My view is that this is probably something like a once in a 1000 year event. It will be, probably, the most extreme weather event any of us have ever observed anywhere on the planet during our entire lifetimes. I cannot think of any weather event anywhere that comes close to this on its rarity.
Climate change will have helped by shifting the entire distribtution along a couple of degrees, but even without a background global warming the record would not have been in doubt and it would still be extreme beyond belief.
Think about this. A place in Canada, which did not hold the record before, just broke the record for the entire country, for the entire year, three times in a row. the 49.6C Lynton record is so extreme that Canada has just jumped from being rank 50 to rank 25 in terms of countries ranked by highest recoreded temperature. And that occured in June, not July or August. It is very unusual for a country to have its highest ever recorded temperature in June. Here's a challenge, find some examples that didn't occur during this heatwave. The event was so extreme that I can pretty much guarantee about 90% of all northern hemisphere June temp records happened during this heatwave.
It is simply the most extreme weather event we have or will ever see. More unlikely than Hurricane Patricia in 2015
Originally Posted by: Quantum