Canada sizzling!

My heart goes out to those people in Lytton. So far 90% of the village has been destroyed.

The latest news is that the village of Lytton has been evacuated because of fires that have broken out all over town. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire! This is going to be a terrible fire season! We live right on the coast and we've had no rain for about three weeks!

One thing aggravates me. I built and had it certified by the National Weather Service, an official NWS weather station in Concord, CA., in the 1950s I was in grade school. I used my paper route money to purchase a foot+ tall mercury thermometer, which turned our to be National Bureau of Standards certified with certificate.

In July of 1970 the San Francisco Bay Area suffered under a week long heat wave. At 6:00 AM opening the door meant sun rays on the face and they burned with heat. At the Shell Oil refinery in Martinez, we were taking salt pills and avoiding heaters, steam pipes, and other radiating surfaces.

When the shift ended I headed home. My car had no A/C
But the thermometer in the NWS box read 117F. The next day the Concord Transcript and San Francisco Examiner reported official NWS temperature records of 115 and 117F. Headlines. My house did not have A/C either.

But this is what I did.

From my forays to Mexico I had a ton of bulk cloth mosquito netting. I got a strong fan and wetted down the netting then wrapped it around me. When the fan played across the netting I actually started to get chilled. I even head it wrapped around my head. I would unwrap it every 15 minutes or so and re-soak it.

The weekend passed then my vacation started. I headed to my parent's house at Lake Tahoe. It got to 90F there and I drove up to high altitude then back packed to 10,000 feet. Still hot but the cool stream water soaked my shorts and tee shirt.

If the humidity is less than 50% I sure can recommend the soaked mosquito netting and fan cool down. Years later I learned that heat waves in the mountains and low humidity can be tamed with evaporative swamp coolers. I've measured 100F entry air and 68F exhaust air with ten percent relative humidity

High temps and high humidity are another beast altogether. When it gets to be a steam bath in Las Penas, my bedroom has both an air conditioner and de humidifier.

The newspaper reported dozens of deaths in Canada.

Orion wrote:
Again, this is Canada and June!

You're talking Death Valley temps.

Our heat wave has now peaked and the final result in the village of Lytton was 49.6c , which is 121F ! Again, this is Canada and June!

fj12ryder wrote:
A couple hundred years of data is hardly enough to produce incontrovertible results.

As I mentioned, we know CO2 concentrations from ice cores going back several hundred thousand years. That should be pretty good.

We know warming and cooling has happened, but not in 150 years. And I agree, continually pumping stuff into the atmosphere is not a great idea.

Personally I find it hard to believe that all the pollution being pumped into the atmosphere can't help but contribute to problems. But climate change prediction software has to have solid data to produce meaningful results: GIGO. A couple hundred years of data is hardly enough to produce incontrovertible results.

Personally I see no problem with trying to clean up the air and water, but nothing much can be done until the population growth curve can be leveled out. Until then it's just bandaid actions.

Alaska oil and gas operators active on the North Slope face a long-term, existential threat to infrastructure for which there is no easy solution – thawing permafrost.

Source: S&P Global, 2019

Oil companies are investing more in technologies to refrigerate the permafrost which is melting because of use of the products they are producing on the permafrost. :h

Makes me wonder if it is the layer formally known as "perma"frost.

I don't normally get into the climate change thing much especially when dealing with a very hot or cold day, but when Canada achieves its highest ever temp, 46.6C 116F in JUNE, it makes you think! This is a month earlier than our average hottest day of the year . If this had happened towards the end of July, that figure could have been 121F ! And remember too that these are official temps, not what someone recorded with his home thermometer on the deck! I see that that temp in Lytton BC, the north end of the Fraser Canyon, was hotter than Phoenix!

Had wet snow spritzes coming down on my deck last night around 2200 and woke up to a bit of snow coverage on the high peaks this morning. Very pleasant today with highs in the upper 60's.

BTW- I am at just under 10,000 feet.