Climate Change Made North American Heat Wave 150 Times More Likely: Study

The World Weather Attribution group said that global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the heat wave at least 150 times more likely to happen.

A record-breaking heat wave that hit the western United States and Canada at the end of June would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change, according to an analysis by a group of leading climate scientists. The World Weather Attribution group said that global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the heat wave at least 150 times more likely to happen. Pacific Northwest areas of the two countries saw temperatures that broke records by several degrees, including a Canadian record of 49.6 degrees Celsius in the village of Lytton, which was subsequently mostly destroyed in a wildfire. "There's absolutely no doubt that climate change played a key role here," Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the University of Oxford said during a press conference discussing the findings.