HEAT WAVE A GLIMPSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE'S IMPACT IN N. AMERICA

The U.S. Pacific Northwest was in the throes of a record-shattering heat wave last summer when a woman in her 70s was wheeled into an emergency room with symptoms of a life-threatening heat stroke.

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Desperate to cool her, Dr. Alexander St. John grabbed a body bag, filled it with ice from the hospital kitchen and zipped the woman inside. Within minutes, her body temperature dropped and her symptoms improved.

“I’ve never had to do that before. It was surreal,” said St. John. “Twenty years ago, it seems like we would talk about climate change as something that would happen over the coming generations — and all of a sudden it seems to be accelerating to the point where we’re all experiencing it in real time.”

The technique was used to save several other patients at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center during the five-day heat wave last June that saw temperatures spike as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) in some places and killed an estimated 600 people or more across Oregon, Washington and western Canada.

The sweltering stretch across the normally cool region offers a glimpse of the types of extreme weather events that will accelerate in North America within 30 years without a coordinated effort to slow climate change, according to a United Nations report released this week. Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, people across the U.S., Mexico and Canada will be at increasing risk of catastrophic weather events.