WASHINGTON (AN) — Hotter days, warming oceans and shifting weather patterns powered by human-caused climate change are impacting people and cultures as never before.
As summer bakes the Northern Hemisphere, a massive humid heat dome settled this week over the Persian Gulf region, pushing temperatures to 45° Celsius; the heat index, which factors in the effect of humidity, soared to 65° C. The extreme humidity is linked to the Gulf where sea surface temperatures are reaching 35°, the warmest in the world, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Greece, on the heels of the hottest June ever recorded in the country, authorities are again advising residents and tourists to be prepared for yet another wave of dangerously hot weather, with temperatures exceeding 40° and the wildfire risk growing. Scorching heat prompted tourist officials to close the Acropolis for several hours on Wednesday.
Asia and Middle East hit hard
A pre-monsoon heat wave strained hospitals and morgues in Pakistan beyond their breaking point as people suffered and died. More than 1,300 people perished during this year’s Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, when an exceptional heat wave pushed the temperature to 51°.
In Gaza, where innocent Palestinians are caught up in the ongoing fighting, a late spring blast of hot air made already dire living conditions worse. Now, with summer heat building, men, women and children who have been forced from their homes into makeshift tents and shelters are besieged by swarming flies, disease and noxious odors from hundreds of thousands of tons of uncollected moldering garbage, Netherlands peace activist organization PAX reports.
And with Paris preparing for the summer Olympics, athletes are voicing concerns over the likelihood of dangerous heat during the games, which run from July 26 to August 11. Climate change, they say, could make their sports more dangerous, or even deadly, while eroding the level of competition.
Across the Atlantic, Hurricane Beryl, fueled in part by an exceptionally warm ocean, kicked off the 2024 hurricane season. It grew quickly into a major Category 5 storm, devastating islands in Caribbean, killing a dozen people and leaving thousands homeless, before hitting Mexico and the U.S.
What climate change?
Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party gathered to crown the former president, convicted felon and climate change denier, Donald Trump, as their party’s presidential nominee, global warming was off the table. Trump is running on an agenda that calls for digging more coal and drilling for more oil and gas — the hydrocarbon trio that stokes the Earth’s rising temperatures.
To no one's surprise, last month went into the record books as the 13th straight month of record global heat, besting last June’s record for the hottest June ever recorded, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, the head of Copernicus. Continuing record heat “is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Heat stress is the world’s leading cause of weather-related deaths, the World Health Organization emphasizes, and can exacerbate underlying illnesses including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and mental health disorders. Heatstroke is a medical emergency with a high-case fatality rate; heat also increases the risk of accidents and transmission of some infectious diseases.
Heat putting more people at risk
An estimated 489,000 heat-related deaths occur each year, with 45% of the deaths in Asia and 36% in Europe. Meanwhile, the number of people exposed to extreme heat continues to grow exponentially due to climate change in all world regions, WHO reports.
For older people with physical health problems, hot weather can be especially dangerous. Temperatures as low as about 27° can pose a significant threat, and when the humidity climbs to 90%, even lower temperatures can be hazardous, said Deborah Carr, a Boston University sociologist who specializes in the study of aging.
“Nighttime heat is especially harmful for older adults whose homes lack air conditioning or who can’t afford to run their air conditioners for long periods,” she said.
Carr is a member of a research team that used temperature and climate data archived by NASA, the U.S. space agency, along with demographic data to identify which parts of the world are at the greatest risk of current and future heat exposure.
Not a 'distant threat'
The researchers found that in 2020, about 14% of the world’s population 69 years of age or older lived in places where the average maximum temperature exceeded 37.5° — the level at which even brief exposure can be dangerous for older people. Twenty-five years from now, nearly a quarter of the world’s aging population will be exposed to those dangerously extreme temperatures.
Excessive heat is an often overlooked threat to younger people as well, including for pregnant women, newborns, children and adolescents. For example, preterm births — the leading cause of childhood deaths — spike during heat waves. Every added 1° in minimum daily temperature over 23.9° has been shown to increase the risk of infant mortality by as much as 22.4%, WHO says.
Recent studies “show clearly that climate change is not a distant health threat, and that certain populations are already paying a high price,” said Dr. Anshu Banerjee, WHO's director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and aging.
The consequences of our changing climate — prolonged droughts, extraordinary heat, erratic rainfall patterns and flooding — can lead to crop failures, reduced yields, and disruptions in food supply chains, which in turn contribute to food insecurity and malnutrition, especially in the developing world and for subsistence farmers.
But solutions exist. As U.N. Climate Change-led talks aim for steep reductions in emissions from fossil fuel burning, other organizations are trying to help people deal with some of the many "interlinked" impacts.
In alignment with the U.N.'s 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, the Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, has adopted a 10-year strategy for its work with governments and organizations.
The strategy, it says, focuses on "tackling the impacts of the climate crisis, while aiming to address a broad range of interlinked challenges, including biodiversity loss, desertification, land and environmental degradation, the need for accessible, affordable renewable energy, and food and water security."
FAO is working to put in place climate monitoring systems and improve agriculture-centered weather forecasting that helps farmers, herders and their families in their struggle to adapt to climate variability and extremes.
“I believe that holistic, integrated actions, springing from coordinated and collective efforts, will make our agrifood systems a central part of the global climate solution, and our planet a better place to live,” said FAO's Director-General Qu Dongyu.
