Unprecedented heat, hundreds of deaths and a destroyed city. Climate change is scorching the northern hemisphere

(CNN) – The small town of Lytton has come to have a dismal record. On Tuesday, it experienced the highest temperature in Canada, in an unprecedented heat wave that has killed hundreds of people over a week and sparked more than 240 wildfires in British Columbia, most of which are still burning.

Lytton reached 49.6 degrees Celsius, which is staggering for the city of just 250 people located in the mountains, where June highs typically hover around 25 degrees. Last week, however, their nights have been hotter than their days tend to be, in a region where air conditioning is rare and houses are designed to retain heat.

Now the fires have turned much of Lytton to ash and forced its people, as well as hundreds around them, to flee.

Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and intense. That is a reality that is now unfolding in Canada, but also in many other parts of the Northern Hemisphere that are becoming increasingly uninhabitable.

Roads melted last week in the northwestern United States, and New York City residents were told not to use high-energy appliances, such as washers and dryers, and painfully, even their air conditioners, for the good of the electrical network.

In Russia, Moscow reported its highest June temperature of 34.8 degrees on June 23, and Siberian farmers are struggling to keep their crops from dying in an ongoing heat wave. Even in the Arctic Circle, temperatures soared as high as 30 degrees. The World Meteorological Organization is trying to verify the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle since records began there, after a weather station in Verkhoyansk in Siberia recorded a 38-degree day on June 20.

In India, tens of millions of people in the Northwest were affected by heat waves. India’s Meteorological Department on Wednesday classified the capital New Delhi and surrounding cities as experiencing “extreme severe heat,” with temperatures consistently hovering in the 40s, more than 7 degrees above normal. He said. The heat, coupled with a late monsoon, is also making life difficult for farmers in areas like the state of Rajasthan.

And in Iraq, authorities announced a public holiday in several provinces for Thursday, including the capital Baghdad, because it was simply too hot to work or study, after temperatures surpassed 50 degrees and its electrical system collapsed.

Experts who spoke to CNN said it was difficult to pin down exactly how linked these weather events are, but it is unlikely that it is a coincidence that heat waves are hitting multiple parts of the Northern Hemisphere at the same time.

“The high pressure systems that we are seeing in Canada and the United States, all these systems are driven by something called the jet stream, a band of very strong winds that is high above our heads, at about 9,000 meters, where they fly planes, “Liz Bentley, executive director of the UK’s Royal Meteorological Society, told CNN.

Bentley explained that the jet stream configuration prevents weather systems from moving efficiently along their normal west-east path.

“That jet stream has gotten rippled and got stuck in what we call an omega block, because it’s shaped like the Greek letter omega, and when it goes into it, it doesn’t move anywhere, it blocks it,” Bentley said. “So the high pressure that has been building just stalls for days or weeks, and these omegas show up in different parts of the Northern Hemisphere.”

The same thing happened in the US in mid-June in the Southwest, breaking records in Mexico and places like Phoenix in Arizona. A couple of weeks later, a high pressure dome was built over the northwest, breaking records in Washington, Oregon and southwestern Canada.

“So we’ve seen these unprecedented temperatures – records were not just broken by a few degrees, but they were completely broken,” Bentley said.

Scientists say this could happen every year by 2100

There is growing acceptance among some political leaders that climate change is a driving force behind many extreme weather events, particularly heat waves and storms.

“Climate change is driving the dangerous confluence of extreme heat and prolonged drought,” US President Joe Biden said Wednesday. “We are seeing higher intensity wildfires moving faster and lasting well beyond the traditional months, the traditional months of the fire season.”

Scientists are working on sophisticated tools that can quickly assess how much climate change may have contributed to a particular weather event.

“We conducted a rapid attribution study to get quick answers to ‘What is the role of climate change?'” Said UK Met Office meteorologist Nikos Christidis, who has been developing simulations to carry out said analysis.

“We found that without human influence, it would be nearly impossible to hit a new record and such a hot June in the region,” he said, referring to an area that includes those affected in Canada and the United States.

Christidis said that in the past, without human-caused climate change, extreme heat in the northwestern United States or southwestern Canada would have occurred “once every tens of thousands of years.” Currently, it can occur every 15 years or so, Christidis said.

What if greenhouse gas emissions continue? Christidis said it would be as often as every year or two at the turn of the century.

Several countries, including the US, UK, and the European Union, recently increased their commitments, some quite a bit, but many scientists and activists say they still don’t go far enough to keep global average temperatures within 1 , 5 ° C above pre-industrial levels. World leaders pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement to target this limit to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Climate groups have also urged Canada to increase its commitments and move away from oil and gas.

“This is literally the deadliest climate on record in the Pacific Northwest region of the US and the extreme southwest of Canada. The losses and despair as a result of extreme heat and devastating fires in Canada are a reminder of what lies ahead as this climate crisis intensifies, “said Eddy Perez, manager of the Canada Climate Action Network for diplomacy. international climate.

“Canada is experiencing historical climate-induced loss and damage, while at the same time failing to do its part to combat dangerous climate change. As an oil and gas producer, Canada is still considering the expansion of fossil fuels, which is directly attributed to the rise in global temperature.

CNN’s Anna Chernova contributed to this report from Moscow and Manveena Suri contributed from New Delhi.