Shanghai records hottest May day in 100 years

Shanghai recorded its hottest day in a century on Monday, the east China city’s meteorological department said.

At 1:09 pm (0509 GMT), the temperature measured at the Xujiahui subway station reached 36.1 °C, “breaking the more than a century-old record for the highest temperature for a single month of May”, according to the meteorological official. The service announced the account, on the Chinese social network Weibo.

According to the meteorological service of China’s largest city, the mercury climbed to 36.7 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, one degree below the record temperature of 35.7 degrees Celsius recorded four times in 1876, 1903, 1915 and 2018.

In Shanghai, some applications displayed “felt” temperatures of over 40 °C.

A local resident complained on the Chinese messaging site Weibo, “I went out to take delivery this afternoon and got a headache on the way home.”

– “heat stroke” –

“I almost got heat stroke, it’s really hot enough to explode”, lamented another man named Wu, who assures AFP: “I think summers get hotter and hotter every year. are going”. “I turn on the air conditioning earlier than ever,” he says.

Other Asian countries have already experienced deadly heat waves this year.

In mid-April, the mercury soared to 44 °C in parts of India, killing at least 11 people near Bombay in a single day. Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka recorded its hottest day in six decades.

According to the WWA, the western Thai province of Tak recorded a record high of 45.4 degrees Celsius and Laos’s Sanabuli province recorded 42.9 degrees Celsius, the highest ever recorded for the country.

In mid-May, the United Nations warned that the 2023-2027 period would almost certainly be the hottest ever recorded on Earth under the combined effects of greenhouse gases and the El Niño weather phenomenon.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned that global temperatures are expected to soon exceed the most ambitious target of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to keep the global average temperature rise from 1850 to 1900 well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and, if possible, 1.5°C above those same levels.

The WMO estimates that there is a 66% chance that the global mean annual surface temperature will be 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the next five years.