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BENI MELLAL, Morocco: In the unrelenting heat of Morocco's Middle Atlas, people slept on rooftops. Hanna Ouhbour also needed refuge, but she was outside a hospital waiting for her diabetic cousin, who was in a room without air conditioning.
On Wednesday, there were 21 heat-related deaths at Beni Mellal's main hospital as temperatures soared to 48.3 degrees (118.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region of 575,000 people, most without air conditioning.
“We have no money and no choice,” said Ouhbour, a 31-year-old unemployed woman from Kasba Tadla, an even hotter city that some experts say is among the hottest on Earth.
“Most of the deaths occurred among people suffering from chronic diseases and the elderly, as the high temperatures contributed to the deterioration of their health and led to their death,” said Kamal Elyansli, regional health director, in a statement.
This is life and death in the heat.
As a warming Earth sizzled through a week with four of the hottest days ever recorded, the world focused on cold, hard numbers showing the average daily temperature for the entire planet.
But Monday's reading of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit) doesn't show how oppressively sticky a particular spot has become amid the sun and humidity. The thermometer doesn't tell the story of the heat that just wouldn't go away at night so people could sleep.
Records are about statistics, keeping score. But people don't feel the data. They feel the heat.
“We don't need scientists to tell us what the temperature is outside because that's what our body tells us instantly,” said Humayun Saeed, a 35-year-old roadside fruit seller. in the cultural capital of Pakistan, Lahore.

Saeed had to go to the hospital twice in June due to heat stroke.
“The situation is much better now as it was not easy to work in May and June due to the heat wave, but I avoided the morning walk,” said Saeed. “I might pick it up again in August when the temperature drops more.”
The heat made Delia, a 38-year-old pregnant woman standing outside a train station in Bucharest, Romania, even more uncomfortable. The day was so hot that she was sleepy. With no air conditioning at night, she considered sleeping in her car, as a friend had done.
“We really noticed a very large increase in temperatures. I think it was the same for everyone. I felt it even more because I'm pregnant,” said Delia, who gave only her first name. “But I guess it wasn't just me. Really, everyone felt it.”
Self-described weather geek Karin Bumbaco was in her element, but then it got a little too much when Seattle had day after day of much warmer-than-normal heat.
“I like science. I like the weather. I have since I was little,” said Bumbaco, assistant state climatologist for Washington. “It's kind of fun to see the daily records broken. … But in recent years just living through it and actually feeling the heat has become more miserable every day.”
“Like this recent stretch we had. I wasn't sleeping very well. I don’t have AC at home,” Bumbaco said. “I was looking at the thermostat every morning was a little warmer than the previous warm morning. It was just heating up the house and I couldn't wait for it to be over.”
For climate scientists around the world, what had been an academic exercise on climate change has literally hit home.
“I analyzed these figures from the cool of my office, but the heat started to affect me too, causing sleepless nights due to warmer urban temperatures,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropicals. Weather in Pune, Maharashtra, which normally has a relatively mild climate.
“My kids come home from school at rush hour exhausted,” Koll said. “Last month, the mother of one of my colleagues died of heatstroke in northern India.”

Philip Mote, a climate specialist and dean of the graduate school at Oregon State University, had moved to California's Central Valley and its triple-digit summer heat in high school.
“I thought pretty quickly that I don't like a hot, dry climate,” Mote said. “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 will have overpopulation”.
But the region was hit by nasty fires in 2020 and a deadly heat wave in 2021, prompting some people to flee what was supposed to be a climate paradise.
In the second week of July, the temperature reached 104 degrees (40 Celsius). As a member of a masters rowing club, Mote trains on the water on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, but this week they decided to float down the river in tubes.
In Boise, Idaho, tubing in heat that fluctuated between 99 and 108 degrees Fahrenheit (37 to 42 degrees Celsius) for 17 days has become so popular that it requires a wait of 30 minutes to an hour for to enter the water, said John Tullius. , general manager for Boise River Raft & Tube.
“I think it's been record numbers for the last 10 days in a row,” Tullius said, adding that he worries about his outdoor workers, especially those who raise rafts at the end of the trip.
He erected a special shade structure for them, added more workers to lighten the load, and urged them to hydrate.
In Denver's City Park, the swan-shaped pedal boat rental shop isn't that busy because it's sweltering hot outside and those brave souls who venture out have to sit on fiberglass hot seats.
There is not much shade for the workers, “but we hide in our little hut,” said worker Dominic Prado, 23. “We also have a really powerful fan in there that I like to put my shirt over just to cool off. “