SINGAPORE — Extreme temperatures throughout Asia last month were made worse — and more likely — as a result of human-driven climate change, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.

Billions of people across the continent were affected by record-breaking temperatures during April, with schools forced to shut down, crops damaged and hundreds of people killed by heat-related illnesses, climate experts from the World Weather Attribution group said in a report.

Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam experienced their hottest April days on record, while temperatures in India reached as high as 46° Celsius (114.8° Fahrenheit), they said.

“From Gaza to Delhi to Manila, people suffered and died when April temperatures soared in Asia,” said Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change and the Environment, one of the report’s authors.

“Heatwaves have always happened. But the additional heat, driven by emissions from oil, gas and coal, is resulting in death for many people.”

In the Philippines, one of the worst-hit countries, authorities issued health warnings, shut down schools and rationed electricity supplies as soaring temperatures threatened the country’s power grid.

The 15-day heatwave, which started in the middle of the month, would have been “virtually impossible, even under El Niño conditions” without the impact of man-made global warming, the report said.

Parts of the Middle East saw record-breaking temperatures over April 24-26, with Tel Aviv hitting 40.7°C. Extreme temperatures in western Asia were made five times more likely by climate change, the report estimated.

“The heat that we saw is really compounding an already dire crisis at the moment in Gaza,” Carolina Pereira Marghidan of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre said at a briefing on Tuesday.

Temperatures around India’s Kolkata in late April reached 46°C, 10C higher than the seasonal average, with climate change making extreme temperatures throughout South Asia around 45 times more likely, the report added.

Asian governments need to take action to adapt to soaring temperatures and minimize health risks, particularly in vulnerable sections of the population, said Ms. Marghidan.

“Considering that rate at which extreme heat is rising… we see a big need for heat action plans to be scaled up and current plans to be improved across Asia,” she said. — Reuters

LONDON — The intense northern hemisphere summer heat that drove wildfires across the Mediterranean, buckled roads in Texas and strained power grids in China last year made it not just the warmest summer on record — but the warmest in some 2,000 years, new research suggests.

The stark finding comes from one of two new studies released on Tuesday, as both global temperatures and climate-warming emissions continue to climb.

Scientists had quickly declared last year’s June to August period as the warmest since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

New work published in the journal Nature suggests the 2023 heat eclipsed temperatures over a far longer timeline — a finding established by looking at meteorological records dating to the mid-1800s and temperature data based on the analysis of tree rings across nine northern sites.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said study co-author Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. 

Last year’s summer season temperatures on lands between 30 and 90 degrees north latitude reached 2.07° Celsius (3.73° Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, the study said.

Based on tree ring data, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2°C (4°F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.

The finding was not entirely a surprise. By January, scientists with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service were saying the year of 2023 was “very likely” to have been the warmest in some 100,000 years.

However, proving such a long record is unlikely, Esper said. He and two other European scientists argued in a paper last year that year-by-year comparisons could not be established over such a vast time scale with current scientific methods, including gleaning temperature data from sources such as marine sediments or peat bogs.

“We don’t have such data,” Esper said. “That was an overstatement.”

Last year’s intense summer heat was amplified by the El Niño climate pattern, which typically coincides with warmer global temperatures, leading to “longer and more severe heatwaves, and extended periods of drought,” Esper said.

Heatwaves are already taking a toll on people’s health, with more than 150,000 deaths in 43 countries linked to heatwaves for each year between 1990 and 2019, according to the details of a second study published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.

That would account for about 1% of global deaths — roughly the same toll taken by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half of those heatwave-related excess deaths occurred in populous Asia.

When the data are adjusted for population size, Europe had the highest per capita toll with an average of 655 heat-related deaths each year per 10 million residents. Within the region, Greece, Malta, and Italy registered the highest excess deaths.

Extreme heat can trigger heart problems and breathing difficulty or cause heat stroke. — Reuters

LOS ANGELES — Everything changed for Paul Tran and his wife Lynda when the skincare brand they co-founded went viral on TikTok.

The Atlanta couple created @loveandpebble, and when they shared their Beauty Pops ice face masks on TikTok in 2021, it took their small business to another level.

“We sold out all of our inventory,” Paul Tran said, noting that after going viral, the brand was featured on The Today Show, Shark Tank and in mainstream publications.

Now the Trans are worried about a bill passed by the US Senate and signed into law by US President Joseph R. Biden in late April that bans TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the short video app over the next year. Lawmakers are concerned that China could access data on Americans or spy on them with the app.

A group of TikTok creators sued the US in federal court on Tuesday seeking to block the law and keep the app used by 170 million Americans.

“TikTok has provided a way to the American Dream and this bill is killing that American Dream, my American Dream,” Tran said.

While they tried other apps for their brand, including Instagram and Facebook, it wasn’t until posting on TikTok that the couple found their audience. And they’re not alone.

Many small businesses benefiting from the app’s cultural dominance feel betrayed, as American-owned platforms like Meta, Alphabet and Snap have failed to give them the same prospects of going viral, which leads to more product sales, partnerships and sponsors.

“It’s called #TikTokmademebuyit for a reason,” eMarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said.

“(TikTok) has become the center of the Internet for many young people in particular, and it’s where they go to discover new trends, new products. Brands, creators, and all of that creates this environment of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and inspiration really leads to purchase on those platforms, and that really isn’t replicated anywhere else,” she added.

TikTok’s algorithm not only made way for the Tran’s small business to have high audience viewership and engagement, the 2023 launch of TikTok Shop, which enables creators to sell goods directly within the app, “exploded our business,” Paul Tran said.

COMMUNITIES ‘BUILT WITHIN TIKTOK’
Historically, social media platforms like Instagram were more likely to recommend content based on follower engagement. That meant larger accounts could reach the most people, Jasmine Enberg explained, making it harder for small businesses to get their foot in the door.

Small business owner Summer Lucille, known as @juicybodygoddess, toiled for nearly a decade on Instagram and other apps before her plus-size clothing company gained traction on TikTok.

A month after joining TikTok in 2021, she attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, including customers at her physical boutique location in Charlotte, North Carolina, and eventually a television appearance on CBS Mornings.

“I’ve been on other platforms for almost a decade, and they never gave me this opportunity,” Ms. Lucille said. “This is an app that’s not even American. The American apps didn’t give me that same opportunity.”

Felicia Jackson, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, mom, who founded @CPRWrap, a company that sells packaged kits to save lives in the event of a cardiac emergency, said TikTok rescued her business when her presence on other apps including Facebook, X and Pinterest failed to generate sales.

“(TikTok viewers) engage with my content, and they don’t just buy my product. They take the product, buy it, and they take it to other people that they know who take it to their jobs. So, I love the communities that are built within TikTok. No other platform can touch it,” she said.

Rivals have taken notice. Meta’s recent updates to Instagram acknowledge the ways it could improve the experience and performance for small creators.

“Historically because of how we’ve ranked content, creators with large followings and aggregators of reposted content have gotten more reach in recommendations than smaller, original content creators,” according to an Instagram blog post on April 30.

“We think it’s important to correct this to give all creators a more equal chance of breaking through to new audiences.” — Reuters