Record heat attacked the South this week, thick smoke from Canada blanketed large parts of the Midwest and the Northeast, and triple-digit temperatures threaten California for the first time this year. Via the Washington Post:
Scientists said climate change helped shape the weather conditions that were causing misery and putting lives at risk from Mexico to Canada. There was no disputing the impact: If it wasn’t way too smoky, it was way too hot.
“Everybody’s saying, ‘We’re used to the heat, but not to this degree,’” said Mayor Victor Treviño of Laredo, Tex., which recorded temperatures of 115 degrees last week, tying its all-time high. There were nine heat-related deaths, Webb County Medical Examiner Corinne Stern told county commissioners Monday, adding that “I think our county was caught a little off-guard.”
If Laredo and elsewhere in the South were caught off-guard by the heat, much of the rest of the country was getting an unexpected dose of horrendous air quality because of dense wildfire smoke rolling in from Canada. Air quality alerts related to the smoke were in effect for parts of some 17 states, covering nearly a third of the U.S. population.
