It’s a wave that perhaps heralds a suffocating summer, at a time when the UN is warning that the planet is overheating. The extreme heat hitting the western United States is expected to reach its peak on Thursday June 6. Las Vegas is sweltering in 44 degrees Celsius, and the temperature will approach 49 degrees in the desert region of Death Valley, due to an oppressive anticyclonic weather system.
According to scientists, repeated heat waves are an unequivocal marker of global warming, and these heat waves are expected to multiply, last longer and intensify. “Record highs and lows today will likely be broken or tied between California, Nevada and Arizona,” according to the US Weather Service (NWS).
Specialists believe that these abnormally high temperatures as summer approaches may be a harbinger of a suffocating summer. Las Vegas is experiencing dangerous temperatures above seasonal norms, and authorities there have extended their heat alert until Saturday.
A “particularly worrying” situation
Air-conditioned venues have been opened to provide respite to people without air conditioning at home in America’s gaming capital. “We haven’t really had time to acclimatize to the fact that it’s warming up so much and so quickly”Glen Simpson, director of an ambulance service, told Channel 13, a local ABC affiliate. “People are just not used to it, even when they grew up here, spent all their summers here, the body doesn’t really get used to it.”he notes.
In California, the situation in the very agricultural region of the Central Valley is also “particularly worrying”according to federal authorities. “There will be little or no nighttime respite for those who do not have an effective cooling system or cannot adequately hydrate”, according to the NWS. Temperatures are expected to drop slightly in the coming days, but the heat wave will extend north into Oregon and Washington state.
May 2024 was the hottest May on record worldwide (on land and sea), the twelfth month in a row to break its own record, according to the European Copernicus Observatory. And there is an 80% chance that the global average temperature over a calendar year will exceed “temporarily” more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2028, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned this week.