The Daily - The Heat Wave That Hit the Pacific Northwest

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

The heat wave that hit the usually cool and rainy American Pacific Northwest was a shock to many — Oregon and Washington were covered by a blanket of heat in the triple digits.After the temperatures soared, a group of scientists quickly came together to answer a crucial question: How much is climate change to blame?Guest: Henry Fountain, a climate change reporter for The New York Times; and Sergio Olmos, a freelancer for The Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: An analysis of the recent record-breaking heat found that it would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change.The extreme temperatures in Oregon, Washington State and Canada were exacerbated by an intense drought. Here is what to know about these heat waves.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Record-breaking climate extremes are blanketing the United States this summer, from heat to drought to wildfires. Astead Herndon spoke with our colleagues, Sergio Olmos, about the historic heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest, and to Henry Fountain, about how much climate change is to blame.

It's Wednesday, July 14th. Sergio, I feel like Portland has been basically at the center of every national news story recently. Well, we had a pretty extreme year in Portland. We had COVID shutdowns, 100 days of consecutive protests. Then we had historic wildfires where the sky just turned red. And then, you know, finally the city started to open back up again. COVID restrictions are starting to get lifted. People were starting to come out of their houses, go to restaurants, go to bars.

And regular life was resuming a little bit. And then this massive heat wave just descends on the Pacific Northwest in late June. The Northwest bracing for record-breaking and potentially life-threatening heat this weekend. Dozens of records, some of them decades old, are expected to fall. It's Oregon, Washington, and parts of Western Canada. And it brings this punishing heat. Portland hit an all-time record high of 112 earlier today. Today in Portland, Oregon, temperatures soared to 114 degrees.

Portland hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, making it one of the hottest places in the world. In Portland, we saw temperatures for three days in a row break record after record, and it finally got to 116 degrees. This is some serious heat. Average temperatures this time of year, lower and middle 70s. We're talking about the... 116 degrees is like 40 degrees above what it should normally be for this time of the year. Wow. And that's nine degrees above the previous record of 107. Many people there are not used to relying on air conditioning

and are needing to seek out cooling centers to stay safe. And so we see Portland thrown back into the state of emergency, right? Like, just like COVID or the protests, the wildfires, everything shuts down, no one's outside. And this time, it's a different catastrophe. It's heat. I know reporters have this weird experience where people are staying in and you run out. And I know that that is a reporter's shared instinct.

But can you describe what it was like over those last couple weeks? What has it felt like just physically being in that level of heat? Yeah, it felt like a walk out of the door and the heat wave hits you. It's like, oh, okay. It feels like Vegas, right? But I'm in Portland. This is the Pacific Northwest, right? Where it's raining a lot of the time. It's cool. It's not a place you think of to buy an AC. It never gets that hot. We're not used to this.

The 116 degree weather is something that, like the health officer here for the county explained it, that bodies acclimate to heat, but it takes time. You can't just acclimate one day to the next, one weekend to the next. And so, yeah, we're not acclimated to that, and our infrastructure is not built for it. For instance, I was driving around

and just a few blocks from my house, in the middle of the road, the pavement just buckled. It cracked and it rose up, and the city said it was heat-related. I don't know anything about pavement instead, but I assume it wasn't built for... I've never seen it buckle, so you've already got me shocked. Public transportation here, right? So, the city ahead of time was like, hey, public transportation

is going to be free this weekend. If you need to get to the cooling center or anything, just get on there. Don't worry about paying for it. But as soon as the heat hit, the streetcars and the trains, they stopped them because the overhead wires for the light rail system were being strained. They were only designed to work in temperatures of up to 110 degrees. And the streetcars, the cables that power them were actually melting. Wow.

So the city of Portland paused all trains, all streetcars at the time they needed them the most, right? So it was harder for some people just to get to the cooling centers. And there's a socioeconomic aspect to all of this. There's a professor at Portland State University named Vivek Chandas, and he studies climate adaptation. And during the heat wave, he went around Portland with a thermometer. It's not the kind you buy at the store. It's a scientific grade thermometer. And he took measurements of different parts of Portland. And he found that the wealthiest parts of Portland were in some cases, 98, 99 degrees,

right? And then he went to the working class parts of Portland, parts of Portland where the highest concentration of people of color historically have been disinvested. So not a lot of sidewalks, not a lot of tree covers, a lot of exposed to sun and a lot of concrete that just absorbs the sun's radiation. He found a reading of 121, a lot of exposed to sun, a lot of concrete that just absorbs the sun's radiation. He found a reading of 121 degrees in the poorest neighborhoods in Portland. And so if you look at that and look at the big picture here, the county released a map of where people died in the city. And in the poorest zip codes, the highest number of deaths occurred.

And in the wealthiest zip codes, we had the lowest number of deaths occur. And what do we know about the people who died? Who are they? Right now, at least 193 people have died across Oregon and Washington related to the heat. What we know is that many of the people who died were elderly, living alone, without air conditioning. Others were homeless, and others had underlying health conditions. For example, there's a story of an 84-year-old woman in Washington State, Dorothy Galeano, who was found dead in her home. She lived alone and had no air conditioning. A friend said that she was found with the window cracked open and the TV on. And she just imagined that Dorothy was watching TV, dozed off, and just didn't wake up. Another woman, Deborah Moore, was found collapsed on the sidewalk just a few steps from a house she was visiting. And the police said that she had serious underlying health issues.

You have the story of a houseless man, Joseph Wade Davis, who's 64, and he had just this tent on the side of the road, you know, with PVC pipe and tarp. He was just discovered dead at 10 a.m. So it's a mix of people, obviously the most vulnerable elderly who were living alone without AC, homeless folks. These are, you know, the highest number, but there are other people, you know, healthy adults who also died, and some of them died at work. Sebastián Francisco Pérez, he was the first reported workplace fatality related to the heat. And he died in the Willamette Valley where he lived and worked. And so I went there to learn more about him.

And it's like a farmland community there where they grow a lot of like fruit, trees and kind of the breadbasket of Oregon. And I eventually tracked down his brother-in-law and his nephew. And they're working in the field when I find them. And he tells me about Sebastián Francisco Perez. He came from Guatemala three months ago. He wanted to have children, but he couldn't afford it in Guatemala. Lived just very austere conditions. They grew their food. They didn't have any wages.

Came here to try to, you know, get some money to start a family. And he owed a coyote, these are the people that help immigrants cross illegally, he'd owed him $8,000 for the crossing, five up front, three after. And so he was desperate to work. And, you know, that Saturday when it was extraordinarily hot and a lot of farm workers who could take the day off took it, he asked to work and was told by relatives, like, don't do it, it's too hot. And he said, no, please, I need the money. That Saturday, he was moving irrigation lines in a field of trees,

and his co-workers, other laborers, found him collapsed among the trees, and they called 911, but they couldn't tell the operator where he was exactly. You know, a lot of the laborers, a lot of the immigrants, they work from farm to farm, and they get brought in together. And they don't necessarily know where they are all the time. So they called his nephew and they said, hey, he's collapsed on the ground. We don't know what to do. He tells him, take him to the shade. I'm on my way.

And. shade. I'm on my way. And unfortunately, couldn't resuscitate him. He died that day. So this heat wave was kind of an opening salvo to what's going to be a catastrophic season. The West is currently in the midst of historic drought. Another heat wave is already sweeping across California and the Southwest. And fire season has already begun here in Oregon. And this is unprecedented, right? This is the earliest in the year

that I've covered a wildfire season. There's a fire right now burning in Oregon. It's uncontained. It's already burned 150,000 acres as of Monday. And nobody expected the season to begin this early or already have been this destructive. So from one climate disaster to the next. Yeah.

Thank you, Sergio. Thank you, Ested. We'll be right back. Okay, Henry. I've been speaking with our colleague who has been reporting on the heat waves out in the West. There was the record-breaking one that happened in June in the Pacific Northwest, and another that's underway in California. The question that's running in the back of my head is, how much of what we're seeing is related to climate change?

Well, you know, that's the question that journalists and others always ask after a heat wave or other kind of extreme weather event. And it's really a central question. So right after the late June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, in fact, there was actually a group of scientists trying to figure that very question out. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for joining. This group is called World Weather Attribution, and they held a press conference on Zoom announcing their findings. It was led by Gerd-Jan van Oldenburg and Frederica Otto.

In our study, we focus on the hottest day of the year, which is what broke the records and what you will have heard in the news. So the question immediately arrives, what is the role of climate change in this event? They try to figure out a link, if it exists, between the world that's warming and these extreme events like this really, really bad heat wave. And they try to do it really quickly. We have done this study within a week and everyone worked nights and weekends. They think that getting it out when it's still fresh in people's minds would help people understand the problem. And how exactly do they do that analysis? How do they measure the impact on climate change when it comes to a single event? They use a lot of computers, basically, that run models of the world. They simulate the world. And they run some models with the world

as it is today, which is it's warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit because we've poured all the CO2 into the atmosphere. They also run models of a world that exists or would exist if we hadn't pumped all that CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, a world without warming. And then they compare the two results. So, for instance, if a heat wave like this had a one in a 100 chance of occurring in any given year in a world that hadn't warmed, and in a world that warmed it has a 1 in 10 chance of happening in a given year, then you know that climate change had an impact. So when these scientists ran this model, what did they find? Well, what you've got to understand about this heat wave, it was really off the charts. It was extraordinary.

We've never seen a jump in record temperature like the one in this heat wave, as far as I can remember. And when they ran the analysis, the results were clear. There's absolutely no doubt that climate change played a key role here. This extreme heat wave in this place would have been impossible before we started warming the world. It means that without the additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such an event just does never occur. Or if it occurs, it occurs once in a million times, which is the statistical equivalent of never. So it was still a rare event, but 100 years ago, it was an impossible event.

And that's because the world is warmed. So heat waves are increasing in likelihood by orders of magnitudes more than any other type of extreme event. And what these researchers have also found is that heat waves are more affected by climate change than any other extreme weather. So for any other type of extreme event, we do see extreme rainfall or droughts. We do see an increase, maybe by a factor of four. But for heat waves, we see orders of magnitude. So this event was made at least 150 times more likely. And she said that heat waves, more than any other type of climate-related natural disaster,

are not only more likely, but they also tend to kill more people. And, yeah, and I think this is really, heat waves is how climate change kills us today. I think this is how climate change manifests most strongly. Just think about it. You know, a flood might affect a relatively small region, an area near a river or whatever. A heat wave can cover a huge amount of area.

In this Pacific Northwest T wave that ended in the end of June, everybody in Oregon, everybody in the state of Washington, and most of the people in British Columbia were affected. So I think the researchers estimated that that was something like 9 million people. And that's really a lot of potential victims of extreme heat. And so all of this has these scientists concerned. We feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did. You know, I've covered a bunch of these attribution studies, and I've talked to a lot of scientists about them. And normally, it's pretty straightforward.

But there's one thing Dr. van Oldenborg said that really struck me. And frankly, I kind of found it alarming. I think most of us, or all of us, have just dialed down our certainty of how heat waves behave. We are much less certain about how the climate affects heat waves than we were two weeks ago. You know, essentially you said like, you know, after this heat wave, it was so unusual, so extreme. We're not sure we really understand heat waves anymore. Like it's really kind of jolted us, you know, in our certainty of the way heat waves behave.

Henry, it sounds like what you're saying is what really surprised you is the fact that the scientists themselves were surprised and that they were saying the heat wave that was just experienced in the Northwest may have actually changed their understanding of how these operate. What exactly are we saying, though? How is this heat wave possibly different than ones that we have seen previously? So what we'd expect with a kind of quote-unquote normal heat wave is that as the average baseline temperature goes up, you'd expect the hottest record-breaking temperatures to go up at about the same rate, more or less. But with this heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, the highest temperatures broke the record not by a couple of degrees, but by as many as nine degrees.

So the scientists are trying to figure out what's going on here. And they say there's really only two possibilities. The first one is the obvious one, is that it was just a really, really rare event. And this region was unlucky. Maybe it's just this confluence of bad luck, as they put it. I mean, the Earth is a really huge place and weird things happen or very improbable happen somewhere on Earth on a fairly regular basis. Pacific Northwest had a heat wave that was compounded by the drought that's been going

on in the West and the jet stream was acting funny or whatever. Maybe that's the case. And in that case, maybe it's not such a concern. The second possibility is that we could be past a threshold that made these kind of heat waves suddenly much more likely. But if it's some other mechanism, some other threshold idea, that's a concern. Maybe, you know, this one time event now becomes once every five years or ten years or once a year or whatever. So that's the fundamental issue they're trying to figure out. More and more, I think this is like, this heat wave is like a big deal.

It's like a seminal event, really. Kind of like, you know, a big volcanic eruption or something. And it's going to be studied for a long time because it was so unusual. And they've got to figure out why. So what's most alarming about their findings is that it could mean that we have hit a sort of tipping point. It's not necessarily that we've hit a tipping point, but the thing that really stuns a lot of climate scientists, and it certainly stuns a lot of people, is how fast things are happening, right? I'm guilty of this, too. I've been writing about climate change for a while, and it was always like, yeah, you know, the big impacts are going to be like in the middle of the century.

Well, you know, the big impacts are starting now, and it's obvious now that the impacts are hitting us. But it seems like they're sort of accelerating. So whether we've passed a tipping point or not, I don't know. But we're in a bad state right now where bad climate events are happening. And what we thought would happen in the future is happening now. This makes me think back to the beginning of our conversation, when you were talking about all of those scientists who are rushing to get information out to the public after each of these extreme weather events, there seems to be an optimism at the core of that effort, a belief that with a little more information, with a little more knowledge, that policymakers and the public will care more about

this issue, will push people to do something. But I guess I'm wondering, is that true? Is this really a problem of lack of information? Well, a couple of things. Scientists are scientists, right? They're like men and women who believe in empirical thought and experimentation and getting data and analyzing it and figuring out what's going on and explaining it. If they're optimistic, they think they're going to do what they can do, which is explain the world the way it is, the physical world, the warming world to people. And then there are some scientists who then take that and use it to go out and directly influence the policymakers, like they go lobby Congress or whatever. But there's a lot who just think, I'm going to do my job, and then it's up to the public

and the public's elected officials to do their job and deal with it. And I think you've seen some of that. Scientists have gotten better about explaining what's going on more quickly in this whole attribution study by this group, I mean, that's their goal. But what's really going to change people's minds is the more they're personally affected by things like heat waves or floods or droughts, particularly if they keep happening, or if, God forbid, they lose a loved one to a flood or to a heat wave. I guess the glass half full read is that as these things like heat waves become more tangible in

people's lives, then something will be done. But that same view also means that a lot of bad things are going to happen to people before they really come to know the bad effects of climate change. And we know that the people who are most likely to experience those negative effects are the people who are most vulnerable in our communities, the people who are most unheard, the people who have the least amount of political power to do something about it. You know, sadly, I think that's really true. The poorest and most disadvantaged people in society tend to suffer the most from all kinds of climate-related disasters. And heat waves are really no exception. And what we've learned is that as the world continues to warm,

heat waves are going to continue to increase in frequency and get hotter. And we may even see more events like this one in the Pacific Northwest with really off-the-charts extreme heat. And that doesn't bode well for all of society, but it's especially bad news for the poorest and disadvantaged among us. Thank you, Henry, for your time. Well, thanks. Nice talking to you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. So hear me clearly.

There's an unfolding assault taking place in America today. An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections. An assault on democracy. An assault on liberty. An assault on who we are. Who we are as Americans. In a speech delivered on Tuesday in Philadelphia, President Biden issued his most forceful denunciation to date of Republican efforts to restrict voting in states across the country and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory.

Bullies and merchants of fear, peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country. The speech was designed to reassure Democrats who say Biden has failed to deliver on a promise to make voting rights a central theme of his presidency. And it comes as Republican lawmakers in Texas try to adopt voting restrictions over the objections of their Democratic colleagues, many of whom have fled the state to block the legislation. We'll be asking my Republican friends in Congress and states and cities and counties

to stand up for God's sake and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote. Have you no shame? Have you no shame? Today's episode was produced by Annie Brown, Jessica Chung, Rochelle Banja, Aastha Chaturvedi, and Austin Mitchell.

It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Sean Hubler. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.