Travelore News: British Columbia Wildfires Intensify, Doubling Evacuations To Over 35,000

Forest fires in Canada's western province of British Columbia intensified on Saturday, with the number of people under evacuation orders doubling from a day earlier, as authorities warned of difficult days ahead.

The province declared a state of emergency on Friday to access temporary authoritative powers to tackle fire-related risks, as out-of-control fires ripped through interior British Columbia, partially shutting some sections of a key highway between the Pacific coast and the rest of western Canada, and destroying many properties.

"The current situation is grim," Premier David Eby told reporters on Saturday, saying some 35,000 people were under an evacuation order, and a further 30,000 were under an evacuation alert.

Eby said the province is in dire need of shelter for evacuees and firefighters and ordered a ban on non-essential travel to make more temporary accommodation available. Officials also urged residents to avoid operating drones in the fire zone, saying it could impede firefighting efforts.

The fire is centered around Kelowna, a city some 300 kilometres (180 miles) east of Vancouver, with a population of about 150,000.

Forest fires are not uncommon in Canada, but the spread of blazes and disruption underscore the severity of its worst wildfire season yet.

About 140,000 square km (54,054 square miles) of land, roughly the size of New York state, have already burned, and government officials project the fire season could stretch into autumn due to widespread drought-like conditions in Canada.

B.C. had experienced strong winds and dry lightning in the past few days due to a cold mass of air interacting with hot air built-up in the sultry summer. That intensified existing forest fires and ignited new ones.

"We are still in some critically dry conditions, and are still expecting difficult days ahead," said Jerrad Schroeder, deputy fire centre manager at the Kamloops Fire Centre.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau convened a meeting of key ministers and senior officials on Saturday to discuss wildfires. The Incident Response Group, which met for the second time this week, agreed to make "additional resources available" to both British Columbia and the Northwest Territories (NWT).

MAIN EAST-WEST ROAD UNDER THREAT

A wildfire burning out of control in Yellowknife, the capital city of NWT, had triggered evacuations of almost all of its 20,000 residents this week. One patient died when he was being transferred out of Yellowknife, an NWT minister said on Saturday.

Currently, the fire is not expected to reach city limits by the end of the weekend, officials said, with some rain and cooler temperatures helping to slow its progress.

The TransCanada highway was closed near Chase, around 400 km northeast of Vancouver, and between Hope, 150 km east of Vancouver, and the village of Lytton.

The highway is the main east-west artery used by thousands of motorists and truckers heading to Vancouver, the country's busiest port.

Kip Lumquist, who works at a gift shop in Craigellachie, British Columbia, a tourist spot on the highway, said she saw a lot of devastation over the past week.

"It was crazy, we couldn't see the hills, the mountains, the trees, anything, probably (for) two and a half days," said Lumquist. "I drive a white vehicle, and when I walked out to get in my car... it's just black... It's devastating to the community."

By Friday, the fire in southern B.C. had grown more than a hundredfold in 24 hours and forced more than 2,400 properties to be evacuated.

The flames have destroyed several structures in West Kelowna and authorities have been warning that the province could potentially face the worst couple of days of the fire season this year.

B.C. currently accounts for over a third of Canada's 1,062 active fires.

The fires have drained local resources and drawn in federal government assistance as well as support from 13 countries. At least four firefighters have died in the line of duty.

By Chris Helgren and Nia Williams Some 5,000 customers are also without electricity in interior of the province, the main utility said.

Maui Wildfire Death Toll Rises To 55 As Search For Victims Gears Up

KAHULUI, Hawaii, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Search teams on Maui on Friday will comb through the charred ruins of Lahaina looking for more victims of a wildfire that ripped through the Kingdom of Hawaii's onetime capital, with officials expecting the death toll of 55 to rise.

The inferno, which erupted on Tuesday, reduced the picturesque resort town to piles of smoldering debris as it torched 1,000 buildings and left thousands homeless in what was the worst natural disaster in the U.S. state's history.

Cadaver dogs from California and Washington state will assist in the grim task of recovering human remains from the ruins on Friday as firefighters work to extinguish hot spots and smaller fires. The fire was 80 percent contained as of Thursday evening, officials said.

"Understand this: Lahaina Town is hallowed, sacred ground right now," Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said, referring to humans remains that have yet to be recovered. "We have to get them out."

In addition to searching for those still missing, officials were drafting a plan to put the newly homeless up in hotels and tourist rental properties. The island currently has four shelters in operation for the displaced.

Authorities also were dealing with a widespread power and water issues across the community. As of Friday morning, some 11,000 homes and businesses remained without power, according to Poweroutage.us.

Witnesses to the conflagration that hit Lahaina spoke of their terror as the blaze consumed a town in what seemed to be minutes to many of them. Some escaped the racing flames by jumping into the Pacific Ocean.

Thousands of tourists and locals were evacuated from the western side of Maui, which has a year-round population of about 166,000, with some taking shelter on the island or on the neighboring island of Oahu. Tourists camped out in the Kahului Airport, waiting for flights back home.

Many more people suffered burns, smoke inhalation and other injuries.

"It was so hot all around me, I felt like my shirt was about to catch on fire," Nicoangelo Knickerbocker, a 21-year-old resident of Lahaina, said from one of the four emergency shelters opened on the island.

Knickerbocker heard cars and a gas station explode, and soon after fled the town with his father, bringing with them only the clothes they were wearing and the family dog.

"It sounded like a war was going on," he said.

Governor Josh Green said the scope of the disaster would surpass that of 1960, one year after Hawaii became a U.S. state, when a tsunami killed 61 people on the Big Island of Hawaii.

"It's going to take many years to rebuild Lahaina," Green said at a news conference.

Lahaina's 200-year-old Waiola Church was among the structures destroyed by the fire, local media reported. The landmark was the focal point of Christianity on Maui and the burial site of early members of the Kingdom of Hawaii’s royal family, according to the church's website.

The fate of some of Lahaina's other cultural treasures remains unclear. The historic 60-foot(18-meter)-tall banyan tree marking the spot where Hawaiian King Kamehameha III's 19th-century palace stood was still standing, though some of its boughs appeared charred, according to a Reuters witness.

The Lahaina fire was one of three major wildfires on Maui, all of them still burning, that were fueled by dry conditions, a buildup of fuel and 60 mile-per-hour (100 km per hour) gusts of wind.

Winds were forecast to ease to 6 mph (9.7 kph) on Friday as firefighters were to work to secure the perimeter of the wild land areas that burned Maui County.

As of Thursday evening, the Lahaina fire was 80% contained, while the Pulehu fire, burning to the east, was 70% contained. There was no estimate for the Upcountry fire in the center of the eastern mass of the island, Maui County said.

New Evacuations Ordered In Greece As High Winds And Heat Fuel Wildfires

A weeklong wildfire on the Greek resort island of Rhodes tore past defenses Monday, forcing more evacuations, as three major fires raged elsewhere in the country fueled by strong winds and successive heat waves that left scrubland and forests tinder-dry.

The latest evacuations were ordered in south Rhodes after 19,000 people, mostly tourists, were moved in buses and boats over the weekend out of the path of the fire that reached several coastal areas from nearby mountains. It was the country’s biggest evacuation effort in recent years.

“We are at war -– completely focused on the fires,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during a debate in parliament. “Over the coming days and weeks, we must remain on constant alert.”

Help continued to arrive from the European Union and elsewhere, with firefighting planes from neighboring Turkey joining the effort in Rhodes, where 10 water-dropping planes and 10 helicopters buzzed over flames up to five meters (16 feet) tall despite low visibility.

“The risk of fire will be extreme in several areas of Greece today,” Fire Service spokesperson Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said a day after temperatures on the southern Greek mainland soared as high as 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).

Ian Murison, a businessman from London who was on vacation with his wife and 12-year-old son in
described his family’s ordeal as they tried to escape the fires on Saturday.

“We saw flames coming over the hills. Our hotel had capacity for 1,200 (people), but there was just one coach waiting,” he said. “There was no process in place. ... We all just took our cases and started walking, it was about 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) before we got out from underneath the ash cloud.”

The family reached a nearby beach, where they waited — in the dark due to a power blackout — with thousands of others to be evacuated by bus or boat.

“You could see an orange glow in the sky and it got more and more, big balls of fire going into the sky,” he said, describing chaotic scenes as evacuees crowded to board small boats arriving to take them off the beach.

“It didn’t matter if you had children, adults were fighting to get on next,” Murison said. “It was very, very stressful.”

Overnight, evacuations were also ordered on the western island of Corfu, where more than 2,000 people including tourists were moved to safety by land and sea, on the island of Evia and in a mountainous area in the southern Peloponnese region.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen contacted Prime Minister Mitsotakis late Sunday to offer additional assistance.

“I called (Prime Minister) Mitsotakis to express our full support for Greece, which is confronted with devastating forest fires and a heavy heat wave due to climate change,” she wrote in a tweet.

Addressing parliament. Mitsotakis also highlighted the threat from climate change, which he said “will make its presence ever more felt with greater natural disasters throughout the Mediterranean region.”

The fire service was investigating the causes of the blazes, which raged as 50 new wildfires on average have been breaking out daily for the past twelve days, according to government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis. On Sunday alone, 64 new blazes were recorded.

On Rhodes, the fire roared down mountain slopes, burning homes and cars and leaving livestock dead on the roadside as they tried to escape.
Authorities said no serious injuries were reported in the evacuations, but hospitals and health volunteers provided first aid to tourists and others, mostly for the effects of heat and dehydration.
Officials from the Greek Foreign Ministry were working at the international airport with several embassies and diplomats who traveled from the U.K. to assist tourists who had lost their travel documents.
Several airlines, including easyJet and package operator Tui, sent planes to Rhodes to evacuate tourists forced from hotels by the wildfire. The U.K. government said between 7,000 and 10,000 British nationals are on the island, a popular package holiday destination.

Some tourists said travel companies had failed to provide information or help.

Rhodes is visited by about 2.5 million tourists each year and is one of Greece’s most popular holiday destinations. As some visitors continued to flee the island Monday, others were arriving from multiple European destinations to start their holidays at resorts not affected by the wildfire — some 90% of the total according to Greek authorities.

Greece is using an EU satellite service to estimate the damage caused by the fire and to target resources. Photographs published online by the service showed a brown hourglass-shaped burn scar across the middle of the island.

The army was also helping to set up temporary accommodation on Rhodes, where schools and sporting facilities were opened to help with the effort.

A relative respite from the heat on Monday, with highs of 38 C (100 F) forecast, is to be followed by yet more high temperatures starting Tuesday.

However, it should get significantly cooler on Thursday, with temperatures in the low- to mid-30s Celsius, the country’s Meteorological Service said.

BY MICHAEL VARAKLAS AND DEREK GATOPOULOS, AP

These Are The Top 10 Bucket List Experiences Most At Risk From Climate Change

It’s not uncommon to hear talk of “bucket list” destinations: the places so spectacular that you simply must see them before you die. For most of us it might seem that there is no rush to fit in these awe-inspiring and life-affirming trips, and many will be saving them up for their later years. But is that really a safe assumption? A recent report analysed by MoneyTransfers.com identified the key cities and regions most at risk from climate change by 2050, and we were horrified to see so many of the traditional bucket list destinations appear on the list.

1. Take a River Cruise on the Yangtze River

More than half (114) of the top 200 regions most affected by climate change are situated in Asia, with China bearing the brunt, being home to over half of the top 50 most at-risk states. The majority of these are situated along the Yangtze River, a popular destination for river cruises. The world-renowned waterway has long been considered the lifeline of China, and cruises take in towering stone gorges, the mesmerising Fengdu Ghost City (a Taoist shrine to the afterlife), and the Three Gorges Dam, a feat of modern engineering. The Yangtze has already been hit hard by climate change with the Yangtze River dolphin, a freshwater dolphin native to the river, being officially declared extinct in 2007.

2. Visit the World’s Most Famous Monument to Love

Built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz, The Taj Mahal is considered one of the modern wonders of the world and features on many a bucket list. Unfortunately, following in the footsteps of Princess Diana and snapping a picture on the iconic bench outside the mausoleum may not be possible come 2050. Rapid warming in the Himalaya, which melts glaciers faster, has a significant impact on the Taj Mahal’s home state of Uttar Pradesh, causing the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers to swell, which poses a real risk to the future of the site. It is for this reason that the state features high on the XDI List.

3. Bar Hop Miami Beach

Nowhere has a bar scene quite like Miami, and very soon after landing you’ll discover that everyone has their own ideas about where the best drinks can be found. Whether you’re sipping Miami Vices in the Broken Shaker or downing rum-runners at Monty’s, there’s a reason that Will Smith sang the praises of this city’s nightlife. Unfortunately, Florida is considered to be the US state most at risk from climate change, with the sea levels projected to rise up to 31 inches by 2060. This will be absolutely devastating for Miami, with some studies predicting that the picturesque art deco hotels of Ocean Drive could all be lost entirely within the next three decades.

4. Snorkel the Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef has already begun to see huge devastation as a result of climate change, with unprecedented coral bleaching during 2016 and 2017. Coral bleaching occurs when the algae that provide the coral with their food and give them their rich colours leave the coral due to increased ocean temperatures or pollution, leaving the coral bleached and vulnerable. A recent IPCC report reveals that we will lose up to 90% of all warm water reefs that exist today when the average surface temperature hits 1.5C above the pre industrial levels of the late 1800s, while an increase of 2C will see them wiped out entirely.

5. Be Serenaded by a Gondolier in Venice

We were shocked to see a European city on the list, especially one so far north. Climate change isn’t just a threat to warmer countries and is a great concern for Venice, a low-lying city built on marshland. 2019 saw Venice experience the worst flooding that the city had seen in 50 years and even penetrate the 1,000 year old St. Mark’s Basilica. The city has sunk at a rate of 1mm to 2mm per year and rising sea levels could see it disappear beneath the waves as early as 2100.

6. Stay at a Luxury Hotel in the Maldives

With swaying palm trees, white sand beaches and a plethora of five star resorts to choose from, nowhere does luxury quite like the Maldives. However, at the current rate of global warming it is projected that almost 80% of the archipelago could be uninhabitable by 2050. Even as of today, more than 90% of the islands have severe erosion and 97% have no groundwater. As in Australia, climate change is also impacting the country’s coral reefs with more than 60% affected by bleaching in 2016.

7. Follow in the Footsteps of Your Favourite Star in Los Angeles

Everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Donald Trump has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and getting snapped in the same spot as your favourite celebrity, or taking a tour to see their home, can provide an interesting glimpse into how the other half lives. Unfortunately, in very recent times a number of celebrities, from Kim Kardashian to Miley Cyrus and Orlando Bloom, saw their homes engulfed with wildfires. With rising global temperatures, flooding and fire storms seem to be ever more common occurrences in the city, with 51% of Angelenos reporting that for at least some periods between summer 2020 and summer 2021 they did not leave their homes due to concerns about breathing wildfire smoke.

8. Read a Newspaper on the Dead Sea

We’ve all seen the pictures of tourists floating on the salty Dead Sea while reading a newspaper, but recent news shows that this unique body of water is drying up at a rate of 30% over the last two decades. While one cause of the Dead Sea depleting is said to be water from the River Jordan being siphoned off to support flourishing population growth, there is no doubt that global warming and decreased rainfall also plays a part, and the 40% decline in the sea’s phytoplankton can also be attributed to rising water temperatures.

9. Gaze in Wonder at the Giant Heads of Easter Island

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is one of the most remote destinations in the world, situated 2,300 miles away from Chile. The island is famous for its giant stone heads, which the waves have just started to reach owing to rising water levels. With the island only 15 miles long at its widest point, there are fears that the sea levels could rise up to six feet by 2100 destroying much of its heritage.

10. Count Castles on the Rhine

There are over 40 castles on the area of Rhine between Koblenz and Bingen, and this scenic stretch has rightly been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, this popular destination for river cruisers and weekend breaks is imperilled by rising temperatures and falling water levels, with bouts of low water in 2018 and 2022 estimated to have cost the German economy €12 billion and €8 billion respectively. A €180million effort is now underway to protect the Rhine from climate change, but will it be enough to save this wonderful site for visitors in years to come?

By Emily Sherlock

Europe Broils In Heat Wave That Fuels Fires In France, Spain

LA TESTE-DE-BUCH, France (AP) — A heat wave broiling Europe spilled northward Monday to Britain, where authorities warned of possible record temperatures, and fueled ferocious wildfires in France, which scrambled water-bombing planes and hundreds of firefighters to battle flames spreading through tinder-dry forests.

In Spain, two people were killed in blazes that the country’s prime minister linked to global warming, saying: “Climate change kills.”

In both France and Spain, fierce heat fueled the fires — part of a wall of high temperatures moving across Europe, touching even places like Britain, where officials have issued the first-ever extreme heat warning. The country’s weather service forecast that the record high of 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 degrees Fahrenheit), set in 2019, could be shattered.

“Forty-one isn’t off the cards,” said Met Office CEO Penelope Endersby. “We’ve even got some 43s in the model, but we’re hoping it won’t be as high as that.”

French forecasters also warned of possible record temperatures as swirling hot winds complicated firefighting efforts in the country’s southwest.

Authorities there started evacuating more towns, moving out another 3,500 people at risk of finding themselves in the path of the raging flames that have already seared 140 square kilometers (54 square miles) of pine forests and other vegetation. That will take the number who have been forced out of their homes in the Gironde region to around 20,000 since the wildfires began July 12.

The regional fire service chief, Marc Vermeulen, described the burning forests as “a powder keg” and said tree trunks were shattering as flames consumed them, sending burning embers into the air and further spreading the blazes.

“The fire is literally exploding,” he said. “We’re facing extreme and exceptional circumstances.”

Three additional planes were sent to join six others already fighting the fires, scooping up seawater into their tanks and making repeated runs through dense clouds of smoke, the Interior Ministry said Sunday night.

More than 200 reinforcements headed to join the 1,500-strong force of firefighters battling night and day to contain the blazes in the Gironde, where flames neared prized vineyards and the Arcachon maritime basin famed for its oysters and beaches.

Spain, meanwhile, reported a second fatality in two days as it battled its own blazes. The body of a 69-year-old sheep farmer was found Monday in the same hilly area where a 62-year-old firefighter died a day earlier when he was trapped by flames in the northwestern Zamora province. More than 30 forest fires around Spain have forced the evacuation of thousands of people and blackened 220 square kilometers (85 square miles) of forest and scrub.

Heat waves and drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight. Scientists say climate change will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

“Climate change kills,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Monday during a visit to the Extremadura region, where firefighters tackled three major blazes. “It kills people, it kills our ecosystems and biodiversity.”

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for ecological transition, described her country as “literally under fire” as she attended talks on climate change in Berlin.

She warned of “terrifying prospects still for the days to come” — after more than 10 days of temperatures over 40 C (104 F), cooling only moderately at night.

According to Spain’s Carlos III Institute, which records daily temperature-related fatalities, 237 deaths were attributed to high temperatures from July 10 to 14. That was compared to 25 heat-related deaths the previous week.

The heat wave in Spain is forecast to ease on Tuesday, but the respite will be brief as temperatures rise again on Wednesday, especially in the dry western Extremadura region.

In Portugal, much cooler weather Monday helped fire crews make progress against blazes. More than 600 firefighters attended four major fires in northern Portugal.

EU Lawmakers Endorse Ban On Combustion-Engine Cars In 2035

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Parliament threw its weight behind a proposed ban on selling new cars with combustion engines in 2035, seeking to step up the fight against climate change through the faster development of electric vehicles.

The European Union assembly voted in Strasbourg, France, to require automakers to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 100% by the middle of the next decade. The mandate would amount to a prohibition on the sale in the 27-nation bloc of new cars powered by gasoline or diesel.

EU lawmakers also endorsed a 55% reduction in CO2 from automobiles in 2030 compared with 2021. The move deepens an existing obligation on the car industry to lower CO2 discharges by 37.5% on average at the end of the decade compared to last year.

Environmentalists hailed the parliament’s decisions. Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based alliance, said the vote offered “a fighting chance of averting runaway climate change.”

But Germany’s auto industry lobby group VDA criticized the vote, saying it ignored the lack of charging infrastructure in Europe. The group also said the vote was “a decision against innovation and technology” a reference to demands from the industry that synthetic fuels be exempt from the ban, which European lawmakers rejected.

If approved by EU nations, the 2035 deadline will be particularly tough on German automakers, who have focused on powerful and expensive vehicles with combustion engines while falling behind foreign rivals when it comes to electric cars.

The 2030 CO2-reduction target and ban on combustion engines in 2035 were proposed last year by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm. Cars account for around 12% of European emissions of greenhouse gases, which are blamed for increasingly frequent and intense heat waves, storms and floods tied to climate change.

The governments of EU member nations need to give their verdicts in the coming weeks or months before a final EU agreement on the tougher car emission requirements is approved.

The car law is being scrutinized as part of a package of EU draft climate legislation covering a range of other polluting industries.

The EU plans to slash greenhouse gases by 55% in 2030 compared with 1990 rather than by just a previously agreed 40% over the period.

A big portion of the cuts would come from power plants and factories. These two sectors, unlike cars, have their greenhouse gases curbed in the EU by a European emissions-trading system that every year reduces the total supply of required pollution permits.

Earlier Wednesday, the EU parliament failed to advance that part of the climate package because of a split over the pace at which the free allocation of some emission permits — as opposed to the auctioning of them — should be phased out.

The assembly asked its environment committee to reopen deliberations on the matter. As a result, the EU parliament also delayed its decisions on two related initiatives.

One is the creation of a Social Climate Fund to help vulnerable households cope with the planned clean-energy revamp — an issue that has become more politically sensitive as Russia’s war in Ukraine has sent fuel prices soaring.

Parts Of Spain On Alert Amid ‘Extreme’ May Temperatures

MADRID (AP) — Large parts of Spain were under alert Friday as a wave of intense heat began sweeping across the country, leaving residents sweltering through May temperatures that rank among the hottest in two decades.

A mass of hot, dry air carrying dust from North Africa has pushed temperatures up to 15 degrees above average, with the mercury topping 40 C (104 F) in parts of the country.

The State Meteorological Agency said it expected the “unusual and extreme” temperatures to peak on Saturday.

“These will probably be among the warmest temperatures we’ve seen in May in the 21st century,” agency spokesman Rubén del Campo said.

By Friday, a handful of records had already been set. In the southern Spanish city of Jaén, the temperature climbed to 38.7 C (101.7 F) — 15 degrees above the seasonal average — in a record for the month of May. In the central city of Cuenca, the daily low temperature of 19.5 C (67.1 F) was two degrees higher than the previous May minimum.

While the temperatures are expected to fall short of what meteorologists in Spain define as a heat wave, what makes this episode singular will be its persistence, with nighttime temperatures expected to hover above 20 C (68 F) in many places.

The high temperatures are forecast to push northeast in the coming days, with little relief expected until after Sunday.

The State Meteorological Agency said Friday it had put four regions on alert due to the heat. The regions of Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and Madrid were under a yellow alert, meaning they were at risk, while the southern region of Andalusia was under an orange alert, meaning a significant risk because of the intense heat. No region was under red alert, the highest level that corresponds to an extreme risk.

Del Campo characterized the May heat as part of a broader pattern that has seen summer weather start to arrive in Spain nearly one month earlier than it did in the 1980s. He was unequivocal about the cause.

“What’s behind all of this?” Del Campo asked. “Climate change, obviously anthropogenic, generated by the emission of greenhouse gases linked to human activity.”

Europe’s Floods Kill 120; Climate Links Noted

BRUSSELS — Just as the European Union was preparing drastic plans costing billions of euros to contain climate change, massive clouds were gathering over Germany and other EU nations to unleash an unprecedented storm that left death and destruction in its wake.

Despite ample warnings, politicians and weather forecasters were shocked at the ferocity of the precipitation that caused flash flooding that killed at least 120 people in the lush wooded hills of Western Europe.

Many climate scientists said the link to global warming was unmistakable and the urgency to do something about it undeniable. To say that climate change caused the flooding may be a step too far, but scientists insist that it acerbates the extreme weather that has been on show from the western U.S. and Canada to Siberia to Europe’s Rhine region.

“There is a clear link between extreme precipitation occurring and climate change,” Prof. Wim Thiery of Brussels University said Friday.

For the heat records, added Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam, “some are so extreme that they would be virtually impossible without global warming, as recently in western North America.”

Taking them all together, said Sir David King, Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, “these are casualties of the climate crisis: we will only see these extreme weather events become more frequent.”