Record-Breaking Heat Waves Have Arrived Decades Earlier Than Predicted
The heat waves of 2021, which have pummeled western regions of the United States and Canada, have killed, at a minimum, hundreds of people. In British Columbia, authorities recorded a spike in deaths in the nearly 500-range after temperatures soared to near 120 degrees; and in both Oregon and Washington State, dozens more are known to have died.
Yet those numbers, horrific as they are, do not tell the full story of the devastation caused by this summer’s record-breaking temperatures caused by a climate catastrophe that, until recently, even the most pessimistic climatologists thought was still two or three decades out. Indeed, the mortality data show that recent deaths were not simply a result of just one extreme “heat event.”