Residents gather in a public cooling shelter set up at the Oregon Convention Center during a heat wave in Portland on June 26, 2021. (Maranie Staab/Bl

Northwest "heat dome" signals global warming's march

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2021-06-28 14:30:03

Residents gather in a public cooling shelter set up at the Oregon Convention Center during a heat wave in Portland on June 26, 2021. (Maranie Staab/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The dangerous heat wave enveloping the Pacific Northwest is shattering weather records by such large margins that it is making even climate scientists uneasy.

Why it matters: Infrastructure, including heating and cooling, is built according to expectations of a "normal" climate. Human-caused climate change is quickly redefining that normal, while dramatically raising the likelihood of events that simply have no precedent.

Driving the news: The heat wave is shattering all-time temperature records in the U.S. and Canada. Portland, Oregon reached 112°F on Sunday, breaking the all-time record of 108°F set just the day before.

Between the lines: "Because of the fact that climate change has made heatwaves like this much more likely and intense, we might very well reach the tipping point of what our infrastructure and other societal systems are able to deal with," Friederike Otto, of the University of Oxford, told Axios.

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