Heat waves challenge governments to step back from ‘climate abyss’

Startling heat waves around the world have lent urgency to calls for action to slow global warming. Will they suffice to convince governments to change their fossil fuel ways?

The headlines may seem familiar: health facilities overwhelmed, emergency services scrambling to respond, lives tragically lost – not because of an act of terror or war, but a force of nature.

Except that, this time, the culprit was not the pandemic.

It was the latest, starkest sign of climate change, a “heat dome” enveloping the northwestern United States and Canada and driving temperatures...