BENI MELLAL, Morocco (AP) — In the relentless heat of Morocco’s Middle Atlas, people slept on rooftops. Hanna Ouhbour also needed refuge, but she was outside a hospital waiting for her diabetic cousin who was in a room without air conditioning.
On Wednesday, there were 21 heat-related deaths at Beni Mellal’s main hospital as temperatures rose to 48.3 degrees (118.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region of 575,000 people, most without air conditioning.
“We have no money and we have no choice,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from Kasba Tadla, an even hotter city that some experts say is among the hottest on the planet.
“The majority of deaths occurred among people suffering from chronic illnesses and the elderly, as high temperatures contributed to the deterioration of their health status and led to their deaths,” Kamal Elyansli, the regional health director, said in a statement. .
This is life or death in the heat.
While Earth’s warming lasted a week with four of the hottest days ever measuredthe world focused on cold, hard numbers that showed the average daily temperature of the entire planet.
But the reading of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded on Monday doesn’t convey how oppressively sticky any particular place became at the height of the sun and humidity. The thermometer doesn’t tell the story of the heat that simply wouldn’t go away at night so people could sleep.
Records are about statistics, keeping score. But people don’t feel the data. They feel the heat.
“We don’t need any scientist to tell us what the outside temperature is, because that’s what our body tells us instantly,” he said. Humayun Saeeda 35-year-old roadside fruit seller in Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore.
Saeed had to go to the hospital twice in June because of heatstroke.
“The situation is much better now as it was not easy to work in May and June because of the heat wave, but I have avoided the morning walk,” said Saeed. lower.”
The heat was making Delia, a 38-year-old pregnant woman standing outside a train station in Bucharest, Romania, feel even more uncomfortable. The day was so hot that she was drowsy. Without air conditioning at night, she considered sleeping in the car like a friend did.
“I really noticed a huge increase in temperatures. I think it was the same for everyone. I felt it even more because I’m pregnant,” said Delia, who only gave her first name. “But I don’t think it was just me. Really everyone felt that.”
Self-described weather nerd Karin Bumbaco was in her element, but then it became a little too much when Seattle had day after day of much hotter than normal heat.
“I love science. I love the weather. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” said Bumbaco, Washington’s deputy state climatologist. “It’s fun to see daily records being broken. … But in recent years, just living with it and actually feeling the heat made it even more miserable on a daily basis.”
“Like this recent stretch we had. I wasn’t sleeping very well. I don’t have air conditioning at home,” said Bumbaco. “I watched the thermostat every morning get a little warmer than the previous hot morning. It was just increasing the heat in the house and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.”
For climate scientists around the world, what had been an academic exercise in climate change literally hit home.
“I have been analyzing these numbers in the cold of my office, but the heat has also started to affect me, causing sleepless nights due to warmer urban temperatures,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Tropical Institute. Weather in Pune, Maharashtra, which typically has a relatively mild climate.
“My kids come home from school exhausted at busy times,” Koll said. “Last month, the mother of one of my colleagues died of heatstroke in northern India.”
Philip Mote, a climate scientist and dean of the graduate school at Oregon State University, moved in middle school to California’s Central Valley and its triple-digit summer heat.
“I quickly realized I didn’t like a hot, dry climate,” Mote said. “And that’s why I moved to the Northwest.”
For decades, Mote worked on climate issues from the comfort of Oregon, where people feared that with global warming, the Northwest “would be the last nice place to live in the U.S. and everyone would move here and we would have overpopulation.”
But the region was hit by serious fires in 2020 and a deadly heatwave in 2021, sending some people fleeing what was supposed to be a climate paradise.
In the second week of July, the temperature reached 104 degrees (40 Celsius). As a member of a masters rowing club, Mote practices in the water on Tuesday and Thursday nights, but this week they decided to simply float down the river in tubes.
In Boise, Idaho, tubing in heat that hovered between 37 and 42 degrees Celsius (99 and 108 degrees Fahrenheit) for 17 days became so popular that you have to wait 30 minutes to an hour to get into the water, said John Tullius, general manager of Boise River Raft & Tube.
“I think it’s been record numbers for the last 10 days in a row,” Tullius said, adding that he worries about his outdoor workers, especially the physical toll on those picking up the rafts at the end of the journey.
He erected a special shade structure for them, hired more workers to lighten the load, and encouraged them to hydrate.
In Denver’s City Park, the swan-shaped paddleboat rental shop isn’t that busy because it’s terribly hot outside and the brave souls who go out have to sit on hot fiberglass seats.
There isn’t much shade for the workers, “but we hid in our shack,” said worker Dominic Prado, 23. “We also have a really strong fan in there, which I like to put my shirt over just to cool down. ”
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Borenstein reported from Washington, Metz from Beni Mellal, Morocco. Munir Ahmed in Lahore, Pakistan, Nicolae Dumitrache in Bucharest, Romania, Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, and Brittany Peterson in Denver contributed to this report.
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Follow Seth Borenstein and Sam Metz on X in @borenbears It is @metzsam.
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