Extreme heat waves that previously only struck once every 50 years are now expected to happen once per decade because of global warming, while downpours and droughts have also become more frequent, a UN climate science report said on Monday.

The summer of 2020 brought fear of Covid-19, social distancing – and heat-related health problems that affects tens of millions of Americans. During those months, more than a quarter of the US population suffered from the effects of extreme heat, according to a study released this week. People reported health symptoms like nausea and cramps, as well as a decreased ability to focus, and the effects hit low-income households the hardest.

As the southern European nation battles hundreds of wildfires, Prime Minister Mitsotakis has warned that the country is facing its worst heat wave for 30 years. Extreme weather in 1987 claimed more than 1,500 lives.

From record rainfall inundating cities around the world to wildfires scorching an unprecedented area to deadly heat waves that have come with unrelenting regularity this summer, extreme weather linked to climate change is unfolding with frightening clarity.

A combination of intense heat and drought conditions is causing wildfires in Western Canada to generate their own weather systems, experts say.

A combination of intense heat and drought conditions is causing wildfires in Western Canada to generate their own weather systems, experts say.

More than a billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast may have died last week as a result of the record-breaking temperatures in British Columbia. The unprecedented heat wave that hit western Canada and the north-western U.S. saw temperatures soar to record highs in late June and early July, killing as many as 500 people and triggering hundreds of wildfires, mainly in British Columbia.

‘Record-breaking heat’ is expected to affect much of the west and southwest US over the weekend, weather centre warns.

By Sunday, Cuban officials had evacuated 180,000 people as a precaution against the possibility of heavy flooding from a storm that already battered several Caribbean islands, killing at least three people.

The record heatwave in the Pacific north-west is forcing a reckoning on the climate crisis, as many living in the typically mild region consider what rising temperatures mean for the future. A “heat dome” without parallel trapped hot air over much of the states of Oregon and Washington in the United States, and southern British Columbia in Canada, in past days, shattering weather records in the usually temperate region.

Elsa strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season on Friday as it battered the eastern Caribbean, where officials closed schools, businesses and airports, and it appeared headed eventually for Florida or the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Joe Biden has joined scientists in blaming the climate crisis for a record-shattering heatwave in the western US and Canada that has been linked to dozens of deaths, buckled roads, blackouts and wildfires.

Scorching daytime temperatures aren't the only problem.

The ongoing climate crisis is not going to spare Siberia.

By midnight on Wednesday, two days into a scorching heat wave to hit the US west, the air in Las Vegas had barely cooled. Throughout the day and for the days that followed, temperatures in the desert city hovered close to historic highs, peaking at 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.6 Celsius), and setting a new record for such dangerously hot weather so early in the year. Meanwhile, dust and smoke from nearby wildfires hung in the stiff hot air, casting a brown haze over the valley.

It might be tempting to shrug at the scorching temperatures across large swaths of the West: This just in, it gets hot in the summer. But this record-setting heat wave's remarkable power, size and unusually early appearance is giving meteorologists and climate experts yet more cause for concern about the routinization of extreme weather in an era of climate change.

California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah face extreme heat, worsening drought and raising risk of wildfires

Santa Clara county, the home of Silicon Valley, issued mandatory water restrictions this week during a severe drought that has already reached historic levels. The move was championed by analysts and researchers who have pushed for more conservation efforts across California amid concerns that the state will fall deeper into a drought disaster through the hot, dry summer and autumn.

This March, as Mongolian herder Batsaikhan Enkhee tended to his sheep, the sky suddenly darkened. The wind picked up, filling his shoes and shirt with coarse, heavy sand. A massive sandstorm had engulfed the Mongolian grasslands. "It was dark like the night," Batsaikhanm, 53, told NPR. "I thought I would die."

Twenty-one people running a mountain ultramarathon have died in northwestern China after hail, freezing rain and gale-force winds hit the high-altitude race, state media reported Sunday.