Hell on Earth. It's Arrived.

“Climate change has loaded the weather dice against us,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

“These extremes are something we knew were coming,” she added. “The suffering that is here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently.”

The western United States has become locked into a cycle of  "heat, drought and fire." 

As fires propagate throughout the US west on the heels of record heatwaves, experts are warning that the region is caught in a vicious feedback cycle of extreme heat, drought and fire, all amplified by the climate crisis.

Extreme heatwaves over the past few weeks – which have smashed records everywhere from southern California to Nevada and Oregon – are causing the region’s water reserves to evaporate at an alarming rate, said Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy group. And devoid of moisture, the landscape heats up quickly, like a hot plate, desiccating the landscape and turning vegetation into kindling.

The intensity of the fires in California and Oregon is “not something you used to see” so early in the season, absent the strong late summer and fall winds that fuel the west’s biggest fires, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles. The unprecedented drought gripping the west, alongside “mind-blowing” heatwaves, are fueling extreme fires this year, Swain said, adding that the extreme conditions could set the stage for “considerably worse” fires in late summer and fall. Historically, September and October have been the worst months for megafires in California.

For climate scientists and fire ecologists who have been warning for decades that global heating would bring on hotter heatwaves, drier droughts and more fire, “it can be really demoralizing and very frustrating to find ourselves here,” Kearns said. “Maybe this year will finally be the one to heighten our sense of just how vulnerable we are.”

What I find demoralizing is having a prime minister who prizes pipelines over the wellbeing and safety of his people.  A prime minister who imagines that taking appropriate measures to fight climate change is a greater threat to our economy than the climate catastrophe itself. Is this guy an idiot? What sort of economy does he think we'll have if he treats this as something to be sorted out in decades to come? 

We were warned that a pandemic was on the horizon. What does he do? He deactivates our early warning system.  On climate change, our government has also been asleep at the wheel. We've been warned, countless times, that these climate impacts were on our doorstep. What does Mr. Trudeau do? He spends tens of billions of dollars constructing pipelines.  A 734-page report released by Natural Resources Canada at the end of the hottest June in recorded history stands as a scathing indictment of this government's failure to act on the climate emergency.

Update:

Found this on the weather network web site. Wildfire season may become a thing of the past, even in Canada. That's right. We may be moving into a year-round wildfire paradigm. 

If you want information on wildfires and smoke in your region or headed toward you, try firesmoke.ca. So far, coastal B.C. and most of the Maritimes are dodging this bullet.

Parts of North America have reached the point where heat from wildfires is causing lightning storms that spark new wildfires. That's what is called a climate feedback loop.

Wouldn't this be a perfect time for our prime minister to speak candidly about the situation we're in, what we're facing over the next five or six years and what his government intends to do about it and by when?  We don't get that sort of honesty from the current guy very often and his fossil energy policy is clearly at odds with our wellbeing today and even more so in the coming decades but it's time for him to come clean with us.