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CLIMATE WATCH - A worrisome trend in the global climate system has popped up. Specific regions of the world are experiencing repetitive severe heat waves so extreme and so deadly that scientists’ models are thrown for a tizzy.
This behavior is comparable to a war zone with heat the primary weapon that ravages a specific region with temperatures up to 125°F sustained for days-to-weeks. In turn, deaths ensue, and foliage scorched, as the stage is set for ferocious wildfires.
Global warming is not uniform, rather specific regions of the planet, on a repetitive basis, are being hit with excessive deathly heat that’s not found elsewhere, implying that global warming is worse than realized as it erupts in selected regions of the planet, leaving death and destruction of habitat in its wake.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is based upon a 65-year analysis: Global Emergence of Regional Heatwave Hotspots Outpaces Climate Model Simulations, PNAS, November 26, 2024)
Mysterious hotspots are found on every continent: “These heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, withered crops and forests, and sparked devastating wildfires.” (Source: Kevin Krajick, Unexplained Heat Wave ‘Hotspots’ Are Popping Up Across the Globe, State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, Nov. 26, 2024)
Global hotspots are throwing a wrench into climate modeling of established inter-relationships between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks. The hotspots do not fit scientific models. According to Kai Kornhuber, a scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: “This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand… These regions become temporary hothouses,” Ibid.
The extreme heat waves have been found predominately over the past five years which aligns with abrupt rapid climate change witnessed since the turn of the new century: “For instance, a nine-day wave that hammered the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some locales by 30 degrees C, or 54 F. This included the highest ever temperature recorded in Canada, 121.3 F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The town burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire driven in large part by the drying of vegetation in the extraordinary heat. In Oregon and Washington state, hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health conditions,” Ibid.
The most intense conditions are regularly found in northwestern Europe, causing 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023 across Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands.
In-all the most hard-hit regions of the globe include (1) central China (2) Japan (3) Korea (4) the Arabian Peninsula (5) eastern Australia (6) scattered parts of Africa (7) Canada’s Northwest Territories and the High Arctic islands (8) northern Greenland (9) the southern end of South America and (10) scattered patches of Siberia. In the U.S, regions of Texas and New Mexico, though they are not at the most extreme end.
The yearly heat-related death rate in the United States has doubled this century with 2.325 deaths in 2023.
Scientists are trying to understand the causes, including (1) the long-term aspect of climate change (2) atmospheric heat waves from the ocean (3) disruptions to the jet stream, and (4) dried out vegetation via drought conditions that fails to moderate hot weather because it contains fewer reserves of water to evaporate into the air.
However, what is known demonstrates a new aspect of global warming as fully explained in a YouTube video by the ubiquitous climate system scientist Paul Beckwith: Heat-Wave Hotspots Across the Globe and Their Associate JetStream Configuration Roots.
What does seem obvious is global warming is not going away, rather, it’s increasing in intensity within select regions where it didn’t happen only a few years ago. The question remains whether the intensity spreads to new regions across the globe in a stealthy fashion. So far, the scorecard is downright ugly:
1.) A 2023 report estimated that China saw over 50,000 heatwave-related deaths, with numbers potentially doubling from the previous year, highlighting the severity of the issue in central regions like Henan.
2.) At least 1,301 people died from heat-related illnesses during the 2024 Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Temperatures reached over 122°F (50°C) and the hottest recorded temperature was 125.2°F (51.8°C) in the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
3.) Northwestern Europe experienced 107,000 heat-related deaths in 2022-23.
4.) A recent study attributed approximately 50,000 excess deaths to heatwaves in Brazilian urban areas: Nature, “Compound dry-hot-fire events connecting Central and Southeastern South America: An unapparent and deadly ripple effect,” November 8, 2024. And, “In South America, excessive temperatures are an issue of survival.” (Heat deaths in South America have increased 160% over the past 20 years, El Pais, March 29, 2023)
5.) The British Columbia heat wave of June 25 to July 2, 2021 witnessed an estimated 619 heat-related deaths, making it the deadliest disaster in B.C.'s recorded history (BC Coroners Service 2022).
This is global warming at its worst. The big question going forward is whether the nations of the world will finally come together to combat the roots of global warming, fossil fuel CO2 emissions, before global hotspots go worldwide.
(Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 published articles appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide.)
