If this were a city-wide record, I would agree. This is a country-wide record, and the second widest country in the world (Canada represents ~6.7% of the world's land surface).

> If you have one hundred cities, then a "once in 100 yrs" event will happen in ~1 city per year. So first lesson is be careful assuming extreme events are necessarily linked directly to a trend.

Temperatures aren't a random number you get from throwing 10 dices and adding the numbers. This isn't a statistical issue

Record highs do not work that way. Record highs are by definition outliers. For example, in the Bay Area when we get some record highs during a heat wave, only around ~5-10% of station get new highs. Part of the issue is that except for San Francisco (which has 150 years of records) the records have only been kept for less than 100 years.

Let's compare two scenarios: (1) no warming and (2) warming.

With no warming, when a heat wave hits we get a few new highs. This is because (a) heat waves a rare events, so we may not have one in the record for that exact day and (b) due to microclimates in the area, the exact conditions will affect which sites are able to beat the record. And (c) there aren't that many records to compete with.

With warming, problems (a) (b) and (c) still apply. But you get a nice little bias up which should increase the number of sites obtaining new records. Yay except... the amount of warming so far means that it won't be a complete wipe out of new records, but rather just "more."

The question is how to distinguish the two cases. How do you tell if it's just the expected number of records being broken vs an increased number? The answer is stop doing that! Instead we should look at all daily temperatures -- rather than focusing on the count of record breaking highs -- because then we have a lot more data to work with.

In any case, the PNW heat wave does not match any reasonable expectation for the types of records we expect to be set by global warming because records would have been smashed regardless of warming.

None of this argument is an "anti-global warming" argument. Too many people conflate "science says this particular event was not a sign of warming" with "this person is a climate denier." If we're going to follow the science, that means less panic over individual events and more concern over the ongoing changes.

I live in India and we're either seeing a draught or a flood.

And things are getting worse consistently

Rainy season was June to Sept.. now it rains 12months, literally.last year it rained in ALL months. It has never happened before.

There never were cyclones in Arabian sea, since 2yrs we had 1 cyclone per year.

And they had predicted these cyclones, yes. That's happening due to a warming ocean. And that's because of global warming.

There was polar vortex in US for 3 or 4yrs now, Texas was freezing just a few months ago

The fact that these events are predicted means climate is changing. Else how would we predict a freak accident? A freak accident that keeps happening over and over again

Edit: getting heavily downvoted so much that HN isn't allowing me to post comments!

Do not underestimate the weight of astro-turfing going on here. Many know that lots of influential persons have hcknews as one of their sources of information, how often did you see something here first before it gets digested by more widely read media?

So there are climate denying cliques here on HN - thought only smart people posted here ???.

> thought only smart people posted here ???

Critical thinking is a skill, not something you automatically get by being intelligent.