[The attention paid to the temperature reading in Pakistan highlights how interest in heat records is growing across Asia alongside rising awareness of climate change. Scientists have documented a rise of heat extremes in many parts of the world, and they say the trend is consistent with what they expect on a planet that is warming because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.]
By Salman Masood and Mike Ives
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People
cooling off in Quetta, Pakistan, this month. The remote town of Turbat,
in
the same province of Baluchistan, experienced one of the hottest days on
record
on May 28: 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Credit Jamal
Taraqai/European
Pressphoto Agency
|
ISLAMABAD,
Pakistan — Residents of
Turbat, a remote town in southwestern Pakistan, have had to cope with
punishingly hot weather for generations. But when the mercury climbed to 129.2
degrees Fahrenheit on May 28 — potentially the hottest temperature ever
recorded in Asia — relief proved elusive, partly because Turbat suffers from
regular electricity shortages.
Refrigerators stopped working during that May
scorcher, as did ice factories.
“It got so hot that people here said that
there is no difference between Turbat and hell,” Noroz Bin Shabir, a student
from the town, said by telephone. “It was like a fire was burning outside.”
The temperature in Turbat prompted
discussions on social media and among extreme-weather experts about whether an
Asian record had really been reached.
Had meteorologists in Pakistan rounded up the
reading by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit), some observers asked, to
an Asian record of 54 degrees Celsius, and would that adjustment prevent
history from being made?
Randall S. Cerveny, the rapporteur on weather
and climate extremes for the World Meteorological Organization, a United
Nations agency, later said it was unclear if any rounding had been done. He
added that the 129.2-degree measurement, if confirmed, and an identical one
from Kuwait last summer, would be the third-highest ever recorded on the planet
behind 134 degrees at Furnace Creek, in Death Valley, Calif., in 1913 and 131
degrees in Kebili, Tunisia, in 1931.
The attention paid to the temperature reading
in Pakistan highlights how interest in heat records is growing across Asia
alongside rising awareness of climate change. Scientists have documented a rise
of heat extremes in many parts of the world, and they say the trend is
consistent with what they expect on a planet that is warming because of human
emissions of greenhouse gases.
“A record is an absolute thing, so it’s not
just a little bit better or a little bit warmer or the average has increased by
X degrees,” said Susanne Becken, a professor at Griffith University in
Australia who studies how people seek information about climate change.
As heat records accumulate, “people get more
and more convinced that climate change is happening,” Professor Becken said.
A recent blast of epically hot weather across
vast regions of Asia has underscored how extreme heat can severely disrupt
daily life, especially in poor countries at low latitudes — a problem that
scientists say will worsen as the effects of climate change become more
apparent.
Sixteen of the 17 hottest years ever recorded
have occurred since 2000, scientists say, and 2016 was both the hottest since
modern record-keeping began in the 19th century and the third consecutive
record-breaking year.
The heat is pushing people around the world
toward the limits of what climatologists call “thermal comfort,” with complex
implications for public health and food security.
When a record temperature is announced,
“people start asking questions about their life and their future,” said Omar
Baddour, a senior scientist at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.
The effects have been especially dramatic in
India, where officials said that more than 2,400 people, mostly laborers and
farmhands, died from heat-related illnesses in 2015, the year of a severe heat
wave there. That episode, one of four in India since 1998 that each killed more
than 1,000 people, ranks as the fifth-deadliest heat wave in history, said Jeff
Masters, the meteorology director at the online weather service Weather
Underground.
The Indian government created a national
prevention and management response plan for heat waves, but experts say that
extreme heat in India and beyond still poses disproportionately high risks for
the poor. A study found, for example, that when a deadly 2015 heat wave swept
through Karachi, Pakistan, residents with limited education and monthly incomes
of less than $196 faced a significantly higher risk of death.
Unskilled laborers “don’t have the luxury of
taking the afternoon off work, so they’ll cool off under a tree for a bit but
keep returning to work,” said Shravan Jha, a team manager for the Agriculture
Department in Bihar, a province in India’s northeast. “There is lots of poverty
here, and let’s say a construction worker takes the day off: How will he feed
his kids?”
Another recent hot spot for heat records is
Southeast Asia, where monthly mean temperatures in April 2016 were the highest
since record-keeping began there in the mid-20th century, a study in the
scientific journal Nature Communications reported this month. The heat
disrupted crop production, caused a spike in energy use and “imposed societal
distress,” the study said.
Extreme heat has returned again this spring,
with temperatures in some parts of Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent
pushing 104 degrees for days on end, often in tandem with shirt-soaking
humidity.
“Too much concrete, fewer lakes than we used
to have, and all the air-conditioners raise the temperature,” said Nguyen Ngoc
Huy, a climate change expert in Hanoi, Vietnam, with ISET-International, a
nonprofit research group working on disaster risk management in Asia.
For decades, the highest temperature ever recorded
was believed to be a 136.4-degree reading in 1922 from what is now Libya. But
in 2012, the World Meteorological Organization rejected it, in part because of
what a study described as “potentially problematical instrumentation.” This
transferred the record to the 134 degrees recorded in Death Valley more than
100 years ago.
Temperatures at the absolute extreme end of
the scale are still rare because they are created by highly unusual atmospheric
conditions, Mr. Baddour said, but the odds that Furnace Creek’s record will be
broken are growing as the planet warms.
“The next record will be very amazing,” he
said. “If it happens.”
Salman Masood reported from Islamabad, and
Mike Ives from Hong Kong. Ayesha Venkataraman contributed reporting from
Mumbai, India, and Chau Doan from Hanoi, Vietnam.