It’s not officially summer in the Northern Hemisphere yet. But here are the extras.
Fires are burning across Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange-gray smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert like other parts of the world recently. Earth’s oceans are warming at an alarming rate.
Human-caused climate change is a driving force behind extremes like these. Although there is no specific research linking this week’s events to global warming, the science is clear that global warming is greatly increasing the likelihood of severe forest fires and heat waves. as it affects large parts of North America today.
Now comes a global weather pattern known as El Niño, which can raise temperatures and set heat records. Thursday morning, scientists announced its arrival.
Taken together, the week’s excesses offer a clear takeaway: The world’s richest continent remains unprepared for the dangers of the not-too-distant future. A sign of that came Wednesday when Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said his government would soon create a disaster response agency to “make sure we’re doing everything we can to predict, protect and act before these events come.”
The recent fires have also undermined the idea that some areas are relatively safe from the worst risks of climate change because they are not close to the Equator or far from the ocean. Almost without warning, smoke from distant fires disrupts daily life.
So much smoke from the fire pushed the border that in Buffalo, schools canceled outdoor activities. Detroit was relieved of the toxic haze. Flights are grounded at airports in the Northeast.
“Forest fires are no longer a problem just for people who live in fire-prone areas,” said Alexandra Paige Fischer, a professor who studies fire adaptation strategies at the University of Michigan.
In the United States, more people are already living in the smoke of the fires. A 2022 study by Stanford researchers found that the number of people exposed to toxic pollution from wildfires at least one day a year increased 27-fold between 2006 and 2020. .
The two countries that have experienced these extremes, the United States and Canada, are the main producers of oil and gas, which, when burned, produce greenhouse gases that further warm the Earth’s atmosphere. The average global temperature today is more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial era.
Park Williams, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, pointed out that eastern Canada and northern Alberta are actually expected to get drier in the coming years, according to climate models. But that was not the case this year. It was an unusually dry year across much of Canada. Then came the heat.
The boreal forests of western Canada offer ready firewood. The trees and grasses of eastern Canada become tinder. “Under warmer temperatures, those dry years cause things to dry out and become more flammable than otherwise,” said Dr. Williams.
By Wednesday, more than 400 fires were burning from west to east across Canada, more than half of them out of control.
Some parts of the world are feeling the heat this year. Vietnam broke a heat record in May, with temperatures reaching 44 degrees Celsius, or 111 Fahrenheit. China breaks heat records at over 100 stations during April. The boreal forests of Siberia also burned.
As with North America’s boreal forests, climate change is making Siberia’s fire season longer and more severe. It also increases lightning strikes, said Brendan Rogers, a boreal forest fire expert at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. There are different conditions in different years, to be sure, he said in an email, but “the common denominator is hot / warm and dry conditions that favor the ecosystem for burning. “
Where does all the excess heat in the atmosphere go? Most of it has been absorbed by the oceans, so ocean temperatures have continued to rise over the past decades, reaching records in 2022.
But this spring, something strange happened. Scientists have announced with unusual alarm that the sea temperature is the warmest in 40 years.
Scientists haven’t settled on a cause, although some say the rise could herald the arrival of El Niño. Such a period, which usually lasts several years, brings warmth to the surface of the eastern Pacific Ocean. We’ve been living with its cooler cousin, La Niña, for the past few years.
Jeff Berardelli, a meteorologist at WFLA, a television station in Tampa Bay, Fla., warned on Twitter about the double whammy of El Niño in a world already warming due to climate change. “Let’s hope a stunning year of global excesses,” he wrote.
Puerto Rico is already feeling it this week, with record temperatures and high humidity driving up the heat index 125 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 52 Celsius) in parts of the island.
“We are sailing in uncharted waters,” Ada Monzon, the WAPA meteorologista television station in Puerto Rico, tweeted.