Washington: Agencies
The American newspaper The Washington Post reported that billions of people around the world have felt the deadly severity of heat waves fueled by climate change, noting that scorching heat across the five continents recorded 1,400 new records during this week alone. According to what was reported by the Youm7 news website in Cairo
The American newspaper said, on its website, that the extreme heat waves showed how human-caused global warming has made catastrophic temperatures common.
She pointed out that dozens of bodies were found in the Indian city of Delhi on two days this week, when the intense heat and humidity did not ease until sunset, and tourists died or went missing due to the high temperatures in Greece, and hundreds of pilgrims died before they could reach the holiest site. Among Muslims, temperatures reached more than 51 degrees Celsius.
Scientists say the scorching heat sweeping across five continents in recent days has provided further evidence that human-caused global warming has pushed the baseline level of natural temperatures so high that once-unimaginable disasters have become commonplace.
This suffering came even though there were expectations that the year-long global heat wave might begin to fade soon. Instead, in the past seven days alone, billions have felt the heat caused by climate change that has caused more than a thousand records to be broken. Temperatures have dropped globally, and hundreds have fallen in the United States, where tens of millions of people across the Midwest and East Coast are suffering from extreme heat amid one of the worst early-season heat waves seen in current generations.
“It should be clear that dangerous climate change has already begun, and that people will die from global warming at this point,” said Michael Weiner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Researchers say the occurrence of so many heat waves like this week, which appeared after the dissipation of the El Niño weather pattern that normally causes global temperatures to rise, shows how greenhouse gas pollution has pushed the planet into frightening new territory. Scientists had expected this summer to be more... Somewhat cooler than 2023, which was the hottest in the Northern Hemisphere for at least 2,000 years, but with the start of the summer of 2024 there are ominous signs that more scorching conditions may still be on the horizon.
Climatologist Zeke Hausfather said June was already certain to set a record for the 13th consecutive monthly average global temperature, and that next month the planet could approach or exceed the highest global averages ever measured.
Scientists said it is still not yet clear whether the steady trend in record temperatures will reverse soon, with the expected transition from El Niño to its cooler counterpart, La Niña. Scientists are also still analyzing individual extreme weather events to determine the extent to which climate change will affect them. If there is any effect at all.
Although the temperatures seen around the world this week were not all unprecedented, they were nonetheless evidence of how the climate is shifting in a way that makes hot weather more likely to arrive earlier and last longer.
The Washington Post indicated that temperatures for about 80% of the world’s population - 6.5 billion people - over the past week were double what was likely due to humans burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to data provided to the newspaper (Washington Post). The Washington Post) by the nonprofit Climate Central.
Nearly half of that number experienced what Climate Central considers “exceptional heat,” conditions that would be rare or even impossible in a world not experiencing climate change. “What really stands out is the number of heat waves,” said Andrew Pershing, the organization’s climate science director. occurring at the same time."
Over the course of the week, “exceptional” conditions could be explored in most parts of Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and Southeast Asia. High demand for air conditioning paralyzed power grids in Albania and Kuwait. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last week saw more than 1400 degrees higher than average temperatures around the world.
It is noteworthy that since the beginning of the industrial era, human activities, most of which are the burning of fossil fuels, have led to a rise in the temperature of the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius, and the Earth’s temperature over the past twelve months has been hotter, averaging about 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels. Pre-industrial.