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In the Pacific Northwest that summer, everyone might have known the heat was coming, but nobody thought it would be a searing, ghostly force that would melt asphalt and kill loved ones and force a new reckoning with the world they live in.
In the mountains and valleys, every plant and tree was assaulted by the heat, rooted in place and unable to move, creators of shade that were themselves unable to seek refuge.
But as June came and went and summer turned to fall, life went back to normal, and the memory of the heat wave faded, as memories of heat waves always do, until they become like the fleeting images of a nightmare you’re not quite sure you had. Or a future you don’t want to imagine.
In a world of heat-driven chaos, heat exposes deep fissures of inequity and injustice. Poverty equals vulnerability.
In 2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-time high temperatures.
Birth control pills can also increase core body temperature and make it more difficult for women to keep cool in the heat (or warm in the cold).
By the time the heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021, they had analyzed nearly a dozen extreme events and their technique was well honed. It took Otto and her team exactly nine days to say that the heat wave that killed more than a thousand people and a billion sea creatures would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
But it’s more complicated than that. Like humans, plants also acclimatize, so the effect diminishes with time. More CO2 also means more heat, and the effects of heat quickly overwhelm the benefits of higher CO2.
For them, as well as for warehouse and factory workers who labor in poorly designed buildings, heat is a workplace hazard they confront on a daily basis.
A United Farm Workers poll of 2,176 farmworkers in Washington, which is not a state known for broiling summers, found that 40 percent had experienced at least one symptom associated with a heat illness while at work. A quarter said they did not have enough cool drinking water, and 97 percent said they thought work protections for heat should be improved in the state.
In the US, there are no federal rules related to heat exposure for workers—indoors or out.
Definitions of extreme heat, like definitions of pornography, depend a lot on context.
Bill Gates, an incurable optimist on many public health issues, once told me that pathogens released from thawed permafrost represent the one climate change impact that keeps him awake at night).
It will be deliberate heat. Premeditated heat. We plead guilty to first-degree heat, Your Honor.
If the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated anything, it was how quickly and easily people were able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were old, sick, or otherwise living on the margins.
And so it may be, I fear, with the suffering and deaths from extreme heat. It will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century, something we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives. But the hotter it gets, the more difficult that will become.
