'Slim timeline': UK’s chief scientific adviser gives climate warning as wildfires rage on

UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King on Sunday warned that no place is safe and secure from the wrath of the deadly heatwave that has battered parts of Canada and the US with record temperatures. As governments scrambled to tackle the climate emergency with measures that minimize heat-related deaths, the UK’s top weather scientist in an interview with The Guardian expressed concerns saying that it may not have been anticipated that the temperature would hit almost 50 C in Canada causing hundreds of deaths, melting cars, buckling roads, and wreaking havoc on homes without air conditioning.

More than 180 wildfires were ignited in Canada’s in British Columbia due to intense heatwave, causing casualties in the Pacific Northwest, of these 70 percent were started due to lightning strikes. 

Separately, firefighters in the US have been battling scorching blazes on multiple fronts in the forests of far northern California, which has prompted emergency evacuations.  The harrowing scenes emerging out of California reminded last year’s ravaging wildfires that charred more than 6,562 sq miles (17,000 sq km) forest area, destroying dozens of homes and perishing wildlife. As the heatwaves slammed the Pacific north-west, starting new Salt wildfires in 4 sq miles (10 sq km) of Redding that led to the complete closure of Interstate 5 on the 4th of July, Sir David King cautioned that the dangers of climate change had been understood and identified for a long time, but the humans had not acted.

Furthermore, UK's top weather scientist warned about the “slim timeline” that there was left to bring the environmental disasters under control in view of heat expanding to new areas in the US west coast, including Seattle and Portland. 

In a separate statement to the newspaper, Michael E Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State College and writer of The New Local weather Struggle warned that the authorities must take these [wildfires] very critically. “You heat up the planet, you’re going to see an elevated incidence of warmth excessive. Local weather fashions are literally underestimating the effect that local weather change is having on occasions just like the unprecedented heatwave we’re witnessing out west proper now,” were his wordings as carried in the report. 

Dangers of new climatical events in Asia, Europe, Australia

Climate experts meanwhile weighed in saying that the climate crisis pushes global temperatures higher, creating dangers of new events that might be witnessed across northern Siberia to Europe, and Asia to Australia.  King and other leading scientists had earlier this month formed a Climate Crisis Advisory Group as they said that the time was “running out” about when the world leaders could act. Mann told The Guardian that the climate was being destabilized in parts, leading to the dangerous warming of the Arctic and that the existing climate models were failing to capture the actual intensity of the impact and in turn the repercussions of the same.