Extreme heat across much of India and neighbouring Pakistan in March and April exposed more than a billion people to scorching temperatures well above 40 Celsius.
"This heatwave is likely to kill thousands," tweeted Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate science research non-profit.
But"cascading impacts" on agricultural output, water, energy supplies and other sectors are already apparent, World Meteorological Organization chief Petteri Taalas said this week.Power blackouts last week as electricity demand hit record levels served as a warning of what might happen if temperatures were to climb even higher.
Scientists at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute led by Friederike Otto, a pioneer in the field of attribution science, are crunching the numbers. In India and Pakistan,"more intense heat waves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a recent landmark report.
By that measure, the worst scorcher on record over the last six decades was in Southeast Asia in 1998.
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