2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

Akrasia wrote: »

would a canadian have taken that bet in 2016 that they wouldn't breach the 49c barrier within 5 years? If climate change wasn't real, they would have been completely justified in their incredulity

So are we going to hit 39 this year or not? I need to know whether to leave out water for the cats.

Akrasia wrote: »

So in other words, you were bullsh1tting the whole time


Is there an unsurprised emoji?

No BSing at all. The link is literally a few pages back, but hang on, I'll do the dirty work for you.

Canadians are used to weather extremes and would not be likely to bet against anything that had any possible way of coming to reality. We have chosen to live in a few locations in this country that perhaps are not that suited to human habitation. Same goes for south of the border. Life is pleasant and quite easy 99% of the time, then becomes dangerous or impossible the other 1% (those are not quite accurate percentages, more like 99.99 and 00.01). There's even a ranger station in Death Valley, somebody spends the summer there. Would you? I sure wouldn't.

Lytton is the sort of place that is perched on the edge of an extreme micro-climate zone of a few miles square, and there are several other such places, if things go wrong then such places can be gone within minutes or hours. A couple of years ago, a large town in California (ironically named Paradise) burned in this same way on a much larger scale. So did Fort Macmurray, Alberta (about 40 to 50 per cent of that much larger town was damaged if not destroyed).

The way this is unfolding, it could happen a few more times. It is somewhat more likely in WA or OR than in BC because they have larger areas of easily burned scrubby forest that surrounds towns and villages. But it could happen again this month in BC, it would not surprise me. We are all on high alert, but these fires start very quickly and once they get going faster than 15-20 mph in a forward direction fighting them becomes very difficult.

Where I live, the terrain within 50-100 miles in all directions is almost all forest other than a few alpine areas and the semi-arid Columbia valley. If we get a lot of lightning strikes around here in the next 3-5 days, then fires could easily start up. There have not been damaging fires in this region for decades (more so to the north and northwest of this region and down in WA a good distance past the border). So we're all apprehensive about this. A small part of the population (as is the case anywhere) are not that bright and may go off into the bush, park a heated vehicle over dry brush, or even toss a butt out a window. You can have a highly educated political culture but if even 1% of your population are idiots, then their actions will overcome all of the good otherwise done. Also it has to be said there have been arson cases motivated by the desire to get temporary work, mental illness, a terrorist or racial-conflict motivation in some cases, and this is unsettling too, there have been a rash of church burnings in response to news about events at residential schools in the past (news that has not been entirely confirmed or detailed yet either, but of course that does not stop those who want to start trouble).

It is widely suspected in western Canada that the Fort Mac fire a few years ago was an act of arson committed on a back road off a major highway, or perhaps more gently it was a poor campfire dousing by people who took advantage of a warm spring weekend and went off into the bush. Either way, that fire was not started by lightning, it was late April and a dry spring weather pattern.

Getting back to my local situation, we are still in the extreme heat although just to the west of here a slightly cooler air mass has pushed in. The dynamics are a bit out of focus and the storm response has jumped past us into the southeast corner of BC, but I don't think we're out of the woods so to speak. The temperature here is near 40 C with a gusty south wind at present.

(news update, Lytton is said to be 90-95 per cent burned down and there are two known fatalities)

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Wow. Just wow. A village got so hot that it "burst into flames"?! I thought it was a wildfire.

Are you saying Ireland will it 39 in 5 years? How much are you willing to bet? I can tell you now - and everyone is my witness - that if that happens I will gladly convert to your side of the fence and will use words like "burst" and "devastation" as much as I can. That's a promise. Bookmark this post.

EDIT: No, wait. You said that you would have said it 5 years ago, so this year it will hit 39. I can't wait. It'll hardly be tomorrow, and then the weather will break down, so I suppose we'll have to wait a few more weeks. I say it'll be Shannon Airport.

The synoptics that brought us the 3 days of 30c plus on the western side of this island at this time of the year back in 2018 are not too dissimilar to that which brought those incredible temps to the western side of the way, way bigger north American continent this time around. Something maybe to keep in mind.

Since the subject was brought up in the thread, the most likely cause of the Lytton fire disaster appears to be sparks from a railway line near the town, setting long dry grass on fire and with the strong gusty winds, spreading rapidly into trees and nearby structures.

A fairly serious fire started around mid-day Thursday near a forestry road northwest of Castlegar, a small city of about ten thousand which is located about 40 kms northeast of where I live. There were no lightning strikes in the area so some interaction between users of this forestry road and the forest is the only possible cause, that could vary from some idiot tossing a butt, to somebody parking beside a stream or lake and having their hot engine cause brush to start burning, to a smouldering campfire. We are under a no-campfire ban but that was announced with the recent lifting of mask requirements and may not have come to the attention of all campers (as to who would want to go camping in this heat wave, I haven't been down this particular forestry road, maybe there are some nice lakeside campsites and those might be appealing as compared to hot residences, because it does cool down at night despite the unprecedented daytime heat).

No storms have formed to our south, they all seemed to prefer the larger lift opportunities further north and northeast of this region.

Oneiric 3 wrote: »

Sorry, but who gets to decide that a media org is 'reputable'? Is there a 'science study' to show that CH4 is for example :eek:, or is reputability based solely on whether or not a media org shares the same biases as oneself?

I'll get to decide what is reputable or not when it comes to media articles, not you deciding for me.

Reputable news sources share the following characteristics
Taken from here
https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/news/reputable, but anyone who has any interest in critical thinking will already know these

Characteristics of Reputable News Sources
Characteristics of Reputable Newspapers

publishes accurate content; checks facts, and if errors are made, corrects them

uses reputable sources (people, documentation) and verifies those sources

presents headlines which accurately represent the article content; headlines don't play on readers' emotions

clearly identifies authors of articles with bylines

produces its own content; doesn't merely aggregate content from other sources

clearly identifies content types (e.g. report vs. editorial)

conducts reporting not just editorializing

employs journalists who follow the profession's code of ethics

Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Code of Ethics, four main sections: Seek Truth and Report It, Minimize Harm, Act Independently, Be Accountable and Transparent
10 Elements to Good Journalism (American Institute Press), selected from Kovach and Rosenstiel's book The Elements of Journalism.

Channel 4 is not without it's flaws, but it is a reputable media organisation. Not everything they publish will be accurate, but it is not unreasonable to use them as a source to back up a claim about current events. If it's a scientific claim, it's better to refer directly to the science, but for news events, they're not likely to lie or distort the facts.

What sources do you prefer to use? What criteria do you use to decide if they are reputable?

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

So are we going to hit 39 this year or not? I need to know whether to leave out water for the cats.

Reading comprehension isn't your strength it seems.

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

Wow. Just wow. A village got so hot that it "burst into flames"?! I thought it was a wildfire. .

It’s dire. The whole town is on fire,” he said on TV. “It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.” By Thursday, satellite images showed an eruption of blazes around the village and a widening smoke cloud across the region.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/canadian-inferno-northern-heat-exceeds-worst-case-climate-models

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Most Canadians believe in the reality of climate change, this country has a very left-wing political culture in general, and many things have been done here (all obviously without any effect) to influence the climate. So I don't think many Canadians would have taken that bet. Those who don't think AGW style climate change is real may still believe that the climate is warming for other reasons. Or they might have thought (if asked about your bet) that anything is possible here, we are after all used to weather extremes in Canada, being dominated by continental climate influences. I don't think the average urban Canadian if asked a month ago would have had much idea what the existing national extreme temperature was, but people here do travel south a lot and sometimes in the summer (although not for pleasure) so they are familiar with the fact that certain parts of the southwestern U.S. can reach 120 F, also it's a fairly common opinion among the 99% who don't live in three or four relatively confined hot spots that there are places in BC and the prairies that are "too hot for normal people" so they wouldn't choose to live in places that often exceed 40 C.

If anyone there is labouring under the misconception that the Trump political movement has any traction in Canada, you can examine the results of the last election where the closest analogue to Trump's version of the GOP managed to attract 1.5% of the vote. Our "conservative" party is widely known to be a sort of Liberal Party B team who would do things just slightly differently (and rarely are given the chance). The Liberal Party which used to be centrist to some extent is now enthusiastically globalist and about where Obama used to be in the spectrum, which for me is centre-left. Other Canadian political parties can only be described as either far left or delusional. The leader of the Green Party went on TV to give her reasoned opinion that "every summer will now be like this" and I'll take that bet.

My point wasn’t that Canadians are poorly informed or complacent, it was more to do with the sheer magnitude of the event. Most climate scientists would have thought this event would not have been plausible so soon into the climate change journey

Akrasia wrote: »

It’s dire. The whole town is on fire,” he said on TV. “It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.” By Thursday, satellite images showed an eruption of blazes around the village and a widening smoke cloud across the region.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/canadian-inferno-northern-heat-exceeds-worst-case-climate-models

Yes, and it's a completely tragic event, but the way you worded it read that the town hit 50 degrees and just burst into flames, like spontaneous combustion. It seems there is a more plausible (and less dramatic) explanation, as highlighted by MT earlier.

Just some more areal stats for the alarmists; annual Arctic maximum and minimum sea ice area changes in the satellite era, as a percentage of the total surface area of the globe. Just to put things in context.

March Maxima:
1980: ~3.2% of total global area
2020: ~2.7%

September Minima:
1980: ~1.5%
2020: ~0.8%

Point being, we're talking fractions of fractions