Power plants are churning across the United States and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, struggling to meet air-conditioning demand. Wildfires are raging in Southern Europe and Canada, with more than a month of peak fire season left. Explosive thunderstorms, torrential monsoons and extreme heat are sowing destruction and threatening lives across three continents.
And there is little relief in sight, from the mountains and megacities of Asia to the lakes and rivers of Europe or the plains, forests and suburbs of North America. In the short-term, meteorologists predicted more intense heat and extreme weather over the next month.
In the long-term, scientists say, climate change is making heat waves hotter, more frequent and longer; making wildfires bigger and more intense; affecting air quality, rainfall and droughts — reaching every corner of Earth, driven by the burning of fossil fuels by humans.
“The hard part isn’t over,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece said Thursday. In his country, wildfires have burned scores of homes and thousands of acres of forestland over the last week, and temperatures are forecast to reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 Celsius) on Sunday in the central region of Thessaly.
A fire service spokesperson, Ioannis Artopios, said that the intensely dry heat was creating “even more difficult” conditions for Greek firefighters. Similarly parched conditions have fueled the record fire season in Canada, where more than 25 million acres have burned so far this year.
Given the expectation that the heat will persist, parts of Southern Europe are bracing for the next wave even as the temperatures have ebbed — albeit just slightly — over the past couple of days.
Italian hospitals have reported a rise in heat-related emergencies as temperatures crept toward 100 Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). Unions, government officials and businesspeople met to discuss how to protect workers from the heat, which is creating dangerous conditions on construction sites, tarmacs and city streets. One business leader compared the heat’s impact on workers with the COVID-19 pandemic and called for “extraordinary measures” in response.
In Spain, authorities officially declared an end to the heat emergency Thursday. But the nation’s weather monitor warned people not to “lower our guard,” given that the risk of wildfires in the hot, dry conditions remains high in much of the country.
Across Europe, the searing temperatures have taken a particular toll on older people, with southern European nations being joined by others as far north as Belgium in putting heat-relief plans in place, many aimed at safeguarding older populations.
Extreme heat can be dangerous for anyone, but older people and outdoor workers are at particular risk. Summer heat waves in Europe last year may have killed 61,000 people across the continent, according to a recent study.
Some health officials around the world have started to link deaths to extreme heat this year. Heat and humidity have been particularly devastating in northern Mexico, where more than 100 people died of heat-related causes this year, according to reports from the federal Health Ministry.
In Asia, the extremely high temperatures have been compounded by an intense monsoon season that has already taken more than 100 lives in India, South Korea and Japan, with the full death toll likely to be considerably higher.
Severe rainfall has replaced the intense heat in India in recent weeks, particularly in the Himalayan states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. The intense downpours have caused massive landslides and flash floods, killing at least 130 people in the past 26 days in northern India.
Another heat wave continued to bake much of China on Friday, shattering records across the country.
The far western region of Xinjiang has been particularly hard hit. Temperatures on Sunday at a remote desert township hit 126 degrees (52 Celsius), reportedly breaking the record for the highest temperature in China. Parts of Xinjiang were expected to keep seeing three-digit temperatures, according to official media, and authorities said they were on alert for potential wildfires.
And in northern China, several cities, including Beijing, have broken records for the most days in a year above 95 degrees, although rainstorms that began Thursday night were expected to finally bring some relief.
But the storms brought their own concerns, as officials warned of potential flash floods around the capital. Two years ago, the city of Zhengzhou, in central China, recorded what state media said was the most rainfall on record ever to fall in a single hour in the country. The downpours killed at least 300 people.
Chinese power stations have recently their own broken records for generating electricity — burning more coal, an important contributor to global warming, to meet energy air-conditioning demand — and Chinese leaders rebuffed a U.S. overture this week to commit to tougher climate action.
There was similar demand for electricity in the United States, where more than a quarter of the population experienced dangerous heat Thursday, according to a New York Times analysis of daily weather and population data.
Late Thursday, the operator of California’s power grid issued an emergency alert urging people to conserve electricity as high temperatures strained the system. In Phoenix, the temperature hit 116 degrees Thursday, extending the city’s record streak to 21 straight days with temperatures of 110 degrees or higher.
Severe storms, particularly in the southeastern United States, have further battered the energy grid. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power as strong thunderstorms knocked out power lines Thursday, leaving 150,000 homes without electricity in Georgia, and in western Tennessee, and causing blackouts in 52,000 homes and businesses.
Forecasters said the current heat wave was expected to last through the weekend in the Deep South and Southeast and into next week for the Southwest. Nearly 80 million Americans are expected to face temperatures above 105 in the next few days, the National Weather Service said.
Another U.S. agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted unusually high temperatures in most of the country next month, almost everywhere except the northern Great Plains. On Thursday, NOAA reported that last month was the planet’s warmest June since global temperature record-keeping began in 1850.