GENEVA: As Europe and other regions swelter, a United Nations researcher cautioned that climate change was enabling increasingly intense and long-lasting heatwaves, which in some parts could soon start to hit year-round.
Extreme heat has dominated the headlines in recent weeks, from the “heat dome” sweltering much of Europe to heat-fueled wildfires in Spain, Canada, Greece and Hawaii and surging temperatures in the middle of the South American winter.
Heatwaves are starting earlier, lasting longer and becoming more severe, John Nairn, a top extreme heat advisor at the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, said.
He said that it is the most rapidly emerging effect of global warming that is being witnessed in the weather systems.
The expert stressed that this was in line with scientific predictions, according to AFP.
He said that one reason was that global warming seems to be leading to a weakening of the global jet streams — air that flows high in the atmosphere of Earth. As the jet stream waves increase slower and wavier, they let weather systems become parked in one position for longer.
Heatwaves Among Deadly Natural Disasters
Heatwaves are among the lethal natural disasters, with hundreds of thousands of people losing their lives from preventable heat-related causes each year.
Repeated high nighttime temperatures are especially dangerous for human health since the human body cannot recover from the heat it receives during the day.
Higher overnight heat also means that the energy accumulated during the day has nowhere to go, pushing heat even higher the next day.
