It’s safe to assume heat is not at the top of the list in Western New York’s typical climate hazards. While summer warmth will be building this week, it will still be short of a bona fide heat wave combination of excessive heat and humidity. However, there are some signs even in our more temperate part of the Great Lakes this may turn out to be a warmer than average summer, as projected with some confidence by the Climate Prediction Center.
Nationally and globally, heat is quite another story. In most years, heat is the biggest killer on the planet, and its role is growing. Just looking at the 2021 U.S. statistics, heat’s standing in weather fatalities stands out over a 10-year period.
Globally, the British Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the world’s most important climate data repositories, calculates Earth’s average temperature has increased by 1 degree Celsius/1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli has compiled some of the evidence of growing frequency and intensity of heat waves in recent decades, coinciding with this era of accelerated global warming. The term “heat wave” has different meanings in different parts of the globe, usually tied to what conditions the local population have become accustomed. The American Meteorological Society summarizes the term as “a period of abnormally and uncomfortably hot and usually humid weather.”
Since the turn of this century, there have been some disastrous standout deadly heat waves, such as 2003 in Europe. This cataclysm is estimated to have killed 70,000 people on a stricken continent, with little available air conditioning greatly adding to the casualties.
A peer-reviewed study of this heat wave with a comparison to past paleoclimate data found human-caused warming made this warmest period in the previous 500 years in Europe four times more likely to have occurred than would have been the case without…
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