June was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record. It beat the record set last year for the hottest June on record, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union.
“We should consider this the new normal,” said 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 U.S. population — almost 175 million people — faced extreme heat on July 4, and the impacts of this new normal continued to broil the country this week.
In the Western United States, a heat dome fed wildfires, and in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, excessive heat threatened lives. On Thursday, five days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas, more than a million people in Houston remained without power for their air-conditioning units and medical devices.
Heat waves 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 heat waves 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 Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “When these naturally occurring heat waves 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, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with preindustrial 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 degrees Celsius to preserve a livable planet.
That was a long-term goal, so passing 1.5 degrees for months, or even a year, doesn’t mean it’s passed for good. But the trend is worrisome.
Heat waves 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 don’t destroy an area like a hurricane, a flood or a tornado does, but they’re a bigger threat to people’s health, he added. In the Western United States, heat could be responsible for more than 90 deaths this month.
It can be especially dangerous when extreme heat events piggyback on other disasters.
Houston is an unfortunate example, said Benjamin Zaitchik, an associate professor in Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Hurricane Beryl knocked out power in much of the city — and was followed by a heat wave.
Though the general public “might forget the heat wave,” Dr. 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 labor organizations asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recognize the threat of extreme heat by including it in major disaster declarations.
“Heat is like the silent storm,” said David Sittenfeld, the director of the Center 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 socio-economic inequalities.
The burden of urban heat, for example, isn’t equally distributed. A Columbia University analysis showed that neighborhoods that were historically redlined experienced hotter summers in 84 percent of major American cities, including Houston.
These communities often experience the urban heat island effect: Roads and rooftops absorb more heat than natural spaces do, making urban areas hotter than rural areas. A report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central found that almost 70 percent of 50 million city dwellers are in areas where the temperature was at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher because of city infrastructure.
Based on that analysis, over 1.7 million people in Houston were experiencing heat at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 90-degree temperatures that led to a heat advisory on Thursday — while more than a million people were still without power.
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