Mysterious hotspots

A worrisome trend in the global climate system has popped up. Specific regions of the world are experiencing repetitive severe heat waves so extreme and so deadly that scientists’ models are thrown for a tizzy.

This behavior is comparable to a war zone with heat the primary weapon that ravages a specific region with temperatures up to 125F sustained for days-to-weeks. In turn, deaths ensue and foliage scorched, as the stage is set for ferocious wildfires.

Global warming is not uniform, rather specific regions of the planet, on a repetitive basis, are being hit with excessive deathly heat that’s not found elsewhere, implying that global warming is worse than realized as it erupts in selected regions of the planet, leaving death and destruction of habitat in its wake.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is based upon a 65-year analysis: Global Emergence of Regional Heatwave Hotspots Outpaces Climate Model Simulations, PNAS, November 26, 2024)

Mysterious hotspots are found on every continent: “These heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, withered crops and forests, and sparked devastating wildfires.” (Source: Kevin Krajick, Unexplained Heat Wave ‘Hotspots’ Are Popping Up Across the Globe, State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, Nov 26, 2024)

Global hotspots are throwing a wrench into climate modeling of established inter-relationships between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks. The hotspots do not fit scientific models. According to Kai Kornhuber, a scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: “This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand… These regions become temporary hothouses,” Ibid.

The extreme heat waves have been found predominately over the past five years which aligns with abrupt rapid climate change witnessed since the turn of the new century: “For instance, a nine-day wave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some locales by 30 degrees C, or 54 F. This included the highest ever temperature recorded in Canada, 121.3 F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The town burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire driven in large part by the drying of vegetation in the extraordinary heat. In Oregon and Washington state, hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health conditions,” Ibid.

The most intense conditions are regularly found in northwestern Europe, causing 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023 across Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands

In-all the most hard-hit regions of the globe include (1) central China (2) Japan (3) Korea (4) the Arabian Peninsula (5) eastern Australia (6) scattered parts of Africa (7) Canada’s Northwest Territories and the High Arctic islands (8) northern Greenland (9) the southern end of South America and (10) scattered patches of Siberia. In the US, regions of Texas and New Mexico, though they are not at the most extreme end.

The yearly heat-related death rate In the United States has doubled this century with 2.325 deaths in 2023.

Excerpted: ‘Mysterious Global Hotspots’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org