Unrelenting Heatwave: From Morocco to the US, How Extreme Temperatures Are Impacting Lives

People were sleeping on rooftops in Morocco’s Middle Atlas due to the extreme heatwave. Hanna Ouhbour wanted refuge as well, but she was waiting outside a hospital for her diabetic cousin, who was in a room with no air conditioning.

On Wednesday, there were 21 heat-related deaths at Beni Mellal’s main hospital as temperatures climbed to 48.3 degrees Celsius (118.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the territory of 575,000 people, most of whom did not have air conditioning.

“We don’t have money, and we don’t have a choice,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from Kasba Tadla, an even hotter city that some experts call one of the hottest on the planet.

“The majority of the deaths were among people suffering from chronic diseases and the elderly, as the high temperatures contributed to the deterioration of their health condition and led to their death,” said Kamal Elyansli, the regional director of health.

This is life or death in the heat.

As the warming Earth sizzled through a week with four of the hottest days ever recorded, the world concentrated on cold, hard data indicating the average daily temperature for the whole planet.

However, the 17.16 degrees recorded on Monday do not accurately reflect how oppressively sticky any one location became during the peak of sunshine and humidity. The thermometer does not tell the narrative of Heatwave that refused to go away at night so that people might sleep.

The records are about statistics and keeping score. However, humans do not feel data. They feel the heat.

“We don’t need scientists to tell us what the temperature is outside because our bodies tell us right away,” said Humayun Saeed, a 35-year-old roadside fruit seller in Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore.

Saeed had to visit the hospital twice in June due to Heatwave stroke.

“The situation is much better now, as it was not easy to work in May and June because of the heatwave, but I have been avoiding the morning walk,” Saeed told the reporter. “I may resume it in August when the temperature will go further down.”

The Heatwave made Delia, a 38-year-old pregnant lady standing outside a Bucharest, Romania, railway station, feel even more uncomfortable. The heat during the day made her drowsy. With no air conditioning at night, she considered sleeping in her car, like a friend did.

“I’ve noticed a significant increase in temperatures.” I believe that was the same for everyone. “I felt it even more because I was pregnant,” said Delia, who only gave her first name. “But I suppose it wasn’t just me. “Everyone felt this.”

Self-proclaimed weather nerd. Karin Bumbaco was in her element, but it became a little too much when Seattle experienced day after day of considerably higher-than-normal temperatures.

“I enjoy science. I enjoy the weather. Bumbaco, Washington’s deputy state climatologist, remarked, “I have since I was a little kid.” “It’s exciting to see daily records smashed. But in recent years, simply living through it and feeling the Heatwave has grown increasingly unpleasant on a daily basis.”

“Like the recent streak we’ve had. I was not sleeping well. “I don’t have air conditioning at home,” Bumbaco stated. “Every morning, I checked the thermostat to see if it was slightly warmer than the previous warm morning. It was simply increasing the temperature in the home, and I couldn’t wait for it to be finished.”

For climate experts all throughout the world, what had previously been an academic exercise regarding climate change became a reality.

“I’ve been analysing these numbers from the cool of my office, but the Heatwave has started to affect me as well, causing sleepless nights due to warmer urban temperatures,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, Maharashtra, which has a relatively mild climate.

“My children return home from school during the peak hours exhausted,” claims Koll. “Last month one of my colleagues’ mother died from heatstroke in north India.”

Philip Mote, a climate scientist and dean of Oregon State University’s graduate school, had moved to California’s Central Valley as a junior in high school, when July temperatures reached triple digits.

“I pretty quickly figured I didn’t like a hot dry climate,” Mote recounted. “And that’s why I moved to the Northwest.”

For decades, Mote worked on climate concerns from the comfort of Oregon, where people feared that with global warming, the Pacific Northwest “would be the last nice place to live in the US, and everyone would move here and we’d have overpopulation.”

However, the region was plagued by devastating fires in 2020 and a deadly heatwave in 2021, prompting some people to evacuate what was supposed to be a climatic sanctuary.

In the second week of July, the temperature reached 40 degrees Celsius. Mote, a member of a masters’ rowing club, practises on the water on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, but this week they opted to simply float down the river on tubes.

According to John Tullius, general manager of Boise River Raft & Tube, tubing in temperatures that have hovered between 37 and 42 degrees for 17 days has become so popular that there is a 30-minute to an hour wait to get into the water.

“I think it’s been record numbers these last 10 days in a row,” Tullius said, adding that he was concerned about his outside workers, particularly the physical strain on those who pick up rafts at the end of the voyage.

He built special shade shelters for them, hired more workers to help with the workload, and encouraged them to drink plenty of water.

The swan-shaped pedal boat rental store in Denver’s City Park isn’t very busy because it’s quite hot outside, and those brave souls who do go out must sit on hot fibreglass seats.

There isn’t much cover for the labourers, “but we do hide in our little shack,” said 23-year-old Dominic Prado. “We also have a very strong fan in there that I like to raise my shirt over just to cool down.”

Source: South China Morning Post