“Already now, after an average global warming of a mere 1􏱳C, the Persian Gulf is brushing the threshold. In July 2015, an unprecedented heatwave conspired with the humid air from the sea to push wet-bulb temperatures to a peak of 34.6􏱳C, leaving a margin of 0.4􏱳C to the limit of liveability. But that heatwave appears to have been surpassed by the one of July 2016, summed up worldwide as the hottest month on record on Earth. The global trend was spearheaded by the Gulf: in late July, the mercury – heat only – soared to 54􏱳C (129􏱳F) in Kuwait and Basra, probably the highest temperature ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere and possibly in the world as a whole. 

Zainab Guman, a 26-year-old university student in Basra, told the reporter from the Washington Post that she rarely left home during daylight throughout the summer, for stepping outside is like ‘walking into a fire’: ‘It’s like everything on your body – your skin, your eyes, your nose – starts to burn.’ A spokesperson for Iraq’s meteorological department attested to a fundamental shift in the country’s weather patterns towards longer, more intense, more frequent heat- waves. 

A refugee living in a tin hut outside Baghdad said: ‘Iraqis are strong people. But this heat is like fire. Can people live in fire?’”

Andreas Malm, “‘This Is the Hell That I Have Heard Of’: Some Dialectical Images in Fossil Fuel Fiction,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 53 no. 2 (April 1, 2017): 121–41.