In today’s Washington Post, an article says that researchers are virtually certain that warming from human greenhouse gas emissions played a pivotal role in recent fatalities.
“The system was overwhelmed,” said Mary Tanski, chair of OHSU’s department of emergency medicine, of the towering heat dome that toppled temperature records across the Northwest this week.
Some patients didn’t survive. In Oregon, Washington, and western Canada, authorities are investigating more than 800 deaths potentially linked to the punishing heat.
The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for the landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts, and its worst drought in decades. In Verkhoyansk, Siberia — usually one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet — the land surface temperature was 118 degrees.
“It did not have to be this way,” Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California said. “We have known enough to take action for 20 years. And if we had taken action 20 years ago, it would be a lot easier.”
“But there’s no ‘I told you so,’ ” he continued. “I just feel bad. Just bad. I really wish we had been wrong. But we weren’t.”
The only comfort, said Hayhoe, is in knowing that action can still be taken. Though the world could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming within this decade, scientists say we can avoid crossing that threshold if we cut global greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.6 percent per year.
Such cuts would require an unprecedented transformation of human society. But look at the alternative, Hayhoe said.
“We have choices to make, she said. “And the quicker we make those choices, the better off we will all be. The future is in our hands.”
Read the full article at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/07/03/climate-change-heat-dome-death/