The Pacific Northwest’s Triple-Digit Heat
The heat that hit the Pacific Northwest in late June was unlike anything the region had seen or prepared for. All-time heat records didn’t just fall, they shattered into a million pieces. Infrastructure buckled. A billion sea creatures cooked to death while the region’s famed salmon developed skin diseases after nearly being boiled alive. So many people died, local coroners declared it a mass casualty event.
Most staggering is that ground temperatures reached a knee-quaking 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) in eastern Washington. That’s different from air temperature that we normally measure, but it gives you a good sense of why everything went to hell the way it did. Climate change was responsible for making the event 150 times more likely, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned odds for that type of heat will only increase.
