By Teino Evans and Leonardo Blair, Staff ReportersRECORD-BREAKING HIGH temperatures soaring above 34 degrees Celsius (just over 100° Farenheit) have been blamed for more than 3,000 heat-related deaths in France over the past two weeks and scores of forest fires across the rest of Europe.
But while many Jamaicans swear that this summer is one of the hottest in living memory, the Meteorological Service said that the severity of heat waves currently affecting sections of Europe, was not likely to affect Jamaica.
Ironically, the local Meteoro-logical Service says temperatures had already soared above 34 degrees Celsius in April and May this year. July and August are usually Jama-ica's warmest months with averages of 32.8 and 32.7 degrees, res-pectively.
The soaring summer temperatures have pushed up the sale of air conditioning units and fans at some stores across the island.
"This year is hotter and I can tell you that we have been selling more than 100 fans per month since the start of the summer," said one representative of the Megamart Wholesale Club in Portmore St. Catherine. "We have had to be ordering fans every week and other stores may be doing faster business too," he said.
INCREASED SALES
At the Slipe Road branch of the Courts store in Kingston, assistant branch manager, Melrose Harris says the sale of air conditioning units has increased by 40 per cent over previous years.
"Definitely a/c units have been selling more than any other year, the fans have been selling but the sale of the a/c units have gone up and I am sure it is also true for the other branches," she said.
One manager from the Azan Super Centre in Kingston, K. Sawyers, pointed out, however, that they only had a slight increase in fan sales which could not be counted as significant.
But the Met Office confirmed that Jamaica has had hotter days. Temperature records at the Norman Manley Inter-national Airport for 2000-2002, show figures that exceeded 35 degrees Celsius at least once each year; in November 2000, in August and October 2001, and in August 2002. Thus far, for 2003, the highest temperature recorded at the station was 34.4 degrees Celsius, in April.
MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE
Parts of France have recorded temperatures just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the climax of heat waves affecting countries across Europe.
Evan Thompson, weather branch head at the National Meteorological office, explains that "Jamaica's climate is described as a tropical maritime one. A characteristic of this type of climate is its low temperature variability. The annual range of temperature reaches only as high as six degrees Celsius over inland areas. This simply means that temperatures throughout the year never normally increase by more than six degrees." This, he says, is in direct contrast to higher latitude, continental areas (like Europe) that experience significantly higher variables in a given year.
According to recent climate change scientific assessment reports of the World Meteoro-logical Organisation (WMO) and other organisations, global temperatures have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years. New record extreme events (like the massive heat wave that have affected parts of Europe), occur every year somewhere in the globe, and in recent years, the number of such extremes have been increasing.
