A new report shows that over the past year climate change has been responsible for an additional 26 days of extreme heat for most of the world as Delhi hits 52.3ºC
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The month of May in the Indian capital, Delhi, as well as other parts of northern India, is always almost unbearably hot. But, this year is hotter than normal with temperatures in Delhi this week reaching 52.3 degrees Celsius which is around 9 degrees Celsius above normal for the time of year.
The current extreme heat in northern India does much to underline the findings of a new report released this week. The report, jointly issued by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, says that over the past year, the majority of the planet’s population experienced nearly a month of more extreme heat days than normal and that this probably would not have occurred without climate change.
To come up with this astonishing discovery, a team from Climate Central looked at the years 1991 to 2020 and worked out what temperatures counted as within the top 10 per cent for each country over that period. Then, they examined the number of days between May 15 2023 and May 15 2024 when peak temperatures were within, or beyond, the previous top ten per cent range. As a next step, they applied their Climate Shift Index (CSI), which uses peer-reviewed methodology to quantify the influence of climate change on daily temperatures. Where the CSI level was 2 or above (meaning climate change made the heat at least twice as likely), they counted the day in question as an excess heat day due to climate change.
The next stage of the process was to compare the recent year’s temperatures with counterfactual temperatures – the temperatures that would have occurred in a world without human-caused climate change. They counted the number of days with temperatures within or beyond the ‘top 10 per cent’ band, and where the CSI said climate change made the temperatures at least twice as likely, and subtracted the number of times the counterfactual temperatures reached or exceeded this level.
When the final results came in it showed that between mid-May 2023 and mid-May 2024, an estimated 6.8 billion people – 78 per cent of world’s population – experienced at least 31 days of extreme heat. Of those 31 days the report authors concluded that, on average, across all places in the world, 26 of those extreme heat days would not have happened without human-caused climate change.
Commenting on the report, Aditya V. Bahadur, Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre said: ‘This report provides overwhelming scientific evidence that extreme heat is a deadly manifestation of the climate crisis. This wreaks havoc on human health, critical infrastructure, the economy, agriculture and the environment, thereby eroding gains in human development and decreasing wellbeing – especially for poor and marginalised communities in the global South.’
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