Are Heat Domes the Future Of the West?

 

Having sweltered through the heat dome that settled in over coastal British Columbia last weekend I can tell you there's nothing pleasant about them. People die, sudden death. It keeps the cops and local coroners busy.

When it's gone, replaced by cool breezes off the North Pacific, we can relax. People go back about their daily lives. It's over. 

Is it?

Guardian environment editor, Jonathan Watts, writes that the heat dome phenomenon experienced in Siberia and the Pacific Northwest represent a new dimension in the climate breakdown emergency. The razing of a small mountain village in Canada has riveted attention on the change underway.

Over the past seven days, [Lytton] has made headlines around the world for a freakishly prolonged and intense temperature spike that turned the idyll into an inferno.

...Shocked climate scientists are wondering how even worst-case scenarios failed to predict such furnace-like conditions so far north.

Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said the recent extreme weather anomalies were not represented in global computer models that are used to project how the world might change with more emissions. The fear is that weather systems might be more frequently blocked as a result of human emissions. “It is a risk – of a serious regional weather impact triggered by global warming – that we have underestimated so far,” he said.

In Lytton, it felt as if the weather itself had stagnated. Trapped by a vast heat dome that enveloped western Canada and the north-western US, temperatures had nowhere to go but up.

...The psychological, political and economic impacts are harder to quantify, but for many, along with the horror came a sense of bewilderment that these northern territories were hotter than the Middle East. David Phillips, the Canadian government’s 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 their weather belongs to another part of the world.

The previous week, northern Europe and Russia 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).

Further east, Siberia experienced an early heatwave 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 Oymyakon, Russia, which is widely considered the coldest inhabited place on Earth, was hotter (31.6C) than it has ever been in June. This followed a staggeringly protracted hot spell in Siberia last year that lasted several months.

The Accomplice - Rossby Waves

Rising temperatures can be seen across the world. Even in the Middle East 50C was once an outlier, but parts of Pakistan, India, Australia, the US and Canada are now approaching or passing that mark.

But the intensity of the heat in the north-west Americas this year and Siberia last year has taken many scientists by surprise and suggested extra factors may be involved in northern latitudes.

One theory is that the recent temperature spike might have been caused not just by global heating, but by slowing weather systems that get stuck in one place for an extended period, which gives them time to intensify and cause more damage. This was an important factor in the devastation in Texas caused by the 2018 Hurricane Harvey, which sat above Houston for several days rather than blowing inland and weakening. Blocked high pressure fronts were also blamed for the blistering heatwave in Europe in 2019.

Experts at the Potsdam Institute and elsewhere believe the rapid heating in the Arctic and decline of sea ice is making the jet stream wiggle in large meandering patterns, so called Rossby resonance waves, trapping high- and low-pressure weather systems that will be stuck in one location for a longer time.

Rossby waves are thought responsible for the 2013 Calgary floods when a heavy rain front got stuck over the nearby foothills. A storm, that in normal circumstances would have passed through to the east, stayed over the area, its rain transforming into flood waters. The prime minister of the time, you know who, shrugged and said 'who could've known' when lots of people knew and had been warning this could happen.

Renowned climate scientist, Michael Mann, warns there is something beyond the models in play.

“You warm up the planet, you’re going to see an increased incidence of heat extremes. Climate models capture this effect very well and predict large increases in heat extremes. But there is something else going on with this heatwave, and indeed, with many of the very persistent weather extremes we’ve seen in recent years in the US, Europe, Asia and elsewhere, where the models aren’t quite capturing the impact of climate change.”

“It appears that this heatwave is still a rare phenomenon in the current climate, but whether it stays that way depends on our decisions,” Friederike Otto, the associate director of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, said. “If the world does not rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use and other sources of greenhouse gas emissions like deforestation, global temperatures will continue to rise and deadly heatwaves such as these will become even more common.”

Canada needs to reconsider the cost of our dwindling petro-economy, a cost that is rarely borne by those who profit from coal and bitumen trafficking. The great scourges such as tobacco or malaria never imperiled civilization as fossil fuels may. The carbon economy could trigger a mass extinction.

This is not a threat that can be fixed by a tweak here or there. Think about this - the Earth is now trapping twice as much heat as it did just 15 years ago. Twice as much heat. A paltry 15 year span.  The Earth now has humanity by the throat.

We need to elect leaders who don't have a fossil fuel fetish.  A guy who stupidly throws many billions of dollars on a pipeline project no one in the private sector will touch is plainly unfit to govern.

This is not to say the Liberals cannot redeem themselves and their tar-stained party.  There is an option, a highly educated and accomplished individual, a guy who knows that the worst fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Mark Carney.

As governor of the Bank of England, Carney was an outspoken critic of bitumen trafficking, even declaring the tarry sludge a "stranded asset." There's no way he would fit into a Trudeau cabinet but there's a way to solve that too.  Usher Justin Trudeau out the door with the grateful thanks of the Liberal party membership. His best work came in 2015 when he ended Harper's reign. It's been pretty much downhill since then and, let's face it, he's out of ideas. "I may be no hell but I'm still better than that guy, O'Toole," is not much of a campaign platform.

The morgues are full of those who succumbed to the heat dome.  Lytton is the Calgary Petroleum Club's Lidice. Let's end this murderous madness.