Hotter
An entire British Columbia town has burned up.
The fire started in the late afternoon and by 6 p.m., the mayor had issued an evacuation order for the entire town of Lytton. …
Ninety per cent the small B.C. village has burned in a devastating wildfire, the town’s local member of Parliament says.
Brad Vis, who represents Mission-Matsqui-Fraser Canyon, says the fire that tore through Lytton and forced the entire community to evacuate Wednesday has led to significant structural damage including in the town’s centre.
…
“We heard that we lost our hospital again, plus the ambulance, and it sounds like the whole town’s burning,” said Terry Wagner, an evacuee, late Wednesday.
Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman ordered an evacuation for the entire village of about 250 people at around 6 p.m. Wednesday. Evacuees were asked to register at the Emergency Social Services building in Merritt, and told they will be provided three days’ worth of supports if needed.
…
Lytton made headlines this week after breaking the record for highest temperature recorded in Canada three days in a row. The record now stands at 49.6 C, beating the all-time heat record for Las Vegas.
It’s here.
Damn, that temperature in that location would have been thought impossible a few years ago. Those poor people.
It’s useful to remember that back in 1999 and the days of Al Gore and the infamous Hockey Stick graph (which depicted a sudden rise in global temperatures which, if extrapolated, seemed to predict climate doom), the climatologists were saying things like we could begin experiencing significant effects from global warming by the year 2050. Some of the more risky predictions were going further and saying things like “as soon as 2030”. Now here it is, all of the year 2021 and even many mainstream science figures are starting to suggest that those effects are here, and getting worse. It was only five years ago this past February that James Inhofe famously brought a snowball to the US Senate floor to ridicule claims of warming and jeers were heard ’round the circuit of the conservative talking heads.
But what do Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk care? They got what they wanted then: the political and financial support of the rubes who elected or supported them, and they knew then that they aren’t going to be around to suffer any ill effects from climate change (and, in fact, after a shameful life, Rush has already checked out).
Speaking of Al Gore, he thought that the South Park episode that lampooned him for warning of “Manbearpig” was hiliarous. He also thought it was pretty cool that a few years later, they added an eposide a few years later in which they realize that Manbearpig is real and apologize to him.
James Garnett, one thing to realize is that scientists are conservative. (Not politically; most of us tend to the liberal end of the political spectrum.) Their statements are tempered with caution, especially when based on models, because models are extrapolating data beyond the data set. From what I’ve read, i suspect a lot of them thought they weren’t being conservative enough; there has been a huge surprise at how rapidly things are happening.
The thing is, climate is non-linear, which makes predictions challenging. There are also a lot of working parts.
(Psst James Garnett is a scientist.)