The Furnace Creek Visitor Center thermometer in Death Valley National Park in California reads 54 degrees Celsius on June 16, 2021. REUTERS-Yonhap

By Ko Dong-hwan

To see how much climate change is shaking the world, one need only look at the record high temperatures of the past year across the globe to realize how much mercury can soar in any given location.

Ten cities from different countries experienced their highest temperatures in 2021, breaking national records. According to the British daily The Guardian, the countries were Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Canada, the United States, Morocco, Turkey, Taiwan, Italy, Tunisia and Dominica.

The world’s highest record temperature was in Furnace Creek in Death Valley, Calif., At 54.4 degrees Celsius on July 9, the highest temperature reliably recorded on Earth, according to the daily. The figure narrowly broke the region’s record temperature from 2020 of 0.56 degrees Celsius.

Swiehan in the United Arab Emirates broke his national record on June 6 with 51.8 degrees Celsius. The same goes for Joba in Oman on June 16 (51.6C), and Kairouan in Tunisia on August 11 (50.3C). Lytton, in the Canadian province of British Columbia, set a new national record on June 29 with 49.6 degrees Celsius, while Sidi Slimane in Morocco (49.6 ° C), Cizre in Turkey (49.1 ° C) C) and Syracuse in Italy (48.8 ° C) all recorded record temperatures in July. Taimali in Taiwan (40.6C) and Canefield in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica (35.8C) saw their national records rewritten in August.

These data were compiled by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who has studied more than 400 weather stations around the world. Among all the unusually high temperatures in different cities and regions of the world, Herrera chose Furnace Creek as “the mother of all heat waves”. He told the Guardian that the magnitude of this event had “surpassed anything I have seen after a lifetime of researching extreme events in all of the climate history of the modern world for the past two centuries.”

Melting Arctic ice caps driven by global warming caused more frequent thunders in the region in 2021. Gettyimagesbank

Climatologists and meteorologists have said that 2021 has seen many unusual events that have crossed the border to the extreme. China’s central Henan Province was hit by flooding in July, which concentrated a year of rainfall in just three days. The provincial capital of Zhengzhou recorded 201.9 millimeters of rain in an hour on July 20, the highest figure since state measures began in the country in 1951. Texas in the United States has experienced a deep frost in February, killing nearly 200 people and causing millions of blackouts. . Kenya has experienced two consecutive unsuccessful rainy seasons, forcing the government to organize food aid for the first time in many years.

In the Arctic, there were 7,278 thunder episodes in 2021, according to the annual thunder report from Finnish supplier of environmental and industrial measurement products and services Vaisala. The figure is almost double the annual average from 2012 to 2020. Arctic thunder offers partial insight into worsening climate change; it is caused by the melting of the ice caps, which then increases atmospheric humidity and destabilizes atmospheric conditions, making thunder more likely.

The University of California, Berkeley’s 2014 report in the journal Science, said that every degree Celsius increase in temperature is likely to multiply the incidence of thunder by 12 times. Approximately 194 million thunder reports were recorded in the United States in 2021, which exceeded that of 2020 by 24 million.