When will we listen?
WASHINGTON -- Climate change is slow, gradual, almost imperceptible -- until suddenly it's not. One day, it seems like a normal summer. The next, the temperature soars to an unbearable 121 degrees. In Canada. That all-time record for the entire country was set recently in Lytton, British Columbia, as the Pacific Northwest suffered through its most punishing heat wave in recorded history. The same week, it was 108 in Seattle and 116 in Portland -- both new all-time records. In a region where many homes are not air-conditioned, it is not yet clear how many people died from the extreme heat; in British Columbia alone, officials said there were more than 700 "sudden and unexplained" deaths during the week, three times the normal average. At least 95 deaths in Oregon are suspected of being heat-related. Dozens of deaths are being investigated in Washington state as well. The cause of all this was a massive, stubborn "heat dome" that parked itself on top of the region and refused to move. As you know, it is not possible to definitively attribute any specific, weird, unprecedented weather event to climate change. But a pattern of increasingly frequent, weird, unprecedented weather events is precisely what climate scientists warned us about.