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elevenoh

Lytton BC hit 49.6 degrees yesterday.

For perspective:

China's all time high temp record: 50.5 degrees. Australia: 50.7

Canada broke its heat record 3 days in a row.

486 Sudden deaths in BC during this heat wave, 3x the normal # of sudden deaths.

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> China's all time high temp record: 50.5 degrees. Australia: 50.7

Those temperatures were, not surprisingly, recorded in desert climates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpan#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodnadatta#Climate

This is something else entirely…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton,_British_Columbia#Clima...

Phoenix, Arizona’s all-time record is 50.

When I look up pictures of Arizona I see cacti and deserts. Lytton is hot but it’s a lot of forests and lakes. Would an equivalent be Arizona getting a severe Canadian winter with 1-2 weeks of -40 ?

Maybe not quite that extreme. Something like a few days or a week with highs like 32 - 38 °C is not that unusual in much of southern Canada, including that part of BC. Still a solid ten degrees hotter than what would be considered very hot normally.

Southern BC is very much a desert and barely sees any snow in winter, yet negative temperature.

Source: I have family in Osoyoos.

Southern BC just barely qualifies as a desert (9.8" of annual rain in Osoyoos vs. 10" to qualify as a desert) ;)

But yeah Osoyoos is wildly similar in architecture/vibe to parts of AZ/NM.

> Southern BC just barely qualifies as a desert

Give it a decade or two?

Southern BC leeward of the mountains, that is.

On 10 July 1913, temperatures at the aptly named Furnace Creek area in the California desert reached a blistering 56.7°C (134.1°F).

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/move-over-death-vall....

Are you sure you’re not quoting the surface temperature for Lytton as opposed to the air temperature?

No. That was the temperature of the damn air. It's nuts.

> Are you sure you’re not quoting the…

Yes.

https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/daily_data_e.html...

It's air temperature: https://twitter.com/ECCCWeatherBC/status/1410017678216024067

yikes... been through weather like that in Australia a couple of times. but yeah I can't imagine houses and people (and animals) in Canada are accustomed or designed to handling anywhere near that.

> I can’t imagine the […] people […] in Canada are accustomed

Absolutely not. I don’t live in Lytton, but close, and similarly hot. What is usually called a hot spell would be 34, 35, maybe 36 degrees. The last 3 days we’re well into the 40’s, approaching 50. I went out today and it was about 46 degrees. It hurt my eyes of all things. It’s brutally hot, and by the time I was done (I walked down to river to check temperature, maybe 20-30 minutes) I was spent. Not for this Canadian.

> houses

Well, we get hot summers, and cold winters, so houses should be well insulated (which serves both hot and cold) and air conditioners are common. So not completely unprepared, though it can be hard for A/C to keep up.

Edit: As I think of it, the Fraser Valley was fantastically hot, as was the rest of the lower mainland, which is usually mild weather (typical “pacific north west”) and I think less likely to have A/C installed. The Interior/Okanagan (Incl Lytton) are used to long hot summers, but not 50 degrees.

We hit 46 in some parts of Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver. It was brutal - when I hosed the kids off in the back yard some birds parked themselves in the mist and just sat there with open beaks. It's cooled back down now.

BC is certainly home to a lot of folks with no a/c, 'hike snowcap mountains in a sweater' type of people that've never experienced 40-45+ weather!

Village is the right way to characterise this place. About ten blocks big. Still can't believe they gave up the town this easily.

From The Article:

"It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere."

They didn't give up. They got chased out without notice. By fire.

There's been fire in the area for days. Did they have any sprinklers set up? Fire guards being built? No. I don't think they had any resources there until now which is too late obviously.

It's... Canada. BC. Shall we also fault Nepal for being unprepared for tsunamis?

This is fire county, so we’re perhaps more prepared than Nepal is for Tsunamis, but still Lytton apparently has 1 fire truck, there are fires all over the province so we’re not all just focusing on Lytton, and this swept the town in ~15 minutes. Sprinklers aren’t going to cut it. These are massive fires.

You should see what we do in Alberta when a town is under threat. Forestry sprinklers all over, town goes into fire smart mode, all brush cleared and so on. We learned a lot when slave lake and Fort mac burned.

Read their comment history -- they're a climate change denier. Some people just want to watch the world burn, I guess.

Did you read it? I don't deny it's changing, it is. I typically quote the authoritative reports that show it's not as dyer as alarmists would make you believe.

*dire

BC has a history of massive forest fires every summer.

2020: 347,104 hectares

2019: 21,138 hectares

2018: 1,354,284 hectares

2017: over 1.2 million hectares

2016: 91,817 hectares

2015: no global summary

2014: 360,000 hectares

Source: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...

2017 and 2018 were exceptional but the trend going back decades is less hectares burned every decade. This is true world wide.

I've planted six hundred hectares myself to give you perspective, these burns are easily replanted where desirable.

BC had more than a millions acres burned a couple years ago. 85% of the damn province is forest, ravaged by beetle. Lots of tinder just waiting to catch fire, no excuse.

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