New York Times - Somini Sengupta* | Tiffany May* | Zia ur-Rehman*
We talked to people who found themselves on the front lines of climate change this year. Here are their stories.
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Expect
more. That’s the verdict of climate scientists to the record-high
temperatures this spring and summer in vastly different climate zones.
The continental United States had its
hottest month of May and the
third-hottest month of June. Japan was walloped by record
triple-digit temperatures,
killing at least 86 people in what its meteorological agency bluntly
called a “disaster.” And weather stations logged record-high
temperatures on the edge of the Sahara and above the Arctic Circle.
Is it because of climate change? Scientists with the World Weather Attribution project
concluded in a study released Friday
that the likelihood of the heat wave currently baking Northern Europe
is “more than two times higher today than if human activities had not
altered climate.”
While attribution
studies are not yet available for other record-heat episodes this year,
scientists say there’s little doubt that the ratcheting up of global
greenhouse gases makes heat waves more frequent and more intense.
Elena
Manaenkova, deputy head of the World Meteorological Organization, said
this year was “shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record” and
that the extreme heat recorded so far was not surprising in light of
climate change.
“This is not a future scenario,” she said. “It is happening now.”
What was it like to be in these really different places on these really hot days? We asked people. Here’s what we learned.
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Ouargla, Algeria: 124°F on July 5
At
3 p.m. on the first Thursday of July, on the edge of the vast Sahara,
the Algerian oil town of Ouargla recorded a high of 124 degrees
Fahrenheit. Even for this hot country, it was a record, according to Algeria’s national meteorological service.
Abdelmalek
Ibek Ag Sahli was at work in a petroleum plant on the outskirts of
Ouargla that day. He and the rest of his crew had heard it would be hot.
They had to be at work by 7 a.m., part of a regular 12-hour daily
shift.
“We couldn’t keep up,” he recalled. “It was impossible to do the work. It was hell.”
By 11 a.m., he and his colleagues walked off the job.
But
when they got back to the workers’ dorms, things weren’t much better.
The power had gone out. There was no air conditioning, no fans. He
dunked his blue cotton scarf in water, wrung it out, and wrapped it
around his head. He drank water. He bathed 5 times. “At the end of the
day I had a headache,” he said by phone. “I was tired.”
Ouargla’s older residents told him they’d never seen a day so hot.
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Hong Kong: Over 91°F for 16 straight days
In
this city of skyscrapers on the edge of the South China Sea,
temperatures soared past 91 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 consecutive days
in the second half of May.
Not since Hong Kong started keeping track in 1884 had a heat wave of that intensity lasted so long in May.
Swimming
pools overflowed with people. Office air-conditioners purred. But from
morning to night, some of the city’s most essential laborers went about
their outdoor work, hauling goods, guarding construction sites, picking
up trash.
One blistering morning, a 55-year-old woman named Lin
gripped the hot metal handles of her handcart. She pushed it up a busy
road, glancing over her shoulder for oncoming cars. She had fresh leafy
greens to deliver to neighborhood restaurants in the morning, trash to
haul in the evening. Some days, she had a headache. Other days, she
vomited.
“It’s very hot
and I sweat a lot,” said Lin, who would only give her first name before
rushing off on her rounds. “But there’s no choice, I have to make a
living.”
Poon Siu-sing, a 58 year-old
trash collector, tossed garbage bags into a mounting pile. Sweat
plastered the shirt onto his back. “I don’t feel anything,” he
maintained. “I’m a robot used to the heat of the sun and rain.”
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Nawabshah, Pakistan: 122°F on April 30
Nawabshah
is in the heart of Pakistan’s cotton country. But no amount of cotton
could provide comfort on the last day of April, when temperatures
soared past 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 degrees Celsius. Even by the standards of this blisteringly hot place, it was a record.
The
streets were deserted that day, a local journalist named Zulfiqar
Kaskheli said. Shops didn’t bother to open. Taxi drivers kept off the
streets to avoid the blazing sun.
And
so, Riaz Soomro had to scour his neighborhood for a cab that could take
his ailing 62-year-old father to a hospital. It was Ramadan. The family
was fasting. The father became dehydrated and passed out.
The
government hospital was packed. In the hallways sat worn-out heatstroke
victims like his father. Many of them had been working outdoors as day
laborers, Mr. Soomro said.
Throughout
the area, hospitals and clinics were swamped. There weren’t enough
beds. There weren’t enough medical staff. The power failed repeatedly
throughout the day, adding to the chaos.
“We
tried our best to provide medical treatment,” said Raees Jamali, a
paramedic in Daur, a village on the outskirts of Nawabshah.
“But because of severity of the heat, there was unexpected rush and it was really difficult for us to deal with all patients.”
Every day that week, the high temperature in Nawabshah was no less than 113 degrees, according to AccuWeather.
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Oslo: Over 86°F for 16 consecutive days
“Warning! We remind you about the total ban on fires and barbecuing near the forest and on the islands.”
This was the text message that Oslo residents got from city officials on a Friday afternoon in June.
May
had been the warmest in 100 years. June was hot, too. By mid-July, a
village south of Oslo recorded 19 days when the temperature shot up past
86 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 Celsius, according to MET Norway.
Spring
rains were paltry, which meant that grass had turned brown dry and
farmers were having trouble feeding their livestock. Forests had turned
to tinder. And city officials put a stop to one of the most popular
Norwegian summer pastimes:
heading out to the woods with a disposable barbecue.
“People
not being used to this heat, they’re used to leaving a barbecue and
nothing happens, Marianne Kjosnes, a spokeswoman for the Oslo Fire
Department, said. “Now if a little spark catches the grass, you have a
grass fire going.”
Public parks are off limits to barbecuing. So are the islands in the nearby fjord. The
Oslo Fire Department’s Facebook page is trying to get the word out.
Per Evenson, a fire watchman posted in the tower on Linnekleppen,
a rocky hill southeast of Oslo, counted 11 separate forest fires in one
day in early July. Here and there, white smoke rose in the distance. By
July 19, the civil protection department had tallied 1,551 forest
fires, more than the numbers of fires in all of 2016 and 2017. The department said 22 helicopters were simultaneously fighting fires.
Wildfires were also erupting in Sweden. And
one Swedish village just above the Arctic Circle, hit an all time record high, peaking above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This is really frightening if this is the new normal,” Thina Margrethe Saltvedt, an energy industry analyst who lives in Oslo, wrote in an email.
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| Stephanie Davidson for The New York Times |
Los Angeles: 108°F on July 6
At least Marina Zurkow had air conditioning.
Ms.
Zurkow, an artist, has long been grappling with climate change in her
work. But she was still surprised when a day of extreme weather impacted
one of her projects in a big way.
The
name of that project, which was designed to make people think about the
impact of climate change on how we eat, is “Making the Best of It.” It
is only half in jest.
“It’s both
trying to make the best of a bad situation,” she said, “and in another
way it’s a commitment to making things as delicious as possible.”
The
latest iteration of that project was to host a dinner for a new era of
dry, hot weather in California. Less Mediterranean, more Mojave Desert.
Ms.
Zurkow’s partners, a team of two private chefs called Hank and Bean,
prepared an elaborate meal designed to make their guests chew on the
impact of climate change. The menu included sage fritters, stuffed
rabbit, flatbreads made of cricket and mealworm, and jellyfish. Lots of
jellyfish.
There was jellyfish crudo
with a Greek salad at the top of the meal. There was a jellyfish jelly,
with redwood tip infusion and pine syrup at the end of the meal.
Why
jellyfish? Because it’s considered invasive and therefore plentiful,
Ms. Zurkow reasoned. It’s also zero fat and good protein. “American
dream food,” she added, also only half in jest.
They had planned to serve dinner al fresco in the courtyard of a downtown Los Angeles test kitchen.
But nature had other ideas.
That
day, the first Friday of July, air from the Mojave blew westward and
stalled, compressed and extra hot, over Los Angeles. Downtown hit a high
of 108 degrees. It was too hot to eat outside.
“Even
if you’re talking about climate change, you can’t torture invited
guests,” Ms. Zurkow said. “We had to move the dinner into the kitchen.”
*Somini Sengupta reported from New York and Los Angeles, Tiffany May from Hong Kong, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.
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