Record heat:Italy, Europe and the USA are gasping.The scientists:"It's a climate crisis."Greta Thunberg:“Is this the signal you're looking for?”

As temperatures rise, experts and activists continue to press institutions for a drastic change of pace

The heat doesn't let up in Italy.While many cities are already gasping, meteorologists warn that the heat wave brought to our country by the African anticyclone Charon it has not yet reached its peak.It should arrive between 17 and 19 July, when it could reach 43 degrees in Rome, 36 in Milan.Temperatures between 40 and 45 degrees should also be recorded in Tuscany, Sicily, and much of the South, with only the sea mitigating the highs in some locations.Up to 48 degrees expected in Sardinia.What worries experts greatly, however, is not only the daytime peaks, but also the nighttime lows.In Palermo, for several consecutive days, the temperature will never drop below 28 degrees, and even in the less urbanized flat areas of the country there will be numerous tropical nights in a row, with the thermometer rarely dropping below 21 or 22 degrees.These are figures that exceed the seasonal averages of values ​​ranging from 3 to 12 degrees.All this with global warming currently stuck at just 1.2 degrees compared to the pre-industrial period.

And if the scorching temperatures weren't enough to give an idea of ​​the extent of the phenomenon, the first pages of BBC, Guardian And CNN:on all three newspapers there is a photo of an Italian city, Turin for the Guardian, Rome for BBC And CNN, where tourists and locals suffer oppressed by the heat.While deniers on social media continue to repeat that "it's normal to be hot in summer", experts and activists highlight how this year's temperature trends are quickly leaving behind even those of the last five, so far the hottest in history.The combination of human-generated global warming and ocean warming brought about by Niño they brought the world into what the UN defined uncharted territory.The same message launched by Greta Thunberg in his latest Tweet.«We are breaking every record, last week saw the hottest days ever recorded.This is an emergency", writes the Swedish activist as he publishes a photo of himself holding the sign:“Is this the signal you're looking for?”

The USA and the rest of the world

Europe warms up due to the African anticyclone, which takes the place of an increasingly weak Azores anticyclone, the air mass that until the 1980s it brought mild air to Italy and the other Mediterranean countries.But it is not just the Old Continent that is suffering.In these same hours, a third of Americans are in an area for which a weather alert has been issued.In Phoenix, reports the BBC, the temperature exceeded 43 degrees for the sixteenth consecutive day, in mild Miami it reached 34, almost the same temperature reached by the tropical seas of the Keys (36C) - the islands that stretch from the southern tip of the state into the Gulf of Mexico – where the coral reef is disappearing.Las Vegas broke its own heat record with a temperature of 47 degrees, while Austin simmers at 41.In recent weeks, temperatures around 50 degrees have also fallen on the Indian subcontinent, in what many experts say is preparing to be the hottest summer ever.

Deaths from the heat

While those who can turn on the air conditioning, the Acropolis of Athens closes its doors in the central hours of the day to prevent someone from becoming ill or even losing their life.In Italy there have already been two deaths collapsed on the ground, a worker in Lodi and a homeless man in Brescia.But the died from the heat there are more and more of them, and they are concentrated in the Mediterranean regions and in the population groups that do not have access to cooled rooms.Last year in Europe 61 thousand people died due to the heat, 18 thousand of these in Italy.Women suffered particularly, with 35,406 premature deaths, while men who lost their lives were 21,667.The majority of deaths occurred among the elderly with “only” 4,822 premature deaths among those under 65.The numbers confirm once again that Europe is warming faster than the rest of the planet:all the major EU countries recorded warming values ​​above 2 degrees.