"The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.

With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.

The historic heat wave that besieged Mali and other parts of West Africa this month — which scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without human-caused climate change — is just the latest manifestation of a sudden and worrying surge in global temperatures. Fueled by decades of uncontrolled fossil fuel burning and an El Niño climate pattern that emerged last June, the planet this year breached a feared warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Nearly 19,000 weather stations have notched record high temperatures since January 1. Each of the last ten months has been the hottest of its kind."

"The heat wave analysis was just the latest report from World Weather Attribution — a global network of researchers who study the influence of climate change on extreme events — to find that previously unthinkable events are becoming commonplace as the world continues to warm. An October heat wave in Madagascar, where record-breaking heat persisted for 10 unbearable days, “would not have occurred” without human-induced warming, the group said. The heavy rainfall in Libya that contributed to a catastrophic dam failure, killing thousands of people, was made 50 times more likely because of climate change.

The West African heat wave might have been unprecedented today, Barnes said. But if the world warms to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — something that could happen by the middle of the century without rapid action to tackle climate change — a heat wave of that magnitude would be expected to occur every 10 years.

“If we keep putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we’re just going to keep warming … and this is going to continue to get worse,” Barnes said. “The sad truth is this is not the new normal. This is on the way to the unknown.”"