Whether they realized it or not, some 7.6 billion people -- 96 percent of humanity -- felt global warming's impact on temperatures over the last 12 months, researchers have said.
But some regions felt it far more sharply and frequently than others, according to a report based on peer-reviewed methods from Climate Central, a climate science think tank.
People in tropical regions and on small islands surrounded by heat-absorbing oceans were disproportionately impacted by human-induced temperature increases to which they barely contributed.
Among the 1,021 cities analyzed between September 2021 and October 2022, the capitals of Samoa and Palau in the South Pacific have been experiencing the most discernible climate fingerprints, the researchers said in the report, released recently.
Spiking temperatures in these locations were commonly four to five times more likely to occur than in a hypothetical world in which global warming had never happened.
Lagos, Mexico City and Singapore were among the most highly exposed major cities, with human-induced heat increasing health risks to millions.
Researchers at Climate Central, led by chief scientist Ben Strauss, looked for a way to bridge the gap between planetary-scale global warming -- usually expressed as Earth's average surface temperature compared to an earlier reference period -- to people's day-to-day experience.
