Good morning. As Britain prepares to flood to the pubs and the parks to enjoy the blue, cloudless skies and catch some rays, it’s hard to ignore the troubling implications of heatwaves that constantly break records. The problem isn’t that yesterday was the hottest day of the year, or that today looks like being, too: the problem is that days like these used to be rare, and now they aren’t.
The pattern of this week’s weather is being repeated in many parts of the world, but the outcomes can be significantly more extreme: in the US extreme heat is the leading cause of weather related death. It’s also having a deadly effect on livestock in Kansas, one of the country’s top three producers of beef, as the state reports 2,000 cattle dead. And the climate crisis will only continue exacerbate the sweltering temperatures, and make them come more often. Below, Archie Bland and I take a look at the impacts of extreme heat on five different cities. First though, the headlines.
