Life and death in the heat. What it feels like when temperatures on Earth reach record highs

Posted on July 27, 2024 by Vaseline

BENI MELLAL, Morocco (AP) — In the relentless heat of Morocco’s Middle Atlas, people slept on rooftops. Hanna Ouhbour also needed shelter, but she waited outside a hospital for her diabetic cousin, who lay in a room without air conditioning.

On Wednesday, 21 people died in the heat at Beni Mellal’s main hospital, where temperatures reached 48.3 degrees (118.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in an area of 575,000 people, most of whom had no air conditioning.

“We have no money and we have no choice,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from Kasba Tadla, an even hotter city that some experts say is among the hottest on Earth.

“Most of the deaths involved people suffering from chronic diseases and the elderly, as high temperatures contributed to the deterioration of their health conditions and led to their death,” regional health director Kamal Elyansli said in a statement.

It’s a matter of life and death in the heat.

Children enjoy the high waves at Clifton Beach, during a heat wave in Karachi, Pakistan, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Fareed Khan

As the warming Earth endured a week with four of the warmest days on record, the world focused on cold, hard numbers showing the average daily temperature for the entire planet.

But the 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit) measured Monday doesn’t tell the story of how oppressively sticky a particular spot became at the height of sunshine and humidity. The thermometer doesn’t tell the story of heat that wouldn’t go away overnight, allowing people to sleep.

The records are about statistics, keeping score. But people don’t feel data. They feel the heat.

“We don’t need scientists to tell us how hot it is outside because our bodies tell us directly,” said Humayun Saeed, a 35-year-old roadside fruit vendor in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital.

Saeed had to go to the hospital twice in June due to heat stroke.

“The situation is much better now because it was not easy to work in May and June due to the heat wave, but I have avoided the morning walk,” Saeed said. “I can take it up again in August when the temperature drops further.”

The heat made Delia, a 38-year-old pregnant woman standing outside a train station in Bucharest, Romania, feel even more uncomfortable. During the day, it was so hot that she was sleepy. With no air conditioning at night, she considered sleeping in her car, like a friend.

“I really noticed a big increase in temperature. I think it was the same for everyone. I felt it more because I’m pregnant,” said Delia, who gave only her first name. “But I think it wasn’t just me. Everyone felt it.”

Karin Bumbaco, who describes herself as a weather nerd, was in her element, but then it all became too much for her when Seattle was much warmer than normal for days.

“I love science. I love weather. I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid,” said Bumbaco, the deputy state climatologist for Washington. “It’s kind of fun to see daily records being broken. … But in recent years, just sitting through it and feeling the heat has just gotten more miserable on a daily basis.”

“Like this recent period that we’ve had. I didn’t sleep very well. I don’t have air conditioning in my house,” Bumbaco said. “I would see every morning the thermostat getting a little bit warmer than the previous warm morning. It was getting warmer and warmer in the house and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.”

For climate scientists around the world, what was initially an academic exercise on climate change has come as a blow.

“I analysed these numbers from the cool of my office, but the heat started to affect me too, leading to sleepless nights due to higher temperatures in the cities,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, Maharashtra, which normally has a relatively mild climate.

“My children come home from school during rush hour exhausted,” Koll said. “Last month, the mother of one of my colleagues died of heat stroke in northern India.”

Philip Mote, a climate scientist and dean of higher education at Oregon State University, moved to California’s Central Valley when he was in high school, where temperatures can reach 100 degrees in the summer.

“I quickly found out that I didn’t like a hot, dry climate,” Mote said. “So I moved to the Northwest.”

Mote spent decades working on climate issues from the comfort of Oregon, where people worried that global warming would make the Northwest “the last nice place to live in the United States and everyone would move here and we would have overcrowding.”

But the region was hit by severe fires in 2020 and a deadly heat wave in 2021, forcing some people to flee what should have been a climate paradise.

In the second week of July, temperatures reached 104 degrees (40 degrees Celsius). As a member of a masters rowing club, Mote trains on the water on Tuesday and Thursday nights, but this week they decided to simply float down the river in tubes.

In Boise, Idaho, tubing in 17-day heat temperatures of 37 to 42 degrees Celsius (99 to 108 degrees Fahrenheit) has become so popular that there is a wait of 30 minutes to an hour to get in the water, said John Tullius, general manager of Boise River Raft & Tube.

“I think it’s been record numbers for the last 10 days in a row,” Tullius said, adding that he worries about his field workers, especially the physical toll on those who retrieve rafts at the end of the trip.

He set up a special shade structure for them, sent more workers to lighten the load, and encouraged them to drink plenty of water.

In Denver’s City Park, the swan-shaped paddle boat rental shop isn’t crowded because it’s scorching hot outside and the brave souls who do venture outside have to sit in hot fiberglass seats.

There isn’t much shade for the workers, “but we hide in our little hut,” said worker Dominic Prado, 23. “We also have a very strong fan there that I like to put my shirt over to cool down.”

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Borenstein reported from Washington, Metz from Beni Mellal, Morocco. Munir Ahmed in Lahore, Pakistan, Nicolae Dumitrache in Bucharest, Romania, Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, and Brittany Peterson in Denver contributed to this report.

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Follow Seth Borenstein and Sam Metz on X at @borenbears and @metzsam.

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