A blistering heat spreads across India, taking the temperature to 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the small city of Phalodi, part of a heavily populated area of India. Oddly, in the age of global warming, the record hottest day in the United States is over 100 years old. The thermometer reached 134 degrees at Furnace Creek, Calif., on July 10, 1913.
Nearby Death Valley shows that temperatures in the United States can be high consistently. In the summer of 2001, in the same place, the temperature was at or over 100 degrees for 154 days in a row.
A major difference between the India and California temperatures is the in the world’s second most populous nation, the figure has risen and still moves higher across a broad part of the country. The high temperature in Death Valley has held at the same level for decades. However, Death Valley is near no large population center and is relatively small in terms of geographic size. As a matter of fact, the area is almost deserted, and it always has been.
Globally, researchers say, temperatures will move relentlessly higher across the world:
April 2016 marked the twelfth consecutive month that the monthly temperature record was broken and the seventeenth consecutive month (since December 2014) that the monthly global temperature ranked among the three warmest for its respective month in the NOAA database. Both global ocean and global land temperatures were the warmest on record for any April.
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The 134 degrees in Death Valley, more than a century ago, was part of records set in a remote area. For the rest of the world, record temperatures will rise — hitting large population centers harshly.
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