Killer heat is making humans pay
Heat waves used to be tedious events, the kind you might casually comment on after apologizing to co-workers for coming in looking all sweaty and sticky, as if you were covered in an invisible layer of jam.
Now it’s more sinister. Heat waves are life-threatening to larger numbers of humans. They’re rough beasts slouching, they’re glutinous canopies inhibiting breathing, they light seeds of horror.
I used to dislike heat waves but now they frighten me. This is, I must admit, true of many current emanations, like airport security guards, raccoons, voyeurs on Twitter, Twitter, mosquitoes, ticks, insects generally. Even water seems deeper now.
Hot violent weather caused the fires that trapped 62 people and injured many in the forests north of Lisbon. London firefighters said in the gentlest possible way that people in Grenfell Tower would have died of smoke inhalation before burning, but that was not true of drivers on the road in Portugal. There was a rush of sympathy from hot countries such as Britain, France, Spain and India.
Britain? It’s enduring the longest continuous spell of extreme heat in June since 1995. On Monday it was 24 C overnight, hotter than it was in Istanbul during the day. Brits aren’t used to that.
In 2003, “la canicule,” France’s worst heat wave since 1540, killed nearly 15,000 people. That year was the hottest in Italy in three centuries.
Cities suffer the most because they are heat islands made of asphalt and concrete surfaces with little tree cover. Top floors are hottest. The cheaply built glass condo towers of Toronto are not well-adapted to climate change. I’ve seen new seniors’ homes built without air conditioning and with glass walls that tenants plaster with fabric, newspaper and wood, anything to block out the baking afternoon sun.
Heat and flood are tormenting Toronto in June. Imagine July and August. In Phoenix, temperatures reached 49 C yesterday, so high that many regional flights on smaller planes — their maxi- mum operating temperature is 48 C — were cancelled.
Why does it matter? Hot air has lower density, meaning it’s thinner, which reduces how much lift is generated on an aircraft’s wings. They need more thrust to take off.
This is just one element in the chaos caused by climate change, for which the world is sorely unprepared. Electricity saves us but power will cut out under the stresses caused by climate change.
This is the Anthropocene, the geological era in which humans influenced the planet itself. We have to learn how to cope with the damage we have done and are doing, but heat seems the most intractable problem.
Some people are born with an internal heat engine, meaning they are always warm and adapt well to extreme heat. Others, like me, cannot cope with it. I have planted a mighty oak and grow vine on the house for insulation. I have updated the upstairs Mitsubishi air conditioner, the kind with machinery on the outside and a fan indoors, but would prefer two of them just in case one breaks. And fans, oh I have many fans.
If the electricity goes out, all bets are off.
The difficulty with heat waves is that they seem unjust in northern countries. They are temperature out of place and they interfere with the trade-off we in the duller northern sector of nations have made. We are cold, rigid and tightly wound. When we get hot, we are still stiff and tightly wound. And since we can no longer suntan safely, parasols and pith helmets will return with attendant inconvenience.
Hot places, such as the American South, are hateful by nature, and only air conditioning made them plausible for modern industry. Without air conditioning, human beings are wretched. You can escape a fire if you’re quick, and head for higher ground in a flood. But when it’s boiling, it’s boiling everywhere. You can only suffer, unable to work hard or think clearly, doped up with existential despair, sleepless and distraught, the night’s heat pressing down on your body like a rhino.
On Tuesday, ABC News found a video of a large rat dragging a garbage bag 10 times its size across a hot sidewalk in Brooklyn. That is me in a heat wave, desperate, my hair volume multiplied and my skin mottled with heat. Rather than relaxing, I inflame.
“Are we not in a sense all Brooklyn garbage rat, hauling our burden across an unforgiving surface to an uncertain destination?” tweeted @RKWinvisibleman.
Well, yes, in a heat wave, we are all hot rats.
Heat waves are life-threatening to larger numbers of humans. They’re rough beasts slouching, they’re glutinous canopies inhibiting breathing, they light seeds of horror