The planet has warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century and will continue to grow hotter until humans essentially stop burning coal, oil and gas, scientists say. The warmer temperatures contribute to extreme weather events and help make periods of extreme heat more frequent, longer and more intense.
Tourists flocked to a giant thermometer in China showing surface temperatures of 80C (176 Fahrenheit) while the death toll from torrential rains in South Korea hit 44 on Wednesday, the latest extreme weather sparking havoc and curiosity around the world.
Wildfires burned for a third day west of the Greek capital Athens, with air water bombers resuming operations at first light and firefighters working throughout the night to keep flames away from a complex of coastal refineries.
In a stifling Beijing, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry began the third day of talks with Chinese officials, expressing hope that cooperation to combat global warming could redefine troubled ties between the two superpowers.
A global pattern of heat waves that have scorched parts of Europe, Asia and the United States this week have thrown that challenge into sharp relief. The World Meteorological Organization warned on Tuesday of increased risk of deaths linked to excessively high temperatures.
Meanwhile Hawaii's Big Island was bracing for the impact of Tropical Storm Calvin, expected to bring as much as 8 inches (20.3 cm) of rain and strong wind gusts, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
In South Korea, deluges of rain have pummelled central and southern regions since last week. Fourteen deaths occurred in an underpass in the central city of Cheongju, where more than a dozen vehicles were swamped on Saturday when a river levee collapsed. In the southeastern province of North Gyeongsang, 22 people died, many from landslides and swirling torrents.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue This year’s casualties have rekindled questions over South Korea’s efforts to prevent and respond to flood damage, less than one year after the heaviest downpours in 115 years pounded Seoul.
President Yoon Suk Yeol has said the situation was made worse because of lax management of vulnerable areas and failures to follow rules, and designated 13 flood-hit areas as special disaster zones on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo called for faster repair efforts to head off additional damage, warning of more heavy rainfalls predicted in the weekend.
“Taking extreme weather events caused by climate change as part of our daily lives, we will create institutional measures and systems accordingly,” Han told an intra-agency meeting on flood responses.
CURIOUS TOURISTS
In China's western Xinjiang province, tourists armed with broad-brimmed hats and umbrellas braved scorching temperatures to take selfies by a giant thermometer that displayed a real-time surface temperature of 800C (1760Fahrenheit), state television showed.
Each summer, curious tourists flock to the Flaming Mountains on the northern rim of Xinjiang's Turpan Depression to admire not just their corrugated slopes of brown-red sandstone but also to take in the super-charged heat emanating from the ground.
In recent days, temperatures in Xinjiang and other parts of Asia, as well as Europe and the United States have shattered records.
On Sunday, a remote township in the Turpan Depression registered a maximum air temperature of 52.2C, smashing China's national record of 50.3C set in 2015, also in the basin.
On that day, the oasis city of Turpan west of the Flaming Mountains saw the highest air temperatures at 31 local weather stations exceed 45C, with the maximum at five of them breaking above 50C, according to state media on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Beijing logged its 27th day of temperatures of more than 35C, setting a new local record for the most number of high-temperature days in a year. The Chinese capital's previous record was 26 days, set in 2000.
These unprecedented temperatures have added new urgency for nations around the globe to tackle climate change that scientists say will make heat waves more frequent, severe and lethal.
In contrast to the extreme heat, heavy rains, thunderstorms, gales and hail are expected to lash other parts of China over the next 18 hours, according to the country's National Meteorological Centre.
With the world's two biggest economies at odds over issues ranging from trade to Taiwan, Kerry told Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng on Wednesday that climate change must be handled separately to broader diplomatic problems.
"It is a universal threat to everybody on the planet and requires the largest nations in the world, the largest economies in the world, the largest emitters in the world, to come together in order to do work not just for ourselves, but for all mankind," Kerry told Han.
Kerry has also held meetings with China's top diplomat Wang Yi and Premier Li Qiang as well as veteran climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in a bid to rebuild trust between the two sides ahead of COP28 climate talks in Dubai at the end of the year.
Punishing heat waves gripped three continents on Tuesday, breaking records in cities around the Northern Hemisphere less than two weeks after the Earth recorded what scientists said were likely its hottest days in modern history.
Firefighters in Greece scrambled to put out wildfires, as parched conditions raised the risk of more blazes throughout Europe. Beijing logged another day of 95-degree heat, and people in Hangzhou, another Chinese city, compared the choking conditions to a sauna. From the Middle East to the American Southwest, delivery drivers, airport workers and construction crews labored under blistering skies. Those who could stay indoors did.
The temperatures, afflicting so much of the world all at once, were a withering reminder that climate change is a global crisis, driven by human-made forces: the emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, sought to coordinate some of the global response with the Chinese premier in Beijing, as a heat wave clutched a huge swath of China.
“The world really is looking to us for that leadership, particularly on the climate issue,” Mr. Kerry told Chinese officials. “Climate, as you know, is a global issue, not a bilateral issue. It’s a threat to all of humankind.”
Also affecting this year’s conditions is the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern that, depending on the sea surface temperature and the pressure of the air above it, can originate in the Pacific and have wide-ranging effects on weather around the world.
For hundreds of millions of people on Tuesday, the heat was hard to escape. In the United States, Phoenix broke a nearly half-century-old record on Tuesday, with the city’s 19th consecutive day of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 0Celsius). Elsewhere around the country, hot and humid conditions were expected to worsen along the Gulf Coast and throughout the Southeast.
Wildfires raged on for yet another week in Canada, having burned a staggering 25 million acres so far this year, an area roughly the size of Kentucky. With more than a month of peak fire season to go, 2023 has already eclipsed Canada’s annual record, from 1989.
Fires also forced evacuations in villages south, west and north of Athens, burning an estimated 7,400 acres of forest in Greece despite aerial water bombardments to bring the blazes under control.
“We’ve had fires, we have them now and we’ll have them in the future, and this is one of the consequences of the climate crisis that we are living with ever greater intensity,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement.
Mr. Mitsotakis cut short a trip to meet European leaders in Brussels in order to oversee the firefighting. The Greek authorities, who opened air-conditioned venues in Athens to offer some relief, are also expected to restrict access to the Acropolis to cooler morning and afternoon hours, as they did last weekend after a tourist collapsed.
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