in certain places after what I've seen happen the last couple of decades.
- gentleman11 5y agoCare to elaborate?
- swader999 5y agoNo.
- jdmg94 5y agoI live in BC but I’m from South America and for me it felt like a summer back home, I was surprised to see so many people passed away this weekend
- gentleman11 5y agoIs it really normal to have temperatures in the 35-49 range there? I can’t even imagine
- mnouquet 5y agoCo-worker from Mumbai (yeah, here-say, I know) mentioned temperature up to 50C in the summer.
- kergonath 5y agoMumbai is horrific because of the humidity on top of the high temperature. I’ve been there a couple of times, though never during a heat wave. I would not want to live there.
- Izikiel43 5y agoArgentina gets easily 30+ in the summer, 40+ is not unusual
- elevenoh 5y agoDepends where you were in BC. Victoria was >15 degrees colder than Kamloops for instance.
- retrac 5y agoSome of it is acclimation. You do learn to tolerate the heat better. I am always drenched in sweat the first really hot days of the summer which gets better. But high heat which approaches the wet bulb temperature is just stressful on the body. Subject a person with moderate heart failure or kidney problems to such conditions and they may do badly. In normally very hot climates, the health burden of that is spread out over time, year after year, not bunched up all at once.
- Tiktaalik 5y agoTweets on this are horrifying https://twitter.com/coltondavies_/status/1410463746896527362?s=21 https://twitter.com/coltondavies_/status/1410463746896527362...
- Kluny 5y agoI live in Victoria, on the water, and this past Sunday and Monday were the hottest days I’ve ever experienced. Nicaragua in the summer wasn’t that hot. The European heat wave of 2018 wasn’t that hot. My friend who just moved here from Johannesburg said he’s never been that hot. People were baking cookies inside their cars. I was worried to leave my pets home during the day in case the inside temperature went too high. The lake that we swim in to cool off was bathtub warm. And Lytton was 10 degrees hotter than that.
- hnick 5y agoI know climate is a thing but is there local phenomena explaining this, like the polar vortices that made the US colder than normal? The article says it's very dry and they're expecting low precipitation thunderstorms which will sadly probably lead to new fires. e: Article didn't say but this one did: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/temperatures-ease-in-b-c-as-alta-sask-brace-for-heat-dome-1.5491403 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/temperatures-ease-in-b-c-as-al... Apparently there is a big dome of heat trapped between mountain ranges, like a giant bubble. A combination of pressure and geography means air can't penetrate as easily to move it on, so it's just sitting, and getting hotter.
- retrac 5y agoYes, these sorts of things happen in that region. And that is the mechanism causing it. But it typically means highs of like 35 or 38 and maybe one day going up to 40. (Temperatures like that would normally be considered very hot.) Day after day over 45 is a shocking idea to me as a Canadian, let alone a record high of 49.6. Been all over the country and I've never experienced hotter than 40 °C myself, and briefly.
- hnick 5y agoSo the mechanism is normal but there is just more energy being pumped into the system lately? That sounds crazy to me given the latitude but the geography explanation makes sense. The article said it's like a giant Death Valley. My understanding is the hot air is high pressure, meaning no cold air can get in, and the mountains block movement of the system as a whole. This implies to me that the hotter it gets the more 'sticky' it might get in staying around for longer. Not sure if that's true but thunderstorms in dry heat are never great, they're a regular source of fires.
- neom 5y agoThis morning - Lightning storm sparks dozens of fires, evacuation alert at Deka Lake, BC: https://www.castanet.net/news/Kamloops/338740/Lighting-storm-sparks-dozens-of-fires-evacuation-alert-at-Deka-Lake https://www.castanet.net/news/Kamloops/338740/Lighting-storm...
- pvaldes 5y ago> It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere "There are currently 67 fires burning in British Columbia and 44 of those have begun in the last 2 days, according to the B.C. Wildfire Dashboard. To date, the province has experienced 450 fires this year" https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/americas/canada-town-evacuation-extreme-heat/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/americas/canada-town-evac... Looks pretty much like arsonism to me. Is a possibility that they shouldn't discard still. Intentional or not, to have a wildfire must be a spark source somewhere. 450 sparks in this case. Discarded bottles acting as lenses, gas spilled from a car crash, cigarettes... something.
- Kluny 5y agoThe most common cause is thunderstorms.
- pvaldes 5y agoSometimes yes, you are right, but this depend on the area. I remember a study from the north of Spain concluding that only around 11% of the wildfires with known cause were by lightning. Most people would guess a much higher percentage if asked. In 2020, some places here experienced a 94% less wildfires than in previous years also. The only variable changing was humans. Everybody at home by covid19 = no wildfires. To fellow Canadians with better direct experience here, are this hot waves being coupled with heavy (or dry) storms?