Washington – Of human cause climate change dialed up the thermostat and turbocharged the odds for this month's killer heat that's been scorching the southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America, a flash new study found.
Daytime temperatures that triggered heatstroke cases in parts of the United States were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees hotter due to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, World Weather Attribution, a fast-running collection of scientists. and non-peer-reviewed climate attribution studies, calculated Thursday.
“This is an oven; you can't stay here,” said Magarita Salazar Perez, 82, of Veracruz, Mexico, in her air-conditioned home. Last week, the Sonoran Desert reached 125 degrees, the hottest day in Mexican history, according to study co-author Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central.
And it was even worse at night, which is what made this heat wave so deadly, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who is coordinating the study team. attribution Climate change made nighttime temperatures 2.9 degrees warmer and unusual evening heat 200 times more likely, he said.
There's just no fresh air at night like people are used to, Salazar Perez said. Doctors say cooler nighttime temperatures are key to surviving a heat wave.
At least 125 people have died so far, according to the World Weather Attribution team.
“This is clearly related to climate change, the level of intensity that we're seeing, these risks,” said study co-author Karina Izquierdo, an urban advisor for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center based in in Mexico City.
The alarming part about this heat wave, which is technically still cooking the North American continent, is that it's not so strange anymore, Otto said. Previous studies by the group have looked at heat so extreme they found it impossible without climate change, but this heat wave not so much.
“From a sort of meteorological perspective in that sense, it wasn't unusual, but the impacts were really bad,” Otto told The Associated Press in an interview.
“The changes we've seen in the last 20 years, which seems like yesterday, are very strong,” Otto said. Their study found that such a heat wave is four times more likely to happen now than in 2000, when it was almost a degree cooler than now. “It seems a little distant and a different world.”
While other groups of international scientists – and the global carbon reduction target adopted by countries in the 2015 Paris climate agreement – refer to warming since pre-industrial times in the mid-1800s, Otto said comparing what's happening now to the year 2000 is more surprising.
“We're looking at a changing baseline: what was once extreme but rare is becoming more common,” said University of Southern California Marine Studies Chair Carly Kenkel, who was not part of the team. attribution team study. He said the analysis is “the logical conclusion based on the data.”
The study looked at a large part of the continent, including Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and Honduras and the five hottest consecutive days and the five hottest consecutive nights . For most of the area, those five days were from June 3 to 7 and those five nights were from June 5 to 9, but in some places the peak heat started on May 26, Otto said .
For example, San Angelo, Texas hit a record high of 111 degrees on June 4th. Between June 2 and June 6, the nighttime temperature never dropped below 80 degrees at the Corpus Christi airport, a record each night, with two days when the thermometer never dropped. below 85, according to the National Weather Service.
Between June 1 and June 15, more than 1,200 daytime high temperature records were tied or broken in the United States and nearly 1,800 nighttime high temperature records were set, according to the National Center for 'Environmental Information.
The attribution team used current and past temperature measurements, contrasting what is happening with what happened in previous heat waves. They then used the scientifically accepted technique of comparing simulations of a fictional world without human-caused climate change to current reality to determine how much global warming the 2024 heat wave accounted for.
The immediate weather cause was a high-pressure system stationed in central Mexico that blocked storms and cooling clouds, then moved into the southwestern United States and is now bringing heat east of the United States, Winkley said. Tropical Storm Alberto formed on Wednesday and headed for northern Mexico and southern Texas with some rain, which may lead to flooding.
Mexico and other places have been suffering from drought, water shortages and brutal heat for months. The monkeys have fallen from the trees in Mexico from the heat.
This heat wave “exacerbates existing inequalities” between rich and poor in the Americas, Izquierdo said, and Kenkel agreed. Nighttime heat is where the inequities become apparent because the ability to cool off with central air conditioning depends on how economically comfortable they are, Kenkel said.
And that means that during this heat wave, Salazar Pérez has been quite uncomfortable.
