The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

Miju was the one-year-old daughter of Jonathan Gerrish and Ellen Chung,

Ah, I remember this. Yosemite is my home territory; I've been backpacking there fifty years. The mistakes they made are beginner's; just a few chats and smart people won't make them. But outdoorsy types will be curious, ask questions, and learn fast. “City folk” won't, typically.

Even before the 2018 fire, the trail that Gerrish had selected for the hike was a risky choice. The steep ascent out of the canyon was along a southeastern-facing slope, which meant it was exposed to the full brutality of the sun.

Yeah, one lesson: do the hard part early, while you're fresh. A down-then-up hike isn't just a little harder than the same hike in reverse it's, maybe as an estimate, four times harder. And that's not counting weather or other environmental conditions. Lesson two: calculate where and weather may change and make things worse. Heavy rain will make a steep trail nasty whether you're going up or down; baking heat won't matter as much if you're able to go down fast on a good trail.

They rambled along the river for the next hour and a half, where they may well have stopped for a drink from their hydration pack and even doused their hands and faces in the cool river water.

Experience tells something that can be uncomfortable: if things turn ugly, find safety. If the family had gone back to the river, they might have survived. But that kind of passivity doesn't seem like a good idea to the inexperienced. But it is also possible that the stream was in full sunlight, and rescue would have taken until the next day. And if they didn’t have gear to overnight… well…

Another is to quickly cool places on the body where, because of the structure of our veins, a lot of blood circulates close to the surface: the bottoms of the feet, the palms of the hands, the upper part of the face.

Oddly — and critically — the back of the neck is a bad place to put a cool towel or icepack. It is a highly vascular area, so it cools fairly effectively, but one of the body's "thermostats" is there (associated with the Vagus nerve, I believe) and cooling there can mislead your body into 'thinking' it is already cooled down, so capillary networks elsewhere will be instructed to contract, reducing cooling elsewhere on the body. -- hmm, I can't find a citation for that; please ignore. I'll come back if I do.

Gerrish and Chung surely had a moment when they stopped to consider whether it was better to stop climbing and turn around and seek refuge by the river.

The actual risk of getting sick from toxic algae was extremely low compared to the danger of heatstroke, but Gerrish and Chung may not have known that.

On the other hand, it was far more humid during my hike, which meant the air had very little capacity to absorb all the sweat that was rolling off my body. And with no evaporation, there was little chance of cooling.

It is not how anyone expects to die.

When it comes to heat management, we are like actors in Hollywood’s silent era who suddenly find themselves cast in speaking roles. We know the script, but our skills are no longer well-matched for the world we live in.

I think the author could have come up with a better metaphor.

(Ironically, new, highly efficient LEED-certified buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps when the power goes out.)

Juarez only turns on her air conditioner a few hours a day—still, her electric bill can run $500 a month during the summer, which is more than she pays for rent.

During the summer of 2018, she was late to pay her electric bill and owed $176.84. On September fifth, Pullman paid $125, leaving $51.84 unpaid. Two days later, when the temperature hit 107 degrees, her electric company, Arizona Public Service (APS), cut off her power.

“Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely,” writes journalist Abrahm Lustgarten, “it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.”

"Remapping" is an academic way of saying "refugee crisis". There'll be climate refugee camps, but they'll probably put them in hot and dry places (where else will land be cheap?) and we'll feel sooo sad when the refugees die.

“If you live in Texas, you have to worry about everything.”

If nothing else, my move shows the complexity of climate-related decisions about where and how we live. I knew very well that my move made no sense from a climate perspective, but who cares? I would rather live with Simone in a tent in the Sahara than without her in a solar-powered house on a lake in the mountains.

We pulled six gallon jugs of water out of our backpacks.

A gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds, so 50 pounds or so. They were undoubtedly carrying more gear for safety, so each was carrying at least 30 pounds. That's a lot for a long desert hike.

what are you actually feeling?

You're feeling atoms and molecules bouncing around faster than normal, and transferring that kinetic energy to your carefully arranged molecules, disrupting them.

“Heat consists in the trembling agitation of the smallest parts of bodies all manner of ways; & the parts of all bodies are always in some agitation.”

Yeah, that's what I said.

Rumford thought the caloric theory was nonsense.

Not complete nonsense, but effectively the quantified accumulation of the excitement of all those wiggling molecules ( or smaller particles).

the 2003 heat wave in Europe, which killed seventy thousand people—

There was another one in 2022. «“The fact that more than 61,600 people in Europe died of heat stress in the summer of 2022, even though, unlike in 2003, many countries already had active prevention plans in place, suggests that adaptation strategies currently available may still be insufficient,” said Hicham Achebak, a co-author of the study and researcher at ISGlobal.» — https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/world/deadly-europe-heatwave-2022-climate/index.html

In 2010, a major heat wave cooked Russia with temperatures as high as 104 degrees. More than 55,000 people died.

higher food prices are inextricably linked with political instability, chaos, and war.

THE BLOB WENT unnoticed at first.

I remember this, although I can't recall when I first learned about it. I still have web pages linked that analyze it and discuss if and when it reappears.

“It’s very scary,” Rogers-Bennett said. “The Blob shows you how fast a tipping point can happen.”

Tipping point: that’ll be the key in the shift “gradually, then all at once”.

“It’s like Russian roulette.”

Good metaphor. Like Russian Roulette, but we’re steadily putting more bullets into the chambers.

“The question we want to answer is, is the West Antarctic ice sheet on the verge of unstoppable collapse?”

To most people, I think such a sea level rise is an abstraction. There are multiple steps in the causation chain before it becomes apparent that this could cause a catastrophe.

low-lying coastal city in the world.

(San Francisco, of course, is quite hilly. It’d do better than most 😉)

Because this is, in part, a US government–sponsored trip, this afternoon we all had to watch videos about sexual harassment and environmental rules in Antarctica (which included tips on how to pick seedpods out of the Velcro on your winter jacket so as to not import any invasive species to the continent).

👍🏼

In a 1978 paper called “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster,” Mercer focused on the floating ice shelves that buttress the West Antarctic glaciers.

1978!

there is much talk about how the fate of the civilized world may be determined by the movement of warm circumpolar deepwater currents under Thwaites Glacier. How far and how fast that warm current is flowing under Thwaites, melting it from below, will broadly determine how quickly the glacier collapses.

Thus the “Doomsday Glacier”

As the world warms, making more of the planet comfortable for heat-loving Aedes aegypti, the mosquito’s Goldilocks Zone will expand northward, and to higher altitudes. By 2080, five billion people, or 60 percent of the world’s population, may be at risk for dengue. “The fact is, climate change is going to sicken and kill a lot of people,” said Colin Carlson, a biologist at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. “Mosquito-borne diseases are going to be a big way that happens.”

The body, it turned out, had been in the apartment above hers for more than a week before it was discovered.

I feel lime this anecdote is more sensational than informative. Is the horrific nature of this one death going to be a significant element in a large number of deaths to come?

“We care about the polar bears because they’re showing us what’s going to happen to us,” says Steven Amstrup, the chief scientist for Polar Bear International, a nonprofit polar bear conservation group. “If we don’t heed their warning, we’re next.”

But we don't actually believe that, do we? 🤪😭💔☠️🪦

More methane means more warming, which will release still more methane—when scientists talk about a looming climate catastrophe, this is one of the scenarios that worries them most.

This is only *one* possible reason why climate change could continue even if humanity could completely stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Heat will be the engine of this transformation.

He fulfilled the contract; he explained how heat kills, and how heat is creeping up on our lives and the world around us. But he also missed: he gestured towards the real problem, but didn't confront it. The problem isn't the heat, but the astonishing fact that we've let it get out of control. And even more, that we're simply failing to respond adequately to the crisis. We don't even agree it's a crisis, or even real. The problem is one in human social cognition. He missed the crux.

Making the necessary changes will be hard; it will require political leadership and a deeper understanding of our connection with one another and with the world we live in. But it is not beyond our reach.

It is, however, beyond our grasp.

But our world will be transformed.

He's missing the macroeconomic upshot: economic collapse leading to civilization collapse.

“We are confronted simultaneously with our vulnerability to catastrophe and our profound unseriousness in the face of it. It’s as if the fires are starting to spread through Rome and all we can do is argue about the fiddling.”

Not "we" — a tiny minority of us see this; most aren't interested, and a large portion sneer "fake news".