Tourists on Huntington Beach, California on October 11 Photo: VCG

From Death Valley to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent to sub-Saharan Africa, global warming has already made daily life unbearable for millions of people.

And if nothing is done to slow climate change, the record temperatures and deadly heat waves it brings will only get worse, experts warn.

"Climate [change] is sort of steroids for the weather. It's loading the dice to make these sort of extreme events be more common," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute in California, the US.

The hottest place in the world is officially Death Valley, California. There too, temperatures are rising. 

"If you look at the average temperature in Death Valley for a summer month... it has gotten much warmer in the last 20 years than it was before," said Abby Wines, spokesperson for the Death Valley National Park.

In 2021's summer, for the second year, the area registered an astonishing 54.4 C. If confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization, it would be the hottest ever recorded with modern instruments.

According to the US climate agency NOAA, July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. 

"We are affected a lot by this unbearable heat, and we poor are hit the hardest," said Kuldeep Kaur, a resident of Sri Ganganagar in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, bordering Pakistan. 

Half a world away in western Canada, where a so-called "heat dome" pushed temperatures above 40 C in 2021's summer, north Vancouver resident Rosa lamented: "It's just unbearable. It's impossible to be out."

Rising temperatures are a driving force behind more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, storms, and even floods. And the rising number of heat waves is devastating for farming and agriculture and potentially fatal for humans.

"A flood is a few deaths, maybe a few dozen. We're talking about thousands of deaths every time we have a very large extreme heat wave. And we know that these heat waves are multiplying," said climatologist Robert Vautard, head of France's Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute.

If the world warms by 2 C, a quarter of the world's population could face severe heat waves at least once every five years, according to a draft UN report obtained by AFP ahead of the COP26 climate summit opening in Glasgow, Scotland, on Sunday.

AFP