WASHINGTON — Human-caused climate change dialed up the thermostat and turbocharged the odds of this month's killer heat that has been baking the Southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America, a new flash study found.
Sizzling daytime temperatures that triggered cases of heat stroke in parts of the United States were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees hotter because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists that run rapid and non-peer reviewed climate attribution studies, calculated Thursday.
"It's an oven here; you can't stay here," 82-year-old Magarita Salazar Pérez of Veracruz, Mexico, said in her home with no air conditioning. Last week, the Sonoran Desert hit 125 degrees, the hottest day in Mexican history, according to study co-author Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central.
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Margarita Salazar, 82, wipes the sweat off with a tissue Sunday inside her home amid high heat in Veracruz, Mexico.
It was even worse at night, which is what made this heat wave so deadly, said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who coordinates the attribution study team.
Climate change made nighttime temperatures 2.9 degrees warmer and unusual evening heat 200 more times more likely, she said.
There's just been no cool air at night like people are used to, Salazar Pérez said. Doctors say cooler night temperatures are key to surviving a heat wave.
At least 125 people have died so far, according to the World Weather Attribution team.
"This is clearly related to climate change, the level of intensity that we are seeing, these risks," said study co-author Karina Izquierdo, a Mexico City-based urban advisor for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre.
The alarming part about this heat wave, which technically is still cooking the North American continent, is that it's no longer that out of the ordinary anymore, Otto said. Past studies by the group have looked at heat so extreme that they found it impossible without climate change, but this heat wave not so much.
"From a sort of weather perspective in that sense it wasn't rare, but the impacts were actually really bad," Otto told The Associated Press.
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Worker Jorge Moreno drinks flavored water to cope with the heat Monday at a construction site in Veracruz, Mexico.
"The changes we have seen in the last 20 years, which feels like just yesterday, are so strong," Otto said. Her study found that this heat wave is now four times more likely to happen now than it was in the year 2000 when it was nearly a degree cooler than now. "It seems sort of far away and a different world."
While other groups of international scientists — and the global carbon emissions reduction target adopted by countries in the 2015 Paris climate agreement — refer to warming since pre-industrial time in mid 1800s, Otto said comparing what's happening now to the year 2000 is more striking.
"We're looking at a shifting baseline — what was once extreme but rare is becoming increasingly common," said University of Southern California Marine Studies Chair Carly Kenkel, who wasn't part of the attribution team's study. She said the analysis is "the logical conclusion based on the data."
The study looked at a large swath of the continent, including southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and Honduras and the hottest five consecutive days and hottest five consecutive nights.
For most of the area, those five days ran from June 3 to 7 and those five nights were June 5 to 9, but in a few places the peak heat started May 26, Otto said.
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Spectators stand in the heat June 8 prior to an international soccer friendly between Mexico and Brazil at Texas A&M's Kyle Field in College Station, Texas.
For example, San Angelo, Texas, hit a record 111 degrees on June 4. Between June 2 and June 6 the night temperature never dipped below 80 degrees at Corpus Christi airport, a record each night, with two days when the thermometer never dropped below 85 according to the National Weather Service.
Between June 1 and June 15, more than 1,200 daytime high temperature records were tied or broken in the United States and nearly 1,800 nighttime high temperature records were reached, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
The attribution team used both current and past temperature measurements, contrasting what is happening to what occurred in past heat waves. They then used the scientifically accepted technique of comparing simulations of a fictional world without human-caused climate change to current reality to come up with how much global warming factored into the 2024 heat wave.
The immediate meteorological cause was a high pressure system parked over central Mexico that blocked cooling storms and clouds, then moved to the U.S. Southwest and is now bringing the heat to the U.S. East, Winkley said. Tropical Storm Alberto formed Wednesday and is heading to northern Mexico and southern Texas with some rains, which could cause flooding.
Mexico and other places have been dealing for months with drought, water shortages and brutal heat. Monkeys have been dropping from trees in Mexico from the warmth.
This heat wave "exacerbates existing inequalities" between rich and poor in the Americas, Izquierdo said, and Kenkel agreed.
Extreme heat drives up food prices. Just how bad will it get?
Extreme heat drives up food prices. Just how bad will it get?
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Sometimes climate change appears where you least expect it — like the grocery store. Food prices have climbed over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked by the growing cost of staples like beef, sugar, and citrus.Â
While many factors, like supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, have contributed to this increase, extreme heat is already raising food prices, and it's bound to get worse, according to published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. reports the analysis found that "heatflation" could drive up food prices around the world by as much as 3 percentage points per year in just over a decade and by about 2 percentage points in North America. For overall inflation, extreme weather could lead to anywhere from a 0.3 percentage point to a 1.2 percentage point increase each year depending on how many carbon emissions countries pump into the atmosphere.
Though that might sound small, it's actually "massive," according to Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. "That's half of the Fed's overall goal for inflation," he said, referencing the Federal Reserve's long-term aim of . The Labor Department recently reported that consumer prices climbed over the past 12 months.Â
The link between heat and rising food prices is intuitive — if wheat starts withering and dying, you can bet flour is going to get more expensive. When Europe , it pushed up food prices that were already soaring due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine (known as the breadbasket of Europe), researchers at the Europe Central Bank and Potsdam Institute in Germany found in the new study. Europe saw a record-breaking inflation that year, and the summer heat alone, which hurt , might have been responsible for almost a full percentage point of that increase.
To figure out how climate change might drive inflation in the future, the researchers analyzed monthly price indices for goods across 121 countries over the past quarter-century. No place on the planet looks immune. Countries in North Africa and the Middle East, where hot temperatures already push the comfortable limits of some crops, are expected to see some of the biggest price shocks.Â
The study's results were striking, Wagner said, but at the same time very believable. He thinks the calculations are probably on the conservative end of the spectrum: "I wouldn't be surprised if follow-up studies actually came up with even higher numbers."
It adds up to a troubling picture for the future affordability of food. "The coronavirus pandemic demonstrated how sensitive supply changes are to disruption and how that disruption can awaken inflation," David A. Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in an email. "The disruptive effects of climate change are orders of magnitude greater than those of the pandemic and will cause economic dislocation on a far greater scale."
The world began paying attention to the dynamic between climate change and higher prices, or "climateflation," in March 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, when the German economist Isabel Schnabel coined the term in warning that the world faced "a new age of energy inflation." A few months later, in an article about how blistering temperatures were driving up food prices.Â
The difference between the terms is akin to "global warming" vs. "climate change," with one focused on hotter temperatures and the other on broader effects. Still, "heatflation" might be the more appropriate term, Wagner said, given that price effects from climate change appear to come mostly from extreme heat. The new study didn't find a strong link between shifts in precipitation and inflation.
The research lends some credibility to the title of the landmark climate change bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act. While it's an open joke that the name was meant to capitalize on Americans' concerns about rising prices, it might be more fitting, in the end, than people expected. "We shouldn't be making fun of the name Inflation Reduction Act, because in the long run, it is exactly the right term to use," Wagner said.
was produced by and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
Extreme heat drives up food prices. Just how bad will it get?
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