By Claire Parker, Photo: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, August 28, 2022
The world will remember the summer of 2022 in the Northern Hemisphere as a season of brutal heat that saw riversrun dry, wildfires rage and farmers struggle to save their crops.
Temperatures broke records in Britain, Spain and Portugal, and in East Asia.Thousands of people in Europe have died from the heat, and heat-fueled fires have burned more than a million acres of land across the continent. In the United States, temperatures soared as high as 113 degrees in Texas in July. Drought in Mexico has driven water rationing and theft. In China, experiencing its worst heat wave in six decades, authorities shut factories.
Politicians and policymakers are worried about what increasingly extreme weather will mean for the health of communities. To face the problem, some cities have appointed “heat officers” or assigned similar officials to help adapt to the new reality.
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