BENI MELLAL, Morocco (AP) — In the relentless heat of Morocco’s Middle Atlas, people were sleeping in attics. Hanna Ouhbour needed shelter, too, but she was outside the hospital waiting for her cousin, a diabetic, in a room with no air conditioning.
There were 21 heat-related deaths on Wednesday as temperatures rose to 48.3 degrees Celsius (118.9 degrees Fahrenheit) at Beni Mellal’s main hospital, with many in the region of 575,000 people lacking air conditioning.
“We have no money and no other options,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from the city of Kasba Tadla, which some experts say is one of the hottest cities in the world.
Regional Health Director Kamal Elyanslı said in a statement, “The majority of deaths occurred among people with chronic diseases and the elderly. High temperatures caused the health conditions of these people to deteriorate and lead to their deaths.”
It’s a matter of life and death in the heat.
As a warming Earth endures a week that has seen four of the hottest days ever measured, the world has turned its attention to the cold, harsh numbers that chart the average daily temperature across the planet.
But the reading of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded on Monday doesn’t tell the story of how oppressively sticky a particular place has become at the height of sun and humidity. The thermometer doesn’t tell the story of the heat that doesn’t go away at night so people can sleep.
Records are about statistics, they’re about keeping score. But people don’t feel the data. They feel the temperature.
“We don’t need any scientist to tell us what the temperature is outside, our body tells us that instantly,” he said. Humayun SaidA 35-year-old roadside fruit vendor in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital.
Saeed had to go to hospital twice in June due to heatstroke.
“The situation is much better now because it was not easy to work in May and June due to the heat wave, but I avoid morning walks,” Saeed said. “I may start again in August when the temperature drops further.”
The heat was making Delia, a 38-year-old pregnant woman, feel even more uncomfortable as she stood outside a train station in Bucharest, Romania. It was so hot during the day that she was sleepy. At night, she considered sleeping in her car, as a friend did, because there was no air conditioning.
“I noticed a really big increase in temperatures. I think it was the same for everyone. I felt it even more because I was pregnant,” said Delia, who would only give her first name. “But I think it wasn’t just me. Everyone really felt it.”
Self-described weather enthusiast Karin Bumbaco was in her element, but things got a little tougher when Seattle started experiencing much warmer-than-normal weather conditions every day.
“I love science. I love weather. I’ve loved it since I was a little kid,” said Bumbaco, assistant state climate scientist in Washington. “It’s fun to see the daily records being broken. … But just living through it and feeling the heat has become more of a daily occurrence in recent years.”
“Like the last time we had it. I wasn’t sleeping very well. I don’t have air conditioning in my house,” Bumbaco said. “Every morning I would see the thermostat a little warmer than the hot morning before. The heat in the house was rising and I couldn’t wait for it to end.”
For climate scientists worldwide, this has become a crucial point in the academic study of climate change.
“I was analysing these figures in the cool of my office, but the heat has started affecting me too and I am having sleepless nights due to the rising temperatures in cities,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, Maharashtra.
“My kids come home from school exhausted during peak hours,” Koll said. “Last month, a colleague’s mother died of heatstroke in northern India.”
Philip Mote, a climate scientist and dean of the graduate school at Oregon State University, moved to California’s Central Valley, where summer temperatures drop into triple digits, when he was in middle school.
“I quickly realized I didn’t like a hot, dry climate,” Mote said. “And so I moved to the Northwest.”
Mote worked on climate issues for decades from the comfort of Oregon, where people feared that with global warming, the Northwest would become “the last good place to live in the United States, and everyone would move here and there would be overpopulation.”
But the region faced devastating wildfires in 2020 and a deadly heatwave in 2021, prompting some people to flee what was supposed to be a climate haven.
The temperature reached 104 degrees (40 Celsius) during the second week of July. As a member of the masters rowing club, Mote practices in the water on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, but this week they decided to just float down the river with tubes.
In Boise, Idaho, where temperatures have been between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit (37 and 42 degrees Celsius) for 17 days straight, sledding has become so popular that waiting 30 minutes to an hour to get into the water is a common practice, said John Tullius, general manager of Boise River Raft & Tube.
“I think we’ve had record numbers in the last 10 days,” Tullius said, adding that he was particularly concerned about workers working outdoors because of the physical strain that those who took the raft at the end of the march would be under.
He built a special shade structure for them, hired more workers to lighten the load, and encouraged them to drink water.
The swan-shaped pedal boat rental shop in Denver City Park is not very crowded because it is unbearably hot outside and the brave hearts who venture out have to sit on warm fiberglass seats.
There isn’t much shade for workers, “but we hide in our little hut,” says employee Dominic Prado, 23. “We also have a really powerful fan there, so I like to lift my shirt over it just to cool down.”
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Borenstein reported from Washington, while Metz reported from Beni Mellal, Morocco. Munir Ahmed from Lahore, Pakistan, Nicolae Dumitrache from Bucharest, Romania, Rebecca Boone from Boise, Idaho, and Brittany Peterson from Denver contributed to this report.
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You can follow Seth Borenstein and Sam Metz on X at @borenbears and @metzsam.
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