45°C in Thailand 44°C in India 38°C in China Asia

45°C in Thailand, 44°C in India, 38°C in China… Asia already in the oven

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The global warming

As soon as the hot season has started, several temperature records have already been broken from Central Asia to Southeast Asia. Global warming is making heat waves more frequent, more intense, and earlier.

After a scorching 2022, a large part of the Asian continent is once again suffocating under a heat wave this month April 2023. Although the continent is entering its hot season, temperatures are shockingly high and early.

For the first time in its history, Thailand has just measured temperatures above 45°C. At the 15 th of April 45.4°C was measured on the Tak, a province in the northwest of the country and on the border with Burma, according to the Thai Meteorological Service. The previous record was in 2016, when 44.6°C was measured in the nearby Mae Hong Son region.

On the Southeast Asian side, Laos recorded 41.6°C in mid-April. In Bangladesh, 43 °C was measured in Ishurdi in the west-central part of the country. This April record is similar to those in 1963, 1980 and 1995, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who follows extreme weather events around the world, said on Twitter. Also in Kalewa in the north, Burma suffocates with 44°C. A record for the month of April.

Ditto in Central Asia, where Turkmenistan also set a heat record for April: 42.2 °C were measured in Uch-Adzhi in the east of the country, British meteorologist Scott Duncan noted on Twitter. With 38.1°C in Uzbekistan, 35.1°C in Kazakhstan (including 33.6°C in the Taraz Highlands, a record for the month of April) and 35°C in Tajikistan, the heatwave is spreading to many areas of Central Asia .

“It’s not just hot during the day, extremely high temperatures were also measured at night. Temperatures don’t drop below 28°C at night,” says meteorologist Scott Duncan.

6,500 people die from heat in India

In India and Pakistan, temperatures are yet to reach the deadly levels of late April 2022, when both countries suffocated below 50°C and humidity didn’t allow the human body to cool down. Nevertheless, temperatures in excess of 40°C have been recorded for several consecutive days in north-west India and Pakistan, around 5°C above the seasonal average. In particular, 44.6 °C in Prayagraj in north-eastern India.

This Monday, during an awards ceremony attended by around a million people in full sun, Indian authorities announced that 11 people had died of “heat stroke”. Since 2010, heat waves in India have claimed the lives of more than 6,500 people. Those hellish temperatures are expected to continue throughout the week.

Nepal, a small neighbor of the Indian giant, has also recorded temperatures above 40°C in the past few days. The country’s monthly records could be broken in the coming days. Even the high plateaus of Mongolia have reached a maximum temperature of 27 °C, Maximiliano Herrera notes.

In China, the Mengla weather station measures a monthly record: 38.2°C. Several Chinese provinces exceeded 35C, such as Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou, where temperatures all topped 37C. Wufeng in Hubei province also had the hottest April day since records began, also at 37 °C.

According to IPCC experts, severe heat waves are increasing worldwide. The effects of human activities on climate make heat waves more frequent, more intense, and earlier in the year. Scientists explain that the probability of the occurrence of unprecedented and very intense events increases with every tenth of global warming. At +2°C every five years, “1.7 billion additional people will be exposed to extreme heat, 420 million to extreme heat and around 65 million to exceptional heat waves,” the climatologists warn.