Across the Northern Hemisphere, searing temperatures are breaking records, disrupting everyday life and costing lives.
In Asia, unrelentingly high temperatures in Pakistan are making everyday life unbearable. In Tiancheng, China, it was 108 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 42 Celsius. In Japan, a heat wave has set records up and down the archipelago.
An intense, record-breaking heat wave sweltered wide areas of Europe.
And while summer temperatures in the United States have most likely not yet peaked, major cities in the West are already grappling with the consequences of extreme heat. In Clark County, Nev., at least 29 people have already died from the high temperatures. Across the continent, 11 have died in Maryland.
The rash of global heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere comes as average global temperatures continue to climb, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, and new data reveals that the world is becoming hotter, faster.
New research from an international team of scientists shows that each fraction of a degree of warming will lead to longer heat waves, “with the most extreme heat waves lengthening the most.”
David Neelin, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a coauthor of the study, said that just as the world is getting hotter, faster, the intensity and duration of heat waves is increasing, too.
“For each increment of temperature for the foreseeable future, the change in the durations is actually going to be more than for the previous increment of temperature, basically wherever you are,” he said.
And that will mean more deaths. One recent paper suggested that heat could claim more than 30,000 lives annually in England and Wales by the 2070s.
To get a sense of how people around the world were coping with the heat, I checked in with several of my Times colleagues around the globe.
Countries such as India are no stranger to heat. Last week in Aminidivi, part of an island chain off southwestern India, the minimum temperature was 101 degrees Fahrenheit.
But Anupreeta Das, who covers South Asia for The Times, told me the region has experienced heat waves in recent years that are lasting longer and becoming hotter. And the country is not prepared.
“The Indian government has been slow to recognize the effects of extreme heat on people and draw up mitigation strategies,” she said. “In urban areas, slum dwellers, informal workers and those whose professions require outdoor work — such as traffic cops, vendors, construction workers and street cleaners — face extreme risk from excessive heat. In rural areas, farmers are among the most vulnerable.”
There are halting efforts to respond, Das said, including awareness campaigns that encourage people to stay indoors during the hottest hours of the day, and efforts to train community health workers to spot signs of heat exhaustion. Some cities, she said, were also coming up with heat action plans that include warning systems and cooling stations.
But as India keeps heating up, those efforts will go only so far.
“Given the rapidity of change,” Das said, many climate experts and scientists have urged the Indian government to extend their thinking beyond mitigating the effects of heat waves to “long-term climate adaptation strategies.”
In the Middle East, extreme heat is already the norm, said Vivian Nereim, the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula.
“Highs are hovering around 110 degrees every day this week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where I have lived for a decade,” she said. “This is just a typical summer. Everyone who is fortunate enough to stay indoors scuttles between their air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned workplaces, venturing outside only in the early morning or after sunset.”
This week in Tuz Khurmato, Iraq, the minimum temperature one day was 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Elsewhere in the region, temperatures climbed to 125.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
But not everyone has the luxury of staying indoors, or escaping to cooler locales.
“Those who suffer the most are the people, mostly foreign laborers, whose jobs require them to be outside,” Nereim said.
That includes construction workers, street cleaners and food-delivery drivers, who arrive at your doorstep on tiny motorcycles, pleading for water.
“It’s the sort of dystopian future that wealthier countries around the world will face as the planet warms,” she said.
Back in India, Mujib Mashal, the South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times, said that “every summer in recent years, the story feels the same in South Asia: that it is hot, and that it is hotter than the summer before.”
This month, Mashal wrote a powerful story about the unrelenting nature of the heat in one city, Sri Ganganagar.
“While we covered how the heat broke records last summer, this year we wanted to see just how this intensifying trend impacts life in some of India’s hottest places,” he said. “What was clear was the impact of the heat on health and on productivity.”
Yet Mujib also saw a population working to adapt.
“What we found was how much daily routines have been changing quite rapidly to adapt to this new reality,” he said. In practice, this meant “different work hours in offices and in farms, a heightened awareness of the risks of heatstrokes, medical preparedness at the village level for dealing with illnesses that exacerbate due to heat.”
The West’s drought might last a long, long time
A megadrought has sapped water supplies, ravaged farms and ranches and fueled wildfires across the American Southwest for 25 years. Not in 12 centuries has the region been so dry for so long.
Now comes worse news: Relief might still be decades away.
According to new findings published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the dry spell is no mere bout of bad luck, no rough patch that could end anytime soon. It seems to be the result of a pattern of Pacific Ocean temperatures that is “stuck” because of global warming. That means the drought could continue through 2050, perhaps even 2100 and beyond. — Raymond Zhong
More climate news from around the web:
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Unusual ocean heat is a big factor behind a surge of floods this summer, according to The Washington Post.
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The Federal Court of Australia ruled that the government has no “duty of care” to protect Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders from the effects of climate change, the BBC reported.
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A wildfire has destroyed 70 structures on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, including the century-old Grand Canyon Lodge, ABC News reported. Officials have closed the North Rim area for the remainder of the summer season.
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From Variety: The Steve Miller Band said it had canceled all dates on its 2025 North American tour because of the dangers posed by weather disasters.
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David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
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