96% of Humanity has Felt the Impact of Global Warming

Whether they realize it or not, some 7.6 billion people - 96% of humanity - have felt the impact of global warming on temperatures in the past 12 months, researchers say.

But some regions have felt it much more strongly and more often than others, according to a report by Climate Central, a climate science think tank.

People in tropical regions and on small islands surrounded by heat-absorbing oceans have been disproportionately affected by human-induced temperature increases to which they have contributed little.

Among the 1,021 cities analyzed between September 2021 and October 2022, the South Pacific capitals of Samoa and Palau experienced the most distinct climate footprints, the researchers said in the report.

Temperature spikes in these locations were typically four to five times more likely than in a hypothetical world in which global warming never occurred.

Lagos, Mexico City and Singapore are among the most heat-affected major cities, with man-made heat increasing health risks for millions of people.

Climate Central researchers, led by Principal Scientist Ben Strauss, looked for a way to bridge the gap between global warming on a planetary scale — usually expressed as the average temperature of the Earth's surface compared to an earlier reference period — and people's everyday experience.

"Diagnosing climate footprints allows people to understand that their experiences are symptoms of climate change," Strauss told AFP. "This is a warning and shows that we need to adapt."

Using seven decades of high-resolution daily temperature data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and two dozen climate models, Strauss and his team created a tool -- the Climate...