This is not an illusion, summer is really hot year after year.

This is not an illusion, summer is really hot year after year.

11:35 PM

This is not an illusion, summer is really hot year after year.

The heat has arrived, and it is the hottest time of the year. I wonder if you are also being grilled in the summer stove at the moment? The past June is the hottest in Europe since the record. In the north of China, there are also a few days of heat that people dare not step out of their homes. Today, heatwave weather has become a global problem. Like earthquakes and typhoons, continuous high-temperature heat waves are also a natural disaster.



Heat is the most intuitive feeling in summer. The summer of 2019 has only just begun, and the temperature record in Europe has been broken. In June 2019, the average temperature in Europe was 2°C higher than normal, making it the hottest June in history. On June 28th, the temperature in the southern French city of Nimes reached 45.9 ° C, breaking the French temperature record. Europe is not the only region in the world that faces dangerous temperatures. Since mid-May, India and Pakistan have suffered the longest heatwave in recent years, and the temperature in New Delhi has soared to 48 ° C, which is the highest temperature in the Indian capital in June.

China Weather Network launched the national high-temperature "ignition" warning map. After analysis, it was found that from the average data statistics from 1981 to 2018, the north furnace "point" was early and "extinguished" was early, in contrast, The Jiangnan South China stove has more endurance, and the "burning" time is longer, and it is often "finished" in September. At the beginning of July, after a brief cool in the north, the heat will debut again.

The current heatwave weather is by no means a narrow issue, not a local issue. It has become a global problem. Like earthquakes and typhoons, continuous high-temperature heat waves are also a natural disaster. Climate scientists say they are not surprised by the extremes observed in recent years, because the situation has been warned for many years, but the severity and number of these extreme events still surprise them.

Getting hotter and hotter

The heatwave that swept through Europe in June was like a red alert for climate change. The intense heat waves affected most of Europe and created temperature records for Germany, Austria, Spain, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.



According to the analysis of China Weather Network, from 1981 to 2018, the high-temperature combustion in Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Hangzhou showed a trend of increasing length, and the "ignition" was getting earlier and earlier, and the "extinguishing" was getting late. They counted the average annual temperature in summer in China since 1951 and found that whether the average temperature, the highest temperature or the the lowest temperature showed an upward trend, it was not an illusion that it was getting hotter.

For the heatwave, the French are more aware of the fatality of extreme heat than anyone else in any other country. In 2003, a two-week the heatwave caused about 15,000 deaths in France and 70,000 deaths across Europe. In the United States, approximately 600 people die each year from heat-related diseases. High temperatures can attack vulnerable groups such as the elderly, babies, and people who are in poor health, but athletes and outdoor workers can also die.

Many people died of high temperatures in June. What will happen in August?

The Climate and Health Assessment Program of the US Global Change Research Project predicts that by the end of the century, climate change will cause tens of thousands of premature deaths each year. Heatwaves are getting longer, more serious, and more frequent. This is an inevitable conclusion that as climate change, we will see more people die. [2]

In addition to death, scientists also recorded other losses caused by heatwaves. The MIT research team found that as the climate changes, rising temperatures directly affect the pattern of irrigated agriculture, which increases the water evaporation rate of the irrigation system, resulting in increased humidity in the northern plains of China, and increased temperatures. And humidity directly leads to an increase in the intensity of the heatwave.

From 2070 to 2100, China's North China Plain may become unsuitable for living due to extreme heatwaves. Not only that, the Ganges and the Indus Valley in India and most of South Asia may also greet extreme heatwaves in the second half of the 21st century. [3]

Why is it fatal because of heat?

Temperature regulation is one of the important physiological functions of the human body. Humans are warm-blooded animals. Regardless of the temperature in vitro, various mechanisms in the human body always keep their core body temperature within the normal range of about 37 °C. This temperature regulation is controlled by the hypothalamus, which is the body's biological thermostat. Part of the cause of death due to heat is the characteristics of human warm-blooded animals.



A large body of scientific evidence shows that overheating can have a detrimental effect on human health, leading to various diseases ranging from depression to heart disease. In hot weather, sweating is the most effective cooling mechanism. However, if the sweat glands are "blocked" and the sweat cannot be effectively discharged, the body's temperature regulation mechanism will be ineffective.

Why is it invalid? First of all, due to various physiological reasons, some special people can not effectively use the sweating mechanism to cool down. These people will feel great physiological pressure in the heatwave weather. They are mainly the elderly, children or sick people. Organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that overheating is fatal to older people, infants, or people who are ill.

Also, the humidity in the air can affect the discharge of human sweat. Usually, in hot weather, sweat that has evaporated from the skin will cool the body. However, if the surrounding environment is very humid and the air is full of moisture, the sweat will not evaporate, which will cause the body's body temperature to be too high.

The US Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed the use of the concept of heat index to indicate the effect of temperature and humidity on human body temperature. In a study of the Great Lakes of the United States, it was mentioned that in the latter part of the century, the average temperature in summer in some Gulf countries may be unsuitable for habitation. [4]

How to fight the heat?

To counter the dangers caused by tropical tropics, many countries have begun to make efforts.



France has repeatedly suffered from heat waves, so in the face of a new round of heatwaves, the French authorities need time to determine the “excessive mortality” caused by it, but preventive measures including cooling centers and sprayers seem to have been prevented. The disaster happened. [2] Western communities, including Los Angeles, recognize that urban heat is a growing threat to public health, and climate warming only exacerbates this problem. It is not as obvious as other disasters, but the impact can be profound. [5]

Global warming has caused the Earth's temperature to rise, and the "urban heat island effect" has become more and more serious. Urban planners are also looking for ways to mitigate the “urban heat island effect”, one of which is to plant trees. Trees can cool buildings, especially when trees are planted east or west of the building and the shadows of the trees prevent solar radiation from penetrating the windows or heating the walls.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that at least 40% of canopy coverage is needed in urban blocks to offset the warming effect of asphalt. The expansion of coverage will bring more cooling effects, but even in less than half of the streets are occluded, the city can see the actual benefits. Of course, this is just an overall figure. The cooling effect of trees is also related to the area of impervious ground. Generally, when there are shades in the three-quarters of the road surface, the cooling temperature can exceed 2.5 ° C, but in the asphalt-based blocks, most of them can only reduce 0.5 ° C ~ 1.0 ° C. [6-8]

Is it a disaster caused by global warming?

Separating human activities from the natural variability of weather and climate systems are difficult, so scientists are reluctant to link any single weather event to the researchers' long-term measurement of climate warming, but this is changing now. More and more research results continue to reveal that heatwaves like this may occur more frequently than in the past due to global warming, and the situation may get worse.

In 2017, Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh published a study in the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that found the characteristics of climate change on a global scale. Researchers have found through reliable observations that climate change has led to an increase in the probability of record-breaking high-temperature events in more than 80% of the world's surface observations. If carbon emissions are not reduced, the situation will get worse. The temperature rise caused by human activities has made the occurrence of heatwaves more frequent.

It is estimated that by 2040, the extreme temperatures recorded in the 2003 heatwave will become normal summer temperatures. By that time, the heatwave will be longer, more frequent, and more intense. Therefore, Dieffenbach said in the article that when reviewing historical data, we can see that global warming is happening, and extreme weather and climate events are increasing in many regions.

In June of this year, the European continent was suffocating at record-breaking high temperatures for several days, prompting researchers to try to clarify the relationship between heatwaves and climate change. [9] According to the assessment, abnormal heat waves are more likely to be caused by global warming. The new study uses a computer model to calculate the expected temperature in France when the temperature rises by 1 ° C and does not have a temperature of 1 ° C. They then observed the average temperature in France and the three days of June in Toulouse and compared the observations with the model. The overall French results show that climate change makes the heatwave about 4 °C higher than normal, and the possibility of heatwaves increases by at least 5 times and the results of Toulouse are similar. [10-11]


Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said that although 5 times is the lowest level, the the real number "may be much higher." The research team said that this possibility maybe 100 times, but should not be too serious, because it is very difficult to model the interaction between clouds, atmosphere, and soil, and to reproduce such extreme and recordable temperatures in the model.

Although it is difficult to attribute this heatwave directly to climate change, it is expected that this extreme weather event will become more common as the Earth continues to warm as greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise.



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