Page 41 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine December 2023

bne December 2023 COP28 I Special focus I 41
Iran hottest day ever on earth
Things weren't any better in Europe where temperatures broke through the 40°C mark in mid-June, stoking fears of record-breaking summer heatwaves that could endanger lives and threaten food supplies while providing further proof of the devastating effects of man-made global warming.
In the French resort town of Biarritz, temperatures reached 42.9°C on 18 June, the hottest ever June day in the town since records began in the nineteenth century. This was also the earliest 40°C observed in France in recorded history, beating the previous record of 21 June
in 2003.
Likewise, Brazil and the rest of South America has also seen a heatwave that has been drying up the Amazon river.
Large parts of India risk becoming uninhabitable in future if current heat waves persist, threatening migration and climate crises that could send shock waves round the world and displace 1.3bn people.
Temperatures were in their 50Cs in April in India and Pakistan, with peaks of up to 65°C, breaking all records, pushing up demand for electricity, causing water shortages in agriculture and threatening future food supply constraints. The Indian franchise of Burger King took tomatoes off the menu after the local crops failed and tomatoes became exorbitantly expensive.
Brazil heatwave map
Hot summer
This year has been the hottest on record. Exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, causing chaos as they go and fuelling extreme weather events on an unprecedented scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars of damage has been done and tens of thousands of people have died.
Globally temperatures in June, July and August were 0.66 degrees Celsius above the average between 1991 and 2020, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus.
In the Northern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Anomaly has been increasing and has already increased by more than 1.5C compared to the
EURO heatwave map
long term average. Then the Earth briefly passed the threshold of 2C hotter than the averaage for the first time on November 17.
The global average temperature has never before exceeded a rise of 2C since before industrialisation, according to Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
And in June Iran has recorded one of the hottest days since records began of 52.2C – on the edge of what humanity can survive. By August the heatwave forced Iranian authorities to declared August 2 and 3 as national bank holidays due to abnormally intense heat across the country.
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