Climate apocalypse: Hundreds dead, city destroyed, fires and 50 degrees Celsius VIDEO

Climate apocalypse: Hundreds dead, city destroyed, fires and 50 degrees Celsius VIDEO

Canada has been going through a record heatwave for the last ten days, which has killed hundreds of people in more than seven days and caused more than 150 forest fires across British Columbia.

In Lytton, a place with only 250 inhabitants, the maximum temperatures are usually around 25 degrees during June.

Canada broke its temperature record for a third straight day on Tuesday - 49.6C, in Lytton, British Columbia. Last week, however, the nights were warmer than the usual average temperature for that month.

The inhabitants of that town do not have a lot of air conditioners, and their houses are actually designed to retain heat.

Now the fires have turned much of Lytton to ashes and forced its inhabitants to flee.

Experts say climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves. However, linking any single event to global warming is complicated. Scientists have been warning for decades that climate change will cause more frequent and stronger heat shocks.

We have just witnessed this in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are becoming less and less suitable for life. In the northwestern United States, for example, roads melted this week, and New Yorkers were told not to use energy-intensive devices, such as washing machines, to avoid huge power demands.

The highest temperature in June was measured in Moscow on June 23 - 34.8 degrees.

38 degrees in the Arctic Circle

Even in the Arctic Circle, temperatures were around 30 degrees.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is currently working on recording the highest temperature recorded so far north of the Arctic Circle after 38 degrees were recorded in Verkhoyansk on June 20.

In northwestern India, ten million people have been hit by a heatwave. In the capital and its surroundings, temperatures did not drop below 40 degrees on Wednesday, which is actually 7 degrees higher than the average for that month. Iraqi authorities declared a national holiday in several provinces, including the capital Baghdad, on Thursday.

The reason for that were temperatures above 50 degrees and the collapse of the electric power system, after which it was simply too hot to work or study.

This could happen every year?

CNN spoke with experts to determine how related these events are and why the heatwave is affecting several parts of the northern hemisphere at the same time.

"The high-pressure systems we see in Canada and the United States, all of these systems, are powered by what we call jet streams - a belt of very strong winds that are high above our heads, some 9.000 meters where planes fly," said Liz Bentley, Chief Executive at Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) of Great Britain. Bentley explained that the current configuration of the jet prevents time systems from moving efficiently in the usual west-east direction.

A similar thing happened in mid-June in the southwestern United States, when there was record heat in places like Phoenix in Arizona. A few weeks later, a high-pressure area formed in the northwest, breaking temperature records in Washington, Oregon and southwestern Canada.

Bentley states that this situation could happen every year until 2100.

Global warming or the normal course of events?

Some politicians no longer dispute the fact that climate change is responsible for many weather extremes, especially heats and storms.

US President Joe Biden said the heatwave was tied to climate change in a speech on Tuesday as he pitched a plan to update the country's infrastructure network.

"Climate change is leading to extreme heat and prolonged drought. Forest fires have become more intense and last outside the traditional months of the fire season," US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday.

Scientists are working on sophisticated tools that can quickly assess how much climate change is contributing to a particular weather occurrence.