Climate change made killer heat wave in Mexico, Southwest US even warmer and 35 times more likely

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Climate Change News

Weather,Heat Waves,Central America

A new study finds that human-caused climate change dialed up the heat and drastically increased the odds of this month’s killer heat that has been baking the Southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America.

Margarita Salazar, 82, wipes the sweat off with a tissue inside her home amid high heat in Veracruz, Mexico, on June 16, 2024. Human-caused climate change intensified and made far more likely this month’s killer heat with triple digit temperatures, a new flash study found Thursday, June 20. A man fills containers with water due to the shortage caused by high temperatures and drought in Veracruz, Mexico, on June 16, 2024.

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“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 in an interview.

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. 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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