TOO HOT TO HANDLE.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

The summer that just ended produced some of the hottest-ever temperatures across the globe. Are we prepared for life on a warmer planet?

One afternoon this summer, the Algerian town of Ouargla, on the edge of the Sahara, recorded a high of 124 degrees Fahrenheit. Even for this hot country, it was an all-time record, according to Algeria's national meteorological service.

Abdelmalek Ibek Ag Sahli was at work in a petroleum plant on the outskirts of the town that day. He and the rest of his crew had to be there by 7 a.m., part of a regular 12-hour daily shift. But the heat was so intense they lasted only a few hours. "It was impossible to do the work," Sahli says. "It was hell."

By 11 a.m., he and his colleagues walked off the job.

Sahli wasn't the only one struggling with unbearable heat this summer, as record-breaking heat waves gripped countries around the world. The contiguous United States had its hottest month of May ever recorded and the third-hottest month of June. Japan was walloped by record triple-digit temperatures, killing at least 86 people. And in Northern Europe, heat waves were so intense that they caused nuclear power plants to be shut down because the river water that cools the reactors was too warm.

Why are heat waves getting more intense? Scientists with the World Weather Attribution project, a group based at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, concluded in a study this summer that the likelihood of having a heat wave like the one that baked Northern Europe is "more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate."

The Greenhouse Effect

Studies like this aren't yet available for other record-heat episodes this year. But scientists say there's little doubt that human-caused climate change is making heat waves more frequent and intense--and we may be seeing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet.

"[Climate change] is not a future scenario," says Elena Manaenkova, deputy head of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. "It is happening now."

Globally, this is shaping up to be the fourth-hottest year ever recorded. The only years hotter were the three previous ones. In fact, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.

That string of records is part of a larger trend. Since the 1880s, Earth's average temperature has risen by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit--a phenomenon called global warming. (Global warming together with its side effects is called climate change.)

Average temperatures have always fluctuated naturally over time, but the vast majority of scientists say the current warming is being largely driven by human activities. Burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, to heat homes, power cars, and generate electricity releases carbon dioxide and other gases that trap more heat in the atmosphere. Because they behave like the panes in a greenhouse, they're called greenhouse gases, and their influence on Earth's temperature is called the greenhouse effect. The higher the concentration of greenhouse gases, the warmer the planet gets.

A study published in the journal Science Advances in 2017 found that if temperatures continue to rise at their current pace, the heat and humidity would be so high in some areas of South Asia by the end of the century that people directly exposed for six hours or more would not survive.

Indeed, researchers say, if nothing is done to combat climate change, we could see big increases in the number of deaths caused by heat waves. A study last month projected a fivefold increase in heat-related deaths in the U.S. by 2080. The outlook for less wealthy countries is worse; in the Philippines, for example, researchers forecast 12 times more deaths.

Scientists aren't worried just about heat waves getting worse though. Global warming can intensify other extreme weather events as well, including wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, according to a 2014 report by the National Climate Assessment.

That means, scientists warn, we could see more monster storms like Florence, which pummeled the Carolinas in September with record amounts of rainfall; more-intense wildfires, like those that have burned record amounts of land in California this year; and more-extreme droughts, like the ones in Britain this year, which have led to a five-year low in wheat yields, and those that devastated parts of El Salvador this summer, leaving farmers whose livelihoods depend on their corn harvests staring in dismay at their failed crops.

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