Washington — Human causes weather change Dial up the thermostat and turbocharge the potential for this month’s killer heat baking the southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America, a new flash study finds.
The sizzling daytime temperatures that have sparked cases of heatstroke in parts of the U.S. were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees warmer due to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Non-peer-reviewed climate attribution studies calculated on Thursday.
“This is an oven. I can’t stay here,” said Magarita Salazar Pérez, 82, of Veracruz, Mexico, from her home without air conditioning. Temperatures in the Sonoran Desert last week hit 125 degrees, the hottest day on record in Mexico, according to study co-author Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central.
And it got worse at night, making the heat wave deadly, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who leads the team researching its causes. Climate change has made nighttime temperatures 2.9 degrees warmer, making abnormal evening heat more likely by 200 times, she said.
Salazar Perez said there was no cool air at night like people were used to. Doctors say cooler night temperatures are key to surviving heat waves.
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 we are seeing, and these risks,” said study co-author Karina Izquierdo, an urban advisor at the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center in Mexico City.
The worrying part about this heat wave, which is technically still engulfing the North American continent, is that it is no longer normal, Otto said. The group’s past research has found heat so extreme that it wouldn’t be possible without climate change, but this heat wave isn’t much of a stretch.
“From a kind of weather standpoint, it wasn’t uncommon, but the impact was actually really bad,” Otto told The Associated Press in an interview.
“The changes we have seen over the past 20 years are so powerful that it feels like yesterday,” Otto said. Her research shows these heat waves are four times more likely to occur now than they were in 2000, when temperatures were nearly one degree colder than now. She said, “It feels like a very distant, different world.”
While the global carbon emissions reduction target adopted by another group of international scientists and the countries of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 refers to warming since the pre-industrial era of the mid-1800s, Otto said it was more surprising to compare what was happening now to 2000.
“We’re seeing a changing baseline: Things that were once extreme but rare are becoming more and more common,” said Carly Kenkel, chair of marine studies at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the contributing team’s research. She said the analysis was a “logical conclusion based on the data.”
The study looked at a large swath of the continent, including Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and Honduras, as well as the five hottest consecutive days and five hottest nights. In most places, those five days were June 3 to 7 and those five nights were June 5 to 9, but in some places the peak heat began on May 26, Otto said.
For example, San Angelo, Texas, set a record of 111 degrees on June 4th. From June 2 to June 6, nighttime temperatures at the Corpus Christi Airport did not drop below a record 80 degrees each night, and the thermometer did not drop for two days. Below 85 degrees, 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 overnight high temperature records were reached, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
The attribution team used both current and historical temperature measurements to contrast what happened during past heat waves with what is happening now. They then used a scientifically acceptable technique of comparing current reality with a simulation of a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change to find out how much global warming would affect the 2024 heat wave.
The immediate meteorological cause was a high pressure system parked over central Mexico that blocked cooling storms and clouds that then moved into the southwestern United States and are now bringing heat to the eastern United States, Winkley said. Tropical Storm Alberto formed Wednesday and headed toward northern Mexico and southern Texas, bringing light rain that could cause flooding.
Mexico and other parts of the country have been experiencing months of drought, water shortages and extreme heat. Monkeys are falling from the trees From the warmth of Mexico.
This heat wave is worsening the gap between rich and poor in the Americas, Izquierdo said, and Kenkel agreed. The heat of the night is where inequality really becomes apparent. That’s because your ability to cool with central air conditioning depends on how financially comfortable you are, Kenkel said.
This means that Salazar Perez has been quite uncomfortable during this heat wave.
