In the midst of North West Wildfire, New York Times Reports ‘Climate change Drove Western Heat Wave’s Extreme’ and ‘A Wildfire So Overwhelming That it Controls the Weather’

A New York Times report of July 7 2021 by Henry Fountain concludes that “the extraordinary heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest last week would almost certainly not have occurred without global warming, an international team of climate researchers said Wednesday.

Temperatures were so extreme — including readings of 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Ore., and a Canadian record of 121 in British Columbia — that the researchers had difficulty saying just how rare the heat wave was. But they estimated that in any given year there was only a 0.1 percent chance of such an intense heat wave occurring.

“Although it was a rare event, it would have been virtually impossible without climate change,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who conducted the study with 26 other scientists, part of a collaborative group called World Weather Attribution.”

Read the article here

A further article of July 20 ‘A Wildfire So Overwhelming that it Controls the Weather’ notes that the bootleg fire, ‘at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it is also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere’.