This year, Fourth of July was meant to celebrate a historic milestone, marking the 250th anniversary of the United States officially becoming its own sovereign nation after it severed ties with Great Britian. Instead, it became a lesson in what heat now does to rich countries as well as poor ones. More than 185 million people, over half the US population, were placed under heat alerts as heat index values threatened to reach 46 degrees Celsius. Washington’s Independence Day parade was cancelled, Philadelphia called off its Salute to Independence Parade and Boston delayed access to its fireworks event. PJM, the largest US grid operator, serving 67 million people, ordered emergency conservation as generator outages, overloaded transmission lines and air-conditioning demand strained the system.
This is no longer only a story about temperature. Heat now tests the state itself. It tests whether electricity systems can survive demand spikes, whether hospitals can absorb heatstroke patients, whether cities have shade and water, whether workers can stop before their bodies do, and whether governments know who is most likely to die indoors, alone, poor or old. The image of American celebrations being interrupted by a heat dome should puncture the illusion that wealth alone can protect a country against any climate risk.
The North American heatwave is said to be driven by a persistent high-pressure system, and the same pattern now produces more dangerous heat because the planet has already warmed. Wet-bulb globe temperatures, which combine heat, humidity, sunlight and wind, reached record-shattering levels. In a climate 1.4 degrees Celsius cooler, such humid heat would have been virtually impossible.
El Niño adds another layer, and is expected to strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter. But this should not become an excuse to treat the crisis as a passing ocean cycle. El Niño is a natural climate pattern. It shifts rainfall and temperature around the world. What has changed is the baseline on which it operates. The old dice have been weighted by fossil-fuel warming, asphalt-heavy cities and power systems designed for yesterday’s summers.
The rest of the world is already reading from the same script. Europe has endured a deadly heatwave, with at least 3,700 excess deaths across France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Africa is running far above its historic July norm. South Asia has been exposed to pre-monsoon temperatures above 46 degrees in several places this year, with at least 37 heat-related deaths in India.
Pakistan does not need to look elsewhere for proof. Karachi’s 2015 heatwave killed more than 1,200 people, most of them failed by heat, power cuts, water shortages and late official response together. Jacobabad, Dadu, Multan, Lahore and Karachi now sit on the front line of a crisis that is as administrative as it is meteorological. Heat action plans cannot remain paper exercises. Pakistan has every right to demand climate finance, but adaptation cannot wait for foreign cheques. *