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The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It\u2019s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth\u2019s warming builds.<\/p>\n
Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 110-degree Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) reading in the Arizona desert on Thursday that smashed the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, sites in Arizona and southern California had preliminary readings of 109 F (about 43 C), which would be the hottest March day on record for the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is what climate change looks like in real time: extremes pushing beyond the bounds we once thought possible,\u201d said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. \u201cWhat used to be unprecedented events are now recurring features of a warming world.\u201d<\/p>\n
March\u2019s heat would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, according to a report Friday by World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists who study the causes of extreme weather events.<\/p>\n
More than a dozen scientists, meteorologists and disaster experts queried by The Associated Press put the March heat wave in a kind of ultra-extreme classification with such events as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2022 Pakistan floods and killer hurricanes Helene, Harvey and Sandy.<\/p>\n
The area of the U.S. being hit by extreme weather in the past five years has doubled from 20 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s Climate Extremes Index, which includes various types of wild weather, such as heat and cold waves, downpours and drought.<\/p>\n
The United States is breaking 77% more hot weather records now than in the 1970s and 19% more than the 2010s, according to an AP analysis of NOAA records. In the United States, the number and average cost of inflation-adjusted billion-dollar weather disasters in the last couple years is twice as high as just 10 years ago and nearly four times higher than 30 years ago, according to records kept by NOAA and Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and communicators who research and report on climate change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really hard to even keep up with how extreme our extremes are becoming,\u201d said Climate Central Chief Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky. \u201cIt\u2019s changing our risk, it\u2019s change our relationship with weather, it\u2019s putting more people in risky situations and at times we\u2019re not used to. So yes, we are pushing extremes to new levels across all different types of weather.\u201d<\/p>\n
For government officials who have to deal with disaster it\u2019s been a huge problem.<\/p>\n
Craig Fugate, who directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2017, said he saw extremes increasing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were operating outside the historical playbook more and more. Flood maps, surge models, heat records \u2014 events kept showing up outside the envelope we built systems around. That\u2019s just what we saw,\u201d Fugate said via email.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe built communities on about 100 years of past weather and assumed that was a good guide going forward. That assumption is starting to break. And the clearest signal isn\u2019t the science debate. It\u2019s insurers walking away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Climate scientists at World Weather Attribution did a flash analysis \u2014 which is not peer-reviewed yet \u2014 of whether climate change was a factor in this Southwest heat wave. They compared this week\u2019s expected temperatures to what\u2019s been observed in the area in March since 1900 and computer models of a world with climate change. They found that \u201cevents as warm as in March 2026 would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n
That warming, from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, added between 4.7 degrees to 7.2 degrees F (2.6 to 4 degrees C) to the temperatures being felt, the report found.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we can very confidently say is that human-caused warming has increased the temperatures that we\u2019re seeing as a result of this heat dome, and it\u2019s going to be pushing those temperatures from what would have been very uncomfortable into potentially dangerous,\u201d said report co-author Clair Barnes, an Imperial College of London attribution scientist.<\/p>\n
The Southwest heat wave is solidly in the category of \u201cgiant events,\u201d with temperatures up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (16.7 degrees Celsius) above normal, said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field.<\/p>\n
He listed five others in the last six years: a 2020 Siberia heat wave, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave that had British Columbia warmer than Death Valley, the summer of 2022 in North America, China and Europe, a 2023 western Mediterranean heat wave and a 2023 South Asian heat wave with high humidity.<\/p>\n
And that doesn\u2019t include the East Antarctica heat wave of 2022 when temperatures were 81 degrees (45 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal. That\u2019s the biggest anomaly recorded, said weather historian Chris Burt, author of the book \u201cExtreme Weather.\u201d<\/p>\n
Worsening wild weather influenced by climate change isn\u2019t just superhot days, but includes deadly hurricanes, droughts and downpours, scientists told AP.<\/p>\n
Devastating floods hit West Africa in 2022 and again in 2024. Iran is in the midst of a six-year drought. And the deadly Typhoon Haiyan hitting the Philippines in 2013 shocked the world.<\/p>\n
Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 flooded New York City and neighbors, had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. It spawned 12-foot seas over 1.4 million square miles, about half the size of the U.S., with energy equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters.<\/p>\n
And don\u2019t forget wildfires that are worsened by heat and drought, so recent extremes should include 2025\u2019s Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which were the costliest weather disaster in the United States last year, said Climate Central meteorologist and economist Adam Smith.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is due to climate change, that we see more extreme events, and more intense ones and have so many records being broken,\u201d said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College of London climate scientist who coordinates World Weather Attribution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.<\/p>\n