Baking highways signal a real, red-hot summer

In northern China, road surfaces have soared to 70C. In California's Central Valley, temperatures are reaching into the triple digits in Fahrenheit. Across much of Spain, the mercury has risen so high that it's prompting warnings for tourists.

- BRIAN K SULLIVAN JOE WERTZ MARY HUI

Weeks before the official start of the Northern Hemisphere's summer, signs are emerging that the coming months will be blistering in North America, Europe and Asia. There's even a chance that the season could shatter global high-temperature records, said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The scorching conditions threaten to tax power grids, wilt crops and send energy prices soaring across three continents. Hot, dry weather is also elevating the risk of wildfires, with blazes already erupting in Alberta, the epicentre of Canada’s oil industry. The human and economic consequences are dire: Extreme heat is expected to inflict about US$200 billion (6.54 trillion baht) in annual losses in the US alone by 2030, a number that will more than double by 2050, according to one estimate.

All three northern continents face sweltering temperatures fuelled by climate change — particularly the western and central US and Canada, as well as western and northern Europe, Swain said. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, these regions will also see areas of intense rain and flooding, he said.

“I'd expect to see further instances of extreme to record-shattering downpours and flood events in regions prone to heavy precipitation during the warm season,” Swain said.

In the Atlantic, the heat is raising ocean temperatures, boosting the odds of an unusually active hurricane season. The absence of El Niño, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that can cause storm-wrecking wind conditions across the Atlantic, also means more hurricanes and tropical storms may develop and grow in the Atlantic and Caribbean, including oiland gasproducing areas along the US Gulf Coast.

From 1980 to 2024, tropical storms and hurricanes caused more than $1.5 trillion worth of damage and killed at least 7,211 people in the US, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.