Take precautions to survive heat waves

For a week or two every year, the temperature gets so high that when I attempt to take my dog for a walk, she gives me a look that says, “Are you crazy?”

- Melvin Durai

At times like this, when stepping outside is like stepping into an oven, I find myself asking the same question: How hot does it have to get before we take climate change seriously?

That’s a question that many Europeans have been asking lately.

“In some places in Europe we are experiencing temperatures that have never been recorded before, so it is really unusual,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the Spain-based Copernicus Climate Change Service told the New York Times.

In the town of Mora in central Portugal, the mercury hit 46.6 degree C in late June, slightly hotter than the 46 degree C recorded in the town of El Granado in Spain. Those temperatures, similar to what New Delhi experienced a few weeks earlier, were the highest temperatures ever recorded in June in Portugal and Spain. It was so hot that some immigrants were heading to the airport, saying, “We're going back to Africa. It’s cooler there.”