The deadly heat waves that began in Central America last month and moved into Mexico and the southwestern United States have become 35 times more likely due to human-caused climate change, a new report by World Weather Attribution, an international organization of climate scientists.
Heat waves are becoming more frequent, longer and hotter worldwide as the burning of fossil fuels for energy increases the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This week, much of the United States experienced record-breaking heat, and dozens of people around the world died from the intense heat during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage.
“The results of our study should be taken as a new warning that our climate is warming to dangerous levels,” Izidine Pinto, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who worked on the analysis, said in a statement.
The scientists studied temperature data from five days of warmest day and night temperatures between late May and early June and compared the measured temperatures with those of a hypothetical planet where humans have never pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The extreme heat the scientists studied was caused by a heat dome, where a clear, sunny sky radiated hot air trapped near the ground by a high-pressure weather system. The excessive temperatures were exacerbated by feedback loops caused by persistent drought, especially in Mexico, and warmer ocean temperatures in the Pacific and Caribbean.
“This is essentially the same high-pressure dome that started over Central America, bulged toward the southwest, and is now over the eastern side of the U.S.,” said Shel Winkley, a meteorologist and weather and climate specialist at Climate Central. non-profit climate communications organization.
This level of heat was a once-in-a-lifetime event in 2000, but with the amount of warming that has occurred since then, the average person could experience such an event five or six times in their lifetime.
Heat in the region included in the report caused forest fires, power outages and a mass death of endangered monkeys. Dangerous temperatures in Mexico have caused at least 125 deaths since March, according to the study, along with more than 2,300 cases of heat stroke.
The report was released after Mexico recorded its hottest day on record, when temperatures peaked at 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the Sonoran Desert. Temperature records were also broken in Guatemala and Honduras, along with Mexico City, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Death Valley in California.
“The number of heat-related deaths is often underestimated,” said Karina Izquierdo, urban advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre and one of the report’s contributors.
Heat-related deaths are usually confirmed months after the heat event, if they are reported at all. Yet heat is the Number 1 weather-related killerand dozens of environmental and labor organizations are urging the Federal Emergency Management Agency to declare the heat a major disaster.
Some of the groups most at risk include farm workers, construction workers and street vendors who face direct exposure, Ms. Izquierdo said, along with homeless people, pregnant people, young children and older adults.
She said: “Refugees and migrants in transit are particularly vulnerable due to the long and physically demanding journey,” exposing them to high temperatures. Between May 31 and June 10 eight bodies of possible migrants were found in the border areas of southern New Mexico and west Texas as the region experienced extreme heat.
