Life and death in the heat. What it feels like when Earth's temperatures soar to record highs

BENI MELLAL, Morocco — In the unrelenting heat of Morocco’s Middle Atlas, people were sleeping on rooftops. “We don't have money and we don't have a choice,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from Kasba Tadla, an even warmer city that some experts say is among the hottest on Earth. “I’ve been analyzing these numbers from the cool of my office, but the heat has started to affect me as well, causing sleepless nights due to warmer urban temperatures,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, Maharashtra, which normally has a relatively mild climate. “Last month one of my colleagues’ mother died from heat stroke in north India.” Philip Mote, a climate scientist and dean of the graduate school at Oregon State University, had moved in junior high to California's Central Valley and its triple digit summer heat. “And that's why I moved to the Northwest.” For decades, Mote worked on climate issues from the comfort of Oregon, where people feared that with global warming the Northwest "would be the last nice place to live in the U.S. and everybody would move here and we'd have overpopulation.” But the region was hit by nasty fires in 2020 and a deadly heat wave in 2021, causing some people to flee what was supposed to be a climate haven.