Scientists fear heat domes in North America and Siberia indicate a new dimension to the global crisis. If you were drawing up a list of possible locations for hell on Earth before this week, the small mountain village of Lytton in Canada would probably not have entered your mind. Few people outside British Columbia had heard of this community of 250 people. Those who had were more likely to think of it as bucolic. Nestled by a confluence of rivers in the forested foothills of the Lillooet and Botanie mountain ranges, the municipal website boasts: “Lytton is the ideal location for nature lovers to connect with incredible natural beauty and fresh air freedom.” Over the past seven days, however, the village has made headlines around the world for a freakishly prolonged and intense temperature spike that turned the idyll into an inferno. The US president, Joe Biden, and Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, have warned worried populations to brace for more. 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. (…) 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, widely considered to be 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. Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said there was a clear human fingerprint on this “very freakish” event. Without emissions from cars, farms and industry, he said, the record temperatures in the western north Americas would be expected only once in tens of thousands of years, but the probability rises along with the levels of the greenhouse gas.
via guardian: Canadian inferno: northern heat exceeds worst-case climate models