BSS :
From Death Valley to the Middle East, theIndian subcontinent to sub-Saharan Africa, global warming has already madedaily life unbearable for millions of people.And if nothing is done to slow climate change, the record temperatures anddeadly heatwaves it brings will only get worse, experts warn.
“Climate (change) is sort of steroids for the weather. It’s loading thedice to make these sort of extreme events be more common,” said ZekeHausfather, a climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute in California.
The hottest place in the world is officially Death Valley, California.There too, temperatures are rising.
“If you look at the average temperature in Death Valley for a summer month it has gotten much warmer in the last 20 years than it was before,” said Abby Wines, spokesperson for the Death Valley National Park. This summer, for the second year in a row, the area registered anstonishing 54.4 degrees Celsius. If confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization, it would be the hottest temperature ever recorded with modern instruments.
According to the US climate agency NOAA, July 2021 was the hottest monthever recorded on Earth.”We are affected a lot by this unbearable heat, and we poor are hit the hardest,” said Kuldeep Kaur, a resident of Sri Ganganagar in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, bordering Pakistan.
Half a world away in western Canada, where a so-called “heat dome” pushed temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius this summer, north Vancouver resident Rosa lamented: “It’s just unbearable. It’s impossible to be out.”
Rising temperatures are a driving force behind more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, storms, and even floods. And the rising number ofheatwaves is devastating for farming and agriculture and potentially fatal for humans.
“A flood is a few deaths, maybe a few dozen. We’re talking about thousandsof deaths every time we have a very large extreme heatwave. And we know thatthese heatwaves aremultiplying,” said climatologist Robert Vautard, head ofFrance’s Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute.
If the world warms by two degrees Celsius, a quarter of the world’spopulation could face severe heatwaves at least once every five years,according to a draft UN report obtained by AFP ahead of the COP26 climate
summit opening October 31 in Glasgow, Scotland.
– For the Bedouins of Saudi Arabia, heat is only too familiar.”I think it’s at least 43 degrees Celsius now, and it’s only 8:30-9:00 am,”said Saudi Bedouin Nayef al-Shammari, adding that it can reach 50 degrees
during the day.
“But we’ve got used to it, it’s normal for us, we’re not (…) worriedabout it.”The family of the 51-year-old and his father Saad, 75, have lived andworked in the Al Nufud Al-Kabir desert raising camels for generations.
But as temperatures rise to life-threatening levels their livelihood andculture could soon be under threat. “Even heat-tolerant animals in the region, for example some camels oroats, will be also affected, agriculture will be also affected, so thisextreme heat will affect food production,’ said George Zittis of the Cyprus
Institute in Nicosia.
Legend has it that the marshes that straddle the famous Tigris andEuphrates rivers in Iraq were home to the biblical Garden of Eden.They too could soon be at risk.
“The temperatures above 50 degrees affect the fish, they affect animals,people and tourism,” said local boat owner Razak Jabbar, who is considering eaving the marshland where he grew up.
With deadly heatwaves increasingly a fact of life across the globe, manyare pinning hopes on Glasgow. “COP26 this November must mark the turning point. By then we need allcountries to commit to achieve nmzero emissions by the middle of the century, and to present clear, credible, long-term strategies to get there,”said UN chief Antonio Guterres.
