For a month and 10 days of unrelenting summer heat, Sepideh, a physician in southern Iran, and her dentist husband have left the house only for work (and only in the mornings) and for groceries (and only when the fridge is utterly bare). At one point last week, her car’s dashboard thermometer read 57 degrees Celsius, about 135 degrees Fahrenheit. “Only 57 degrees!” she posted. A combination of widening poverty and rising heat is crushing much of southern Iran, where sprawling desert, joined with the humidity of the nearby Persian Gulf, is especially prone to heat waves and droughts intensified by climate change. Although the mercury was lower elsewhere in the country, the misery has still been great.

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Persons: Iran’s, Kaveh Madani Locations: Iran, Persian, United Nations