OK, maybe that was an understatement. It’s hellishly hot in the Pacific Northwest right now – temperature records in Canada have been smashed day after day, and hundreds of people are dying. The environment in Seattle hospitals has been described as similar to how it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, except this time it’s because of heatstroke, and cities across the region have seen people retreat to “cooling centers” to escape the heat.
“This is not a one-in-a-lifetime event,” Deepti Singh, assistant professor at Washington State University, Vancouver, told Gizmodo. “These are conditions that are likely to recur, potentially quite frequently, in our near future because of increasing global warming.”
“[O]ur infrastructure development needs to account for the changing climate conditions and our communities, public officials and we as individual[s] need to be prepared to cope with severe heatwaves and other impacts of climate change that we are currently vulnerable to.”