Currently— May 3rd, 2022

May 02, 2022

What you need to know, currently.

 Around 1-in-5 people on the planet — more than 1,500,000,000 people — have already experienced high temperatures in excess of 100°F (38°C) during March and April from Burma and Bangladesh to India, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East and North Africa.https://t.co/H5YkhTVFbo— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) May 2, 2022 

Today, we published a piece by Currently’s founder Eric Holthaus, about the weeks-long heatwave blanketing India and Pakistan.

“Translated into heat stress on human bodies, this heatwave has approached ‘uninhabitable’ levels — and is a preview of truly dangerous climate change in one of the most heat-vulnerable places on Earth,” Holthaus writes.

This year’s March and April were the hottest months in North and Central India’s 122-year-long record. Preliminary data also suggests that this April is the fourth hottest in India’s entire climatic history.

Similarly in Pakistan, this March was the hottest on record since 1961. On Sunday, temperatures reached 121.1°F (49.5°C) in Nawabshah, which is the hottest temperature on record in the Northern Hemisphere so far this year. The country has also been hit with emergency power outages and heat illness amid Ramadan, the holy month during which Muslim people fast from sunrise to sunset.

And, the worst of the heatwave is yet to come.

“That makes heat wave prevention across South Asia one of the most urgent climate priorities across the entire world,” Holthaus writes. “The easiest way to do that, according to the UN, is to implement heatwave early warning systems that prioritize care for those most vulnerable, and to greatly limit greenhouse gas emissions everywhere on Earth."