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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Goodell
Read between
December 20 - December 31, 2023
Definitions of extreme heat, like definitions of pornography, depend a lot on context.
Mercer, who grew up in a small town in England and was known for carrying out his scientific fieldwork in the nude, first visited Antarctica in the mid-1960s.
By one count, half the people who have ever lived have been killed by mosquito-borne pathogens.
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.
Heat rearranges the natural world and rewrites disease algorithms on our planet. It creates new opportunities for microbes, opening up fresh biological landscapes for them to explore, turning pathogens into microscopic versions of Ferdinand Magellan, expanding the boundaries of the known world. Heat waves, as well as heat-driven climate events like flooding and drought, have worsened more than half of the hundreds of known infectious diseases in people, including malaria, hantavirus, cholera, and anthrax.
Nipah virus was particularly scary. Nipah is a horrible pathogen, causing fever, brain swelling, and convulsions. Its fatality rate is as high as 75 percent. Of those who survive, one-third have neurological damage.
White retirees in the North, previously unwilling to put up with the muggy heat of Florida and other Southern states, flocked south to air-conditioned condos on beaches and golf courses.
The political ramifications of this demographic shift to the Sun Belt was enormous. The flood of conservative retirees to the South, once a Democratic stronghold, shifted the balance of power in American politics. Between 1940 and 1980, warm-climate states in the South gained twenty-nine electoral college votes, while the colder states of the Northeast and the Rust Belt lost thirty-one. Among the first to figure this out was Richard Nixon, who wooed these Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s with anti–civil rights messages and racial dog whistles. American politics has never been the same
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Air-conditioning is also a big energy suck. Globally, air-conditioning accounts for nearly 20 percent of the total electricity used in buildings, which means it contributes a significant amount of the greenhouse gas pollution from buildings that are heating up the atmosphere. The hotter the planet gets, the more air-conditioning feels necessary. The more it feels necessary, the more electricity is required to power it. And as long as some portion of that electricity is generated by fossil fuels, that means more greenhouse gas pollution—which further heats up the climate. It’s a vicious cycle.
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In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.
They found that in all but three of the homes, the preferred temperature was 72 degrees, with low humidity, a combination that most closely resembled the temperature and humidity in East Africa—the same region of the continent where the first humans lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. As Mark Maslin, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, observed, the findings suggest that even when people can set the temperature and humidity at whatever they want, “they then choose something that harks back a hundred thousand years to Africa.”
Nobody should die in a heat wave. People die because they are alone and don’t know what to do and don’t ask for help. Or they don’t have air-conditioning (or the money to run it). Or they can’t get to a cooling center. Or they are afraid that their employer will fire them if they stop working.
“himicanes”
It took a few days for the full scope of the tragedy to reveal itself. Police and fire officials began responding to more and more calls. Hospital emergency rooms started to fill up. A week or so into the heat wave, city officials began running out of places to store bodies.
Finally, city officials commandeered a food storage warehouse. They also leased or purchased refrigerated food trucks. “One truck,” a writer recalled, “stripped of its decals, still bore the silhouette of the name of the butcher from whom the city purchased it.”
Many Parisians who had been out of town returned to gruesome scenes. One twenty-year-old woman had been warned before she returned that a neighbor had died in the apartment above hers. But when she opened her front door, she screamed. On the floor was “a pool of dried blood, blood from a body, everything… urine, blood, everything.” The body, it turned out, had been in the apartment above hers for more than a week before it was discovered. Bodily fluids had trickled down the walls and through the slats in the paneling on the ceiling. Vases in her kitchen, she discovered to her horror, were
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Trees are superheroes of the climate fight. They inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen, filtering out air pollution with each breath. They suck up water from the ground and sweat it out through their leaves, which cools the air (think of them as mini–air conditioners). And of course they provide shade to all creatures great and small, as well as to the soil around them, which helps to reduce water loss through evaporation. As anyone who has taken a walk through a city park knows, they also offer mental health benefits to stressed-out urbanites.
Trees are our deep-time evolutionary companions, fellow living things that we have spent millions of years leaning against, climbing, and worshipping.
People love to donate money to plant trees, and politicians love to get their pictures taken planting a tree, but it’s much harder finding money for maintenance.
The basic truth is: rich people get nice trees, poor people get weeds.
But perhaps the biggest hurdle is the gap between the grand visions of architects and urban planners and the reality of what might actually get built.
