Heat and climate extremes are affecting billions of people far beyond the US
Polling station workers. Pilgrims. Tourists on a walk.
Many people worldwide have died in recent weeks due to the scorching heat. It’s a shocking reminder of the global dangers of extreme weather as nearly 100 million Americans face a heat wave this week.
Dozens of cities in Mexico has broken heat records in May and June, killing more than 100 people. India has been experiencing an unusually long heat wave that has killed several election workers, and this week, in the capital Delhi, even nighttime temperatures remained in the mid-90s Fahrenheit, or mid-30s Celsius. Greece is bracing for wildfires this week, after a series of heat waves killed several tourists. In Bamako, the capital of Mali, hospitals reported more than 100 additional deaths in the first four days of April, The Associated Press reported.
Between May 2023 and May 2024, an estimated 6.3 billion peopleAbout four in five people worldwide have experienced what were considered abnormally high temperatures in their area for at least a month, according to a recent analysis by Climate Central, a science nonprofit.
The damage to human health, agriculture and the global economy is only now beginning to become clear.
Extreme heat killed one estimated 489,000 people annually between 2000 and 2019, according to the World Meteorological Organization, making heat the deadliest of all extreme weather events. Swiss RE, the insurance industry giant, said in a report this week that the the accumulation of dangers Climate change could further fuel the growing market for insurance against strikes and riots. “Climate change could also lead to food and water shortages, and in turn to civil unrest and mass migration,” the report said.
As for the world’s two rival economic powers, China and the United States, both face a common danger this summer. As a fifth of all Americans were under an extreme heat warning this week, several areas in northern China broke maximum temperature records. And earlier this week, the capital Beijing was under a heat alert as temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius.
The two countries are also the two largest producers of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. China’s current emissions are by far the highest in the world, and the United States’ cumulative emissions over the past 150 years of industrialization are the highest in the world.
Emissions like these, produced by the burning of fossil fuels, are the cause of these periods of abnormally high temperatures, scientists have repeatedly found. “It is no surprise that heat waves are becoming more deadly,” Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said in a statement on Thursday.
Global temperatures in the first five months of the year are the highest since modern records began, putting 2024 on track to become the warmest year in recorded history, surpassing last year’s record.
Saudi Arabia, a petrostate that has resisted diplomatic efforts to phase out its use of fossil fuels, experienced a shocking event this week. Agence France-Presse reported this on Thursday 1,000 people had died during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the holy city in Saudi Arabia. In central Algeria, another oil-rich state, riots broke out over water mid-June, when rising temperatures and a lack of rain dried up drinking water supplies.
Doctors around the world have increasingly highlighted the often underappreciated effect of heat on health.
Many hospital systems do not have an adequate way to count heat-related illnesses or deaths because heat can exacerbate many other circumstancessuch as kidney disease or asthma, meaning that heat-related deaths are sometimes attributed to other causes and manifest as a pattern of excess mortality.
“A transition away from fossil fuels is the best way to prevent future heat-related deaths and illnesses — anything else is just a band-aid on a gunshot wound,” said Renee Salas, an emergency room physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of a special issue of The Lancet, the medical journal, on climate change and health.
Heat is not the only extreme weather hazard the world faces.
High temperatures dried out the soil in China’s northern agricultural provinces, prompting emergency measures to combat a worsening drought, including cloud seeding operations to induce rain. Meanwhile, heavy rains swept across the country’s south, causing landslides that blocked roads and power outages that affected 100,000 households.
In the United States, the weather in New Mexico changed from fires to floods over the course of a week. About 23,000 acres have burned in southern New Mexico since two fast-moving wildfires were discovered Monday, killing at least two people. Then came torrential rains on Wednesday, sending floodwaters down scarred hills.
Last week, three days of tropical rain in Florida caused major damage to airports and highways.
On Thursday, the first storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Alberto, barreled into Mexico’s northeastern coast. Three children were killed amid the pounding wind and rain, local officials said. One drowned while trying to save a ball in a fast-flowing river. Two others were electrocuted when a cable made contact with a pond.
Hurricane season has arrived is expected to be unusually strong this yearaccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because the ocean is unusually hot. Part of that is also due to the burning of fossil fuels.
John Liu contributed reporting.
