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hatrack

(59,442 posts)
Wed Jun 22, 2022, 08:12 AM Jun 2022

Jacobabad, Pakistan At Edge Of Survivability; 51 Straight Days @ 100F+ Through March; 123.8F In June

Sajjad Ali lies semi-conscious in the heatstroke center at Civil Hospital here, an intravenous line in his wrist delivering fluids to his dehydrated body. Ali, 15, operates a tractor in the fields on the outskirts of Jacobabad—one of the hottest cities on Earth—and was carried to the hospital after his temperature remained at 102 degrees Fahrenheit for a week. On the opposite side of the ward, kept at a cool 78 degrees by a whirring air conditioner, Muhammad Musa occupies another bed, its cobalt blue frame contrasting starkly with his face, which is drained of color. A farm worker in Jacobabad’s rice fields, Musa, 65, arrived with a 102 degree temperature, body aches and severe dehydration.

Jacobabad, a landlocked city in Pakistan’s Sindh Province nearly 340 miles north of Karachi, is pushing the limits of human livability on a warming planet. Since the beginning of March, an unprecedented heat wave has gripped India and Pakistan, affecting more than a billion people on the subcontinent. And Jacobabad has been among the cities worst hit, experiencing temperatures in excess of 100 degrees for 51 straight days. Last month, the temperature here reached 123.8 degrees and before that, reached 122 degrees on three separate occasions.

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Rising temperatures and humidity, coupled with electricity shortages, water stress and the absence of heat adaptation measures, have exceeded thresholds that experts say the human body can stand, with more intense summers arriving earlier in the year, and some experts say that going forward, those extreme conditions could last for 10 months each year. The 2022 heat wave in South Asia is already estimated to have caused more than 90 deaths in India and Pakistan, and to have resulted in glacial melts in northern Pakistan and reduced wheat crop yields in India. According to a recent report published by the World Weather Attribution Initiative, the onset of the heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change.

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In 2015, a then-unprecedented heat wave resulted in more than 1,500 deaths in Karachi. Since then the city has had a heat wave management plan in place that calls for alert systems, setting up of cooling infrastructure and addressing urban heat islands in densely populated areas across the city. But Jacobabad, despite the history of extreme heat, has no such plan. Here, residents come together in small ways to help each other survive the city’s unbearable heat. On Friday afternoons every week, groups of young men set up stations on the side of the road, outside mosques and near the national highway, handing out bright pink, green and orange plastic glasses of cold drinking water to passersby.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20062022/jacobabad-pakistan-heat-health/

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