‘More heat, more often’: Temperature records keep breaking
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A man walking near the Las Vegas strip during a heatwave in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 7, 2024.
PHOTO: AFP
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NEW YORK - June was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record. It beat the record set in 2023 for the hottest June on record, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the EU.
“We should consider this the new normal,” said Dr Katherine Idziorek, an assistant professor in geography and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We need to be preparing for more heat, more often. That’s the reality.”
More than half the US population – almost 175 million people – faced extreme heat on July 4, and the effects of this new normal continued to broil the country this week.
In the western US, a heat dome fed wildfires, and in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, excessive heat threatened lives. On July 11, five days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas,
Heatwaves are part of a natural weather pattern of high-pressure systems, which cause unusually high temperatures to stagnate for a minimum of three days to more than a month. But heatwaves are growing stronger and more frequent under climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
“We’ve known for decades that the world is warming,” said Dr Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “When these naturally occurring heatwaves happen, they’re boosted by those steroids of climate change.”
June was also the 12th consecutive month of global warming at or above 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial temperatures, the Copernicus report found. Almost a decade ago, under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 deg C to preserve a livable planet.
That was a long-term goal, so passing 1.5 deg C for months, or even a year, does not mean it has passed for good. But the trend is worrisome.
Heatwaves kill more people and send more people to the hospital than any other extreme weather event, Dr Gershunov said. They can get less attention because they do not destroy an area like a hurricane, a flood or a tornado does, but they are a bigger threat to people’s health, he added. In the western US, heat could be responsible for more than 90 deaths in July.
It can be especially dangerous when extreme heat events piggyback on other disasters.
Houston is an unfortunate example, said Professor Benjamin Zaitchik, an associate professor in Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Beryl knocked out power in much of the city – and was followed by a heatwave.
Although the general public “might forget the heatwave”, Prof Zaitchik said, the “compounding effect of the hurricane and the power outage, the people suffering in Houston won’t forget it”.
Recently, a group of environmental, health and labour organisations asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recognise the threat of extreme heat by including it in major disaster declarations.
“Heat is like the silent storm,” said Dr David Sittenfeld, director of the Centre for the Environment at Boston’s Museum of Science. Other climate-related hazards like heavy rain and wildfires are more visible, he said, but heat affects everyone and can exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities. NYTIMES
