One continuing reflected aspect of the boiling-over heat wave that placed a  ‘dome’ of suffering over the US Northwest and Canada the past week is that climate change is real, here right now, and bad as shit:

“The world is long past the point when some amount of dangerous climate change could be avoided. And we no longer need to look to the future to imagine what that change could look and feel like. The climate crisis is here.” https://t.co/QNnHcSGNAB

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) July 3, 2021

In Canada, great heat is an oddity, a situation that’s dangerously changing — from CBC News this morning:

Two weeks ago, the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices released a report on the public health impacts of climate change and the need for action to adapt to a new reality of extreme threats.

“Climate change,” Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, wrote in the report’s introduction, “is an escalating public health emergency, and we need to start treating it that way.”

The historic and deadly heat wave in British Columbia made those words frighteningly real — even before it triggered a forest fire that destroyed most of the village of Lytton, British Columbia.

“We are now committed to a certain degree of warming in the world because of the emissions of the past,” Ryan Ness, the adaptation research director for the institute and co-author of the report, said in an interview on Friday.
“So while, in the longer term, it’s absolutely critical to reduce greenhouse gases as much as possible, as fast as possible, to keep things from getting even worse, there is a certain amount of climate change that we can no longer avoid. And the only way to really deal with that is to prepare, to adapt and to become more resilient to this change in climate.”

Easier said than done, despite the obvious warning events this past week.
In the US Northwest, even climate-aware and knowledgeable people have been frightened by this lastest heat wave —per the Guardian, also this morning:

In Washington and Oregon, largely liberal, climate-conscious states, efforts to combat global heating have long been popular.
The Washington governor, Jay Inslee, put himself forward as the “climate candidate” during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
He argued residents of the region would, in the absence of federal leadership, “do our part to address a global problem”.

Climate conversations have generally centered on what north-westerners could do to protect the planet or other people in places at greater risk of extreme heat. But after three days of temperatures near or above 100F (38C) in Seattle – a city where residents often describe the sixth month as “June-uary”, as temperatures rarely reach 80F (27C) – they’re increasingly concerned about themselves.

“It felt like we’d set our Earth on fire,” said Summer Stinson, a 49-year-old Seattle non-profit executive.
“There was a naivety that this wouldn’t affect us in the north-west,” Stinson continued.

Having lived in Las Vegas, Stinson knew how to deal with the heat.
She covered south-facing windows in her craftsman-style home with aluminum foil, kept the appliances off, and hunkered down with her teenage son and black labrador retriever, Rico. It was oppressive, evocative of the wildfire smoke that’s kept west coast residents trapped inside during recent summers.
Stinson binged the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and worried for her city.

The heat wave at its peak was gruesome:

In the emergency department of Seattle’s Harborview medical center, the region’s premier trauma hospital, Dr Jeremy Hess found the scene he expected on Sunday night — dozens of people with heat-related ailments. By Monday evening, as the temperatures peaked, the scene was unusually intense.
Ambulance teams were run ragged, transporting critically ill patients who’d been intubated in the field.
One area hospital was low on ventilators, while equipment at others was breaking in the heat. Hospitals were nearly overwhelmed.

“We really hadn’t had activity like that since the beginning of the Covid outbreak here,” said Hess, who also directs the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.
“We were on the edge.”

Having contributed to UN climate work, Hess knew both the dangers posed both by extreme heat and the lack of preparation in most communities, including his own.
There had been a sense, Hess said, that the north-west would be spared the worst harms presented by a warming world. There’s truth to the sentiment inasmuch as the region, with its affluence, abundant resources and usually mellow weather, is better positioned than much of the world for a hotter, more erratic climate.
The deadly heatwave came as a surprise.

“People have recognized that this might happen in theory, but I don’t think they expected it to happen,” he said.
“They certainly didn’t expect it to happen now, and they didn’t expect it to be this bad.”

Horror being is that the situation will only worsen, and from all indications way-soon.
This month might be a much-easier one, though:

The July climate outlook from @NWSCPC favors a hotter and drier than average July for regions out West which just experienced a record setting heatwave. Meanwhile, a cooler and wetter month is forecast for the Southeast. https://t.co/hVVzbJawym pic.twitter.com/ZQZkI5Vcpb

— NOAA Climate.gov (@NOAAClimate) July 2, 2021

Still, it’s going to be hot no matter…

(Illustration out front is of Swedish teen-aged climate activist, Greta Thunberg, shown on the cover of Time as the magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year; image found here).