As much of the nation swelters under temperatures that have canceled outdoor sports, sparked wildfires and taxed the infrastructure keeping people cool, experts warn that heat waves will only get more common.Heat waves are just one of the types of extreme weather climate change becoming more frequent — but it’s already led to deaths both in the U.S. and around the world this year.”This is the climate change that we’ve been promised by scientists,” Michal Nachmany, founder of Climate Policy Radar, told CBS News foreign correspondent Ramy Inocencio about record-breaking temperatures in the U.K. this week.”This level of extreme weather is life-threatening, and we really want to make sure that people are not under any illusion, that this is serious and this is here to stay for the foreseeable future,” Nachmany said.
In Phoenix, for example, heat kills as many people as homicides, David Hondula, the city’s director of heat response and mitigation, told CBS News’ Ben Tracy. Climate scientist Daniel Swain, who writes about weather in the Western U.S. on his website, pointed out last week that what he called “a prolonged and locally intense heatwave across all of western North America in the coming weeks” is “the least extreme such event currently ongoing across multiple continents,” including Europe and China.
The Associated Press reports that heat waves in China earlier this month – specifically in the Zhejiang province, east of Shanghai – saw temperatures exceeding 42 degrees Cel …