June breaks global heat records

As June comes to a close, countries across the northern hemisphere have just experienced their hottest days ever recorded, and the historically hotter month of July is still to come – hiking concerns over both droughts and sea level rises.

Only this week, over 200 people died likely from heat stroke in Canada's west coast – an unprecedented record for the largely colder region – and China faces its worst power crunch in a decade in warning for global economy.

Conversely, the tropical regions in Africa and South East Asia are facing existential threat from rapid sea level rises. Due to ice melting, at least 72% people in the regions are at-risk with 59% in tropical Asia alone.  Currently 267 million people in these areas already live on land less than 2 metres above sea level and the threats could be greater due to lack of adequate data, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.

For North America, it took until this week for June's record heat wave to take hold. In Seattle and Portland, usually temperate cities in America's northwest, temperatures spiked to 108 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit (42.2-46.6 degrees Celsius), respectively, breaking records both cities had set in 2009, Foreign Policy reported.

Further north, the village of Lytton in British Columbia set a Canadian record—117 degrees—as the high-point increased over three consecutive days, matching an all-time high set in the desert city of Las Vegas roughly 1,300 miles to the south. In Vancouver, dozens are feared to have died from the extreme heat in recent days.

In Europe and the Middle East, June was also a time of extreme heat. Sweihan, a town in the United Arab Emirates posted a national June record of 125.2 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius) as the region endured a historically intense heat wave compared to normal June levels. Meanwhile, cities across Eastern Europe joined Moscow and St Petersburg in setting record high June temperatures.

Wildfire risks

The heat raises immediate worries in the United States of more wildfires this season—to add to the 48 already raging—and an even worse drought, already labelled "exceptional," the highest designation, in much of the western United States. Wary of another devastating wildfire season, US President Joe Biden convenes western state governors to discuss preparation and response at the White House today.

AC droughts

The record heat also highlights how ill-prepared some countries are to survive the extreme heat that climate change will bring in the years to come. Take air conditioning units, an uncommon sight in many northern European countries as well as (traditionally) colder US states. The International Energy Agency projects the amount of air-conditioning units to balloon in the next 30 years, going from 1.6 billion units today to 5.6 billion—posing problems for zero carbon initiatives if new demand is not taken into account.

Hotter and hotter 

While the unseasonably warm temperatures may be written off as a relatively rare "heat dome" phenomenon, the fact of a rapidly heating world is harder to wave away; 2020 was the world's hottest year on record, just beating out a record set in 2016, according to NASA calculations, while the past seven years have been the hottest since record keeping began in the late 19th century.

Writing in the New York Times, Michael E Mann and Susan Joy Hassol effectively tie the recent heat to human-induced climate change and the greater frequency of extreme weather events it has spawned. "It no longer makes sense to talk about a once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennium event as if we're just rolling an ordinary pair of dice, because we've loaded the dice through fossil fuel burning and other human activities that generate carbon pollution and warm the planet." they write. "It's as if snake eyes, which should occur randomly only once every 36 times you roll a pair of dice, were coming up once every four times."