The Heat Wave That Hit the Pacific Northwest

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a daily.
0:10.0	Today
0:12.0	Record-breaking climate extremes are blanketing the United States this summer from heat to drought to wildfires.
0:20.0	A steadherndon 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.
0:35.0	It's Wednesday, July 14.
0:51.0	Sergio, I feel like Portland has been basically at the center of every national news story recently.
0:57.0	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.
1:09.0	COVID restrictions are starting to get lifted. People are starting to come out of their houses, go to restaurants, go to bars, and regular life was resuming a little bit.
1:17.0	And then this massive heat wave just descends on the Pacific Northwest in late June.
1:23.0	The Northwest bracing for record breaking and potentially life-threatening heat this weekend.
1:29.0	Dozens of records, some of them decades old, are expected to fall.
1:33.0	It's Oregon, Washington, and parts of Western Canada. And it brings this punishing heat.
1:38.0	Portland hit an all-time record high of 112 earlier today.
1:43.0	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.
1:55.0	In Portland, we saw temperatures for three days in a row break record after record, and it finally got to 116 degrees.
2:02.0	This is some serious heat.
2:04.0	There's temperatures this time of year, lower in middle 70s, we're talking about the bit.
2:16.0	You know, 116 degrees is like 40 degrees above what it should normally be for this time of the year. Wow. And that's 9 degrees above the previous record of 107.
2:18.0	Many people there are not used to relying on air conditioning and are needing to seek out cooling centers to stay safe.
2:24.0	And so we see Portland thrown back into the state of emergency, right?
2:28.0	There's 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.
2:37.0	I know reporters have this weird experience where people are staying in and you run out. And I know that this is a reporter shared instinct.
	...

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