Weather and its ascribed consequences continue to hold sway this late-afternoon Saturday here in California’s Central Valley, we’re heavy-hot as we’re forecast for another ‘mega-heat-wave’ type-roll for the next few days, but happily not all that intense:

We'll go back above the century mark once again this afternoon for a majority of the southern San Joaquin Valley and lower Sierra Foothills. The good news is that this heat is not extreme like last week and just slightly above average for mid-July! #CAwx pic.twitter.com/tdrvcveHgP

— NWS Hanford (@NWSHanford) July 17, 2021

In the original ‘mega-heat-wave in Canada last month, more deaths occurred than first reported — via CTV News yesterday:

The number of deaths recorded across British Columbia during the province’s recent record-breaking heat wave has climbed to 808, according to coroners.

Those deaths were recorded from June 25 through July 1, as a brutal heat dome sent temperatures soaring to dangerous highs in many communities.
The deadliest day was Tuesday, June 29 – the same day the Village of Lytton experienced 46.9 C heat, setting a new Canadian record and topping the hottest temperature ever registered in Las Vegas.

The B.C. Coroners Service said 300 deaths were recorded that day alone.
…
World Weather Attribution, a group of international climate scientists, has determined heat waves similar to the one experienced this year in Western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest remain “rare or extremely rare,” but the group has cautioned they will become more and more likely as global temperatures rise.
An initial analysis, which has yet to be peer reviewed but is said to have used “peer-reviewed methods,” found the 2021 heat wave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

As I’ve written numerous times, climate change is here and we’d better get kicking on it. Along with the dying, there’s the problem with crops and farming — per the Financial Post, also yesterday:

Sustained record-breaking heat, droughts and wildfires across the Prairies and British Columbia this month are wreaking havoc on food production in Canada, with farmers reporting stunted crops, cherries cooking on trees and 80-per-cent mortality rates at some commercial shellfish operations.

Burnt pastures have left ranchers with little for their cattle to graze, forcing them to dip into winter feed stocks and consider shrinking their herd by sending cattle, even prized breeding cows, to slaughter.
…
Provinces have been encouraging grain farmers to harvest their stunted crops now for feed.
Saskatchewan’s highway ministry has even started reminding ranchers that grass in the ditches alongside roads are free for haying on a first-come, first-served basis.

“It’s too hot for almost all of our crops,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.
“We need to get really serious about climate change because these kinds of temperatures, they’re not viable.”

Pretty straightforward — despite the actual events, any kind of an international move to face the quickly-coming (and is here right now) consequences of a seemingly accelerating warming of our planet’s environment doesn’t seem to be in the works. Drastic action is way-required on an immediate basis-like timeframe.
Yet a factor in relief is the science of how bad climate change will be, even at a low-level rise — Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the reasoning: ‘“The scientific community has done a really good job projecting when we would get to 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about where we are now … The community hasn’t done as good of a job projecting how bad climate impacts would be at 1.2 degrees Celsius.”‘

Hence, the stalled look on climate-change action. A detailed piece on the situation with the onslaught of climate change and how nearly-nothing is being done about it, from The New York Times this afternoon:

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it.
The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change.
“There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save people’s lives.”

The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise.
Questions are now being raised about whether the authorities adequately warned the public about risks.

The bigger question is whether the mounting disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases.
They come a few months ahead of United Nations-led climate negotiations in Glasgow in November, effectively a moment of reckoning for whether the nations of the world will be able to agree on ways to rein in emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change.
…
“Extreme weather events in developing countries often cause great death and destruction — but these are seen as our responsibility, not something made worse by more than a hundred years of greenhouse gases emitted by industrialized countries,” said Ulka Kelkar, climate director at the India office of the World Resources Institute.
These intensifying disasters now striking richer countries, she said, show that developing countries seeking the world’s help to fight climate change “have not been crying wolf.”
…
The events of this summer come after decades of neglect of science. Climate models have warned of the ruinous impact of rising temperatures. An exhaustive scientific assessment in 2018 warned that a failure to keep the average global temperature from rising past 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the start of the industrial age, could usher in catastrophic results, from the inundation of coastal cities to crop failures in various parts of the world.

The report offered world leaders a practical, albeit narrow path out of chaos.
It required the world as a whole to halve emissions by 2030. Since then, however, global emissions have continued rising, so much so that global average temperature has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880, narrowing the path to keep the increase below the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold.
…
That message clearly hasn’t sunk in among policymakers, and perhaps the public as well, particularly in the developed world, which has maintained a sense of invulnerability.
The result is a lack of preparation, even in countries with resources.
In the United States, flooding has killed more than 1,000 people since 2010 alone, according to federal data. In the Southwest, heat deaths have spiked in recent years.

Sometimes that is because governments have scrambled to respond to disasters they haven’t experienced before, like the heat wave in Western Canada last month, according to Jean Slick, head of the disaster and emergency management program at Royal Roads University in British Columbia.
“You can have a plan, but you don’t know that it will work,” Ms. Slick said.

And a colorful, but horrifying image of the nowadays:

Smoke continues: A strong upper level high pressure is apparent on the HRRR smoke forecast today over the West. Notice how the flow is clockwise around the high pressure. #idwx #orwx pic.twitter.com/VICFytoHqz

— NWS Boise (@NWSBoise) July 17, 2021

Yet once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front found here).