Historic heatwave in Canada

Historic heatwave in Canada

Subject: Environment

Context:

A team of climate researchers from the World Weather Attribution said this week that the was witnessed in western Canada and the US in the last days of June was impossible without human-caused climate change.

Concept:

Multiple cities in the US and Canada experienced a heatwave with temperature records, in the village of Lytton in Canada’s British Columbia, temperatures reached a high of 49.6ºC.

Effects

• Sale of air conditioners and coolers
• Led to a rise in sudden deaths
• Sharp increase in hospital visits due to heat-related illnesses and other such emergencies.

Such an event is estimated to be about a “1 in 1000 year event” in today’s climate.

The possible reasons are

• The historic heatwave is itself simply a very low probability event, it is an extremely rare event but was aggravated because of climate change.
• The probability of such kinds of heatwaves has increased.
• The researchers are saying that in the absence of human-induced climate change, the heatwave such as seen recently in the Pacific Northwest would have been 150 times rarer.
• They also note that this heatwave was 2°C hotter than it would have been if it had occurred at the beginning of the industrial revolution (around late 1700s) when the global average temperatures were 1.2°C cooler than what they are today.
• The current rates of emissions, when the world is warmer by 2°C (0.8°C more than what it is today) around the 2040s, a typical heatwave type of event could be at least another degree hotter. If emission levels continue to rise, which in turn would increase average global temperatures, extreme heat waves will become less rare than they are today.

Steps to be taken

• Heat action plans can be organised as early warning systems to help people deal with such events.
• There need to be some long-term plans such as cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions and also adapt to the hotter climate by modifying the built environments.
• They claimed that buildings coated with this paint may be able to cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning (because the colour white absorbs the least heat out of all the colours on the VIBGYOR spectrum. Black absorbs the most). Because the paint is so white, the researchers demonstrated outdoors that the paint can keep surfaces 19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than their ambient surroundings at night.