How do you say 'extreme heat' in Bengali?
No, that’s not the weather forecast for where I currently am.
More than 11 million people live in the city with that forecast temperature. Even in the shade, the high temperature would feel like it is 105 degrees. The night time cools down—if cool is even a word to use here—to 86 degrees.
That city is Bangkok, Thailand, which is sizzling. So is most of Asia, reports the NYT.
The weather across the region in April is generally hot, and comes before Asia’s annual summer monsoon, which dumps rain on parched soil. But this April’s temperatures have so far been unusually high.
In Bangladesh, where schools and universities are closed this week, temperatures in some areas have soared above 107 degrees Fahrenheit, or 42 degrees Celsius. Those numbers don’t quite capture how extreme humidity makes the heat feel even worse.
In Myanmar:
Extreme heat also has a political dimension in Myanmar, where the ruling military junta cited soaring temperatures last week as justification for moving Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s ousted civilian leader, from prison to an undisclosed location. Many people in Myanmar believe that generals are moving her for other reasons but using the heat — the capital recently hit 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit — as a pretext.
As one Bangladeshi said in the NYT report, "“Every year gets hotter, but this year is extreme.”
That’s what we all seem to say every summer, right? Old temperature records are shattered, and new records are created, every summer all across the world.
The BBC adds:
Bangladesh's weather authorities expect the extreme heat to continue for at least another week.
Hospitals and clinics have been asked to prepare for a higher patient load due to heat-related illnesses such as fever and headache.
Patients suffering from heatstroke will be admitted in air-conditioned wards, Health Minister Samanta Lal Sen said earlier this week.
The NYT reminds us:
Asia’s heat wave isn’t happening in a meteorological vacuum. Last year was Earth’s warmest by far in a century and a half. And the region is in the middle of an El Niño cycle, a climate phenomenon that tends to create warm, dry conditions in Asia.
The WaPo also pitches in with a climate story that is full of visuals and is focused on “the Bay of Bengal, where nearly 1.4 billion people live”.
Climate change is warming waters, shifting ocean patterns and transforming the region’s yearly monsoon from a reliable lifeline into a menace.
The water in the bay is rising faster than in other major bodies of water. The challenges confronting nations adjacent to it, densely populated along their coasts, probably foreshadow the struggles ahead elsewhere on Earth.
In case you need a reminder on where the Bay of Bengal is, the WaPo helps out:
It is not only in Asia:
At the end of March and into the early days of April, the Sahel region of Africa experienced an unprecedented heat wave. Extreme temperatures descended upon Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad. One city in Mali recorded a temperature of 48.5 degrees Celsius (over 119 degrees Fahrenheit). The heat wave was impossible.
Or, it would have been impossible without the 1.2 degrees Celsius that humans have already baked into the global climate system. That’s the conclusion from scientists with World Weather Attribution, a group that makes rapid assessments of climate change’s influence on extreme weather events.
So, what to do?
Katherine Hayhoe reminds us about the message that she has been sharing, well, forever it seems:
This post, like many on climate change, is essentially about her first point on having conversations on why climate change matters and what we can do. If we can talk about sports and celebrities, we surely can talk about climate change, right?
If you are lucky enough to have saved money that you can invest, keep that money away from companies whose products and services contribute to the problem.
Vote for people who take climate change seriously and want to do something to make the world a better place. Here in the US, at least for the 2024 elections, it essentially means avoiding one major political party that fondly chants, “drill, baby, drill”. We do not need any more drilling for coal and petroleum and natural gas. Instead, vote for the administration that has taken more climate action than any other in history.
If you are, by chance, a young reader here in the US, hey, you want to join the American Climate Corps?
And, yes, we need to reduce our personal footprints. I am with Hayhoe that we need to make good practices contagious by talking about them, which is why I have been blogging about good ideas all the time. From carbon tax to eating beans, there are plenty of good ideas that we need to talk about, even as we talk about the latest shows that we are binge-watching!
What practice of yours do you like to spread to others as an example of ways in which we can personally do something about climate change?