Few equate different weather patterns with climate change

(Visiting family on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast brought me face-to-face with a changing weather pattern; a change that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the locals, but sadly few equate the differences they are seeing with climate change, with most simply describing the new weather pattern as simply “unseasonable”. On Saturday, July 23, temperatures at Alexandra Headland edged past 30 degrees and many people, including a local real estate agent who had lived in the area all his life, saying “winter is over” – “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

Meanwhile, parts of the Middle-East have experienced record temperatures of 54 degrees – considering that, it is worth noting that the health experts say the human body begins to breakdown at 50 degrees – Robert McLean.)

Scorching days in America's Midwest.

Extreme heat waves like the current string of scorching days in the Midwest have become more frequent worldwide in the last 60 years, and climate scientists expect that human-caused global warming will exacerbate the dangerous trend in coming decades. It comes with potentially life-threatening consequences for millions of people.

Research has shown that overall mortality increases by 4 percent during heat waves compared to normal days in the U.S. A study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in 2011 suggested that rising summer temperatures could kill up to 2,200 more people per year in Chicago alone during the last two decades of the 21st century.

"The climate is changing faster than we've ever seen during the history of human civilization on this planet, and climate change is putting heat waves on steroids," Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, said during a news conference on Thursday. "Heat waves are getting more frequent and stronger."

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Sizzling Midwest Feels a Preview of a Hotter Future Climate.”