Shanghai breaks temperature record for May

Unprecedented heat. Shanghai recorded the hottest May in 100 years on Monday, the eastern city’s meteorological department said.

“At 1:09 p.m. the temperature at Xujiahui Station reached 36.1°C, breaking a 100-year-old record for the highest temperature for a month of May,” said the official account of the meteorological service on the social network. Chinese Weibo.

A few hours later, the meteorological station in central Shanghai reached 36.7°C, according to the same source. It has thus beaten by one degree the previous record which had been recorded four times, in 1876, 1903, 1915 and 2018.

Residents of China’s largest city suffered from the heat in the early afternoon, with some apps showing a “felt” temperature of over 40°C.

“I went out at noon to pick up a delivery and had a headache on the way home,” a post from Shanghai read on Weibo. “I almost had a heat stroke, it’s really hot enough to explode,” lamented another.

Climate change has made extreme heat waves at least 30 times more likely in this country, according to a study by 22 international climatologists from the “World Weather Attribution” initiative published in mid-May.

In mid-May, the UN warned that the period 2023-2027 will almost certainly be the hottest on record on Earth, under the combined effect of greenhouse gases and the El Nino weather phenomenon, which are pushing up the temperatures.

Global temperatures are expected to soon exceed the most ambitious goal of the Paris climate agreements, the World Meteorological Organization has warned.

It estimates a 66% chance that the average annual global surface temperature will exceed pre-industrial levels by 1.5°C for at least one of the next five years.

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