Extreme temperatures in China coupled with a lack of hydro-power forced blackouts in some of its largest industrial cities last month. A rare and short-lived subtropical storm popped up in the South Atlantic off Argentina and Uruguay. And record heat has seared Canada and the Pacific Northwest, while drought crackled the entire western U.S., leaving it primed to burn.
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is just days old, but the extremes keep piling up. The conditions driving these events — heat, ocean warming, changes in longstanding weather patterns — aren’t going away anytime soon, meaning the worst may be yet to come.
While forecasters have known for weeks that this summer was going to be brutal, that’s done nothing to lessen the shock as the records and casualties mount. About 80 people have died during the heat wave in Oregon, and about 700 have perished in British Columbia. "It’s just a matter of running up the score, at this point,” said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of risk analytics firm Verisk.