Summary: Hello wherever you are, and whenever you hear this heat emergency podcast from Radio Ecoshock. It takes a lot to get me to make an special message like this. The last time I pulled the trigger was on Friday March 11th, 2011 - the very day the Fukushima nuclear reactors blew up in Japan. I knew those reactors had melted down. I knew it was a historic moment of high risk for the Northern Hemisphere, if not the planet. I made five special podcasts over the next five days, and then covered Fukushima ever since, including the historic conference in New York in the Spring of 2013. Now I can't stay quiet about what is obviously one of the first great heat alerts running almost completely around the Northern Hemisphere in this summer of 2013. Here is a link to the audio podcast. It is 20 minutes long. Or listen to it right now courtesy of archive.org: Starting in the Far East, Japan suffered absolute record heat with many deaths. The whole society suffered and electricity use neared the breaking point. Crossing the Pacific to California we find more record heat waves inland, with giant fires reaching even to the coast. You heard about the record-smashing heat in Death Valley, almost reaching the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Nevada, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico went into melt-down mode with no relief for weeks. It's still simmering there. At the same time, the Eastern half of North America went through a series of extreme precipitation events, mostly rain, but even hail several feet deep in places. There were so many floods the media skipped through a dozen quick photos, never having time to really report on them all. We don't know how many areas flooded. We don't even have a reporting system to calculate it all. This weather is so new, we don't know how to track and describe it. Then the heat struck the East. All through the mid-West to the East Coast, the temperatures went to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and well above. The humidity stayed so high, it felt more like 45 degrees in Toronto Canada. That is 113 degrees Fahrenheit. All the major cities of the East, from the Carolinas right up through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Quebec are stuck under giant domes of particulates - urban smog that clogs the lungs. Children are dying. Masses of elderly people are dying. The cause of death is often listed as "heart attack" but as I first reported on Radio Ecoshock back in my April 2008 show "Highway to Hell - How Smog Kills" - Dr. Joel Schwartz of Harvard was briefing Congressional staff on the sudden surge of DOA cases, dead on arrival, during these hot smog waves. The victims don't even make it to hospital. Before we head on around the world, let's take one more look - this time at the Canadian North. There are 85 giant fires in the Yukon Territory alone. The smog is being pulled right across the continent. The fires are burning out of control, un-opposed, and releasing vast amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Move on to Northern Quebec, where the second largest fire in Canadian history, over a million hectares, is burning in heat running over 90 degrees. And that's just one fire set, of many, many in the Canadian Arctic. NASA can see them in satellite passovers. Your major news networks don't bother to look, to count, to count the carbon cost. It's a direct blast of carbon into the greenhouse. Check out Jeff Masters Weather Underground blog dated July 13, 2013 for an extensive report on the record smashing fires in northern Quebec, Canada. Oh, and by the way, I provide a link (here) for the scariest forest fire video I have ever seen. I've witnessed a forst fire fairly close up. I've seen trees "candle" - the jumping of fire ball across the tree tops. But few have ever witnessed one of the new super fires racing over a hillside at more than 20 miles an hour straight for the camera. They have to floor their truck and run to get out alive. ON THROUGH EUROPE Now over to Britain. It's so
