Cit­i­zens anx­ious for re­lief from the scorch­ing tem­per­a­tures of the past few days should pay some at­ten­tion to the lat­est warn­ings from cli­mate sci­en­tists.

As un­prece­dent­ed as this hot spell has been in this the dri­est rainy sea­son in re­cent mem­o­ry, all of the in­di­ca­tors sug­gest that this will be­come the norm as the full ef­fects of cli­mate change are be­gin­ning to be ex­pe­ri­enced across the globe.

The ex­treme heat en­gulf­ing the plan­et, al­though far from nor­mal, is an ear­ly warn­ing sign of what lies ahead.

These high­er tem­per­a­tures are caused by emis­sions of heat-trap­ping gas­es, main­ly from the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els, com­bined with the re­turn of El Niño, un­usu­al­ly warm ocean tem­per­a­tures in the Equa­to­r­i­al Pa­cif­ic that af­fect weath­er around the world.

Day­time tem­per­a­tures had been high long be­fore the T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice is­sued the hot spell alert last Fri­day, and there had been oth­er wor­ry­ing signs, in­clud­ing high sea sur­face tem­per­a­tures, which have been ac­cel­er­at­ing coral bleach­ing and caus­ing oth­er neg­a­tive en­vi­ron­men­tal ef­fects to coral reefs around our twin is­lands.

All of these are calls to ac­tion for the so­ci­ety, from or­di­nary cit­i­zens to high-lev­el de­ci­sion-mak­ers.

This year, an ur­gent cli­mate alarm has been sound­ed. Weath­er pat­terns are chang­ing in ways not yet ful­ly un­der­stood by the sci­en­tists and ac­tion must be tak­en to mit­i­gate, where pos­si­ble, and make ur­gent ad­just­ments to deal with the ef­fects al­ready be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced.

Un­der­scor­ing the ur­gency of the sit­u­a­tion is the lat­est in­for­ma­tion from NASA’s God­dard In­sti­tute of Space Stud­ies (GISS) in New York. June, Ju­ly and Au­gust this year were the hottest on earth since glob­al records be­gan in 1880—0.23 de­grees Cel­sius warmer than any oth­er on record, and 1.2 de­grees Cel­sius warmer than be­tween 1951 and 1980.

Sci­en­tists ex­pect the record-break­ing heat waves that swept across the plan­et this year to be­come the norm by 2035, even if all coun­tries re­duce their green­house gas emis­sions by as much as they pledged.

There are se­ri­ous im­pli­ca­tions for T&T. Con­sid­er the cur­rent hot spell as the dress re­hearsal — the worst is yet to come.

At the cer­e­mo­ni­al open­ing of the law term at the In­dus­tri­al Court on Tues­day, pres­i­dent Deb­o­rah Thomas-Fe­lix spoke about the in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions con­se­quences from the cur­rent hot spell.

Work­places are among sev­er­al sec­tors that must be­gin cater­ing for ex­tremes of tem­per­a­ture and er­rat­ic weath­er pat­terns that will soon be fre­quent oc­cur­rences. Dai­ly ac­tiv­i­ties will have to be sched­uled to avoid the worst of the heat, as well as the heav­ier tor­ren­tial rains and all the oth­er cli­mate haz­ards that will take a par­tic­u­lar toll on small is­land de­vel­op­ing states like ours.

There might need to be changes to school hours and the way sport­ing and so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties are or­gan­ised, in­clud­ing ad­just­ments for Car­ni­val and oth­er ma­jor cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ties, where pa­rades and oth­er out­door events will in­volve ad­di­tion­al risks in fu­ture hot spells.

There will, there­fore, be ad­di­tion­al pres­sure on al­ready be­low par pub­lic util­i­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly T&TEC and WASA, and high­er de­mand on first re­spon­ders.

Mea­sures to build cli­mate re­silience should be high on the Gov­ern­ment’s agen­da. There is no way to avoid the in­evitable. Var­i­ous au­thor­i­ties must be­gin, soon­er rather than lat­er, to in­tro­duce long-term changes to cope with the con­se­quences of glob­al warm­ing.