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“What’s coming is not just uncomfortable heat,” Jennifer Vines, the lead health officer for the region, advised Voss. “This is life-threatening heat.”
In a heat wave, wealth can afford twenty-five degrees of coolness.
thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption,
The difficulty of understanding the consequences of heat is amplified by conventional notions of what it means to be hot.
It is heat as an active force, one that can bend railroad tracks and kill you before you even understand that your life is at risk.
Until we figure out a way to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the sky, we will be stuck with a hotter planet.
“If you have enough money, you can engineer your way out of anything.”
In Africa and the Middle East, studies have found a link between higher temperatures and the outbreak of civil war.
If there is one idea in this book that might save your life, it is this: The human body, like all living things, is a heat machine. Just being alive generates heat. But if your body gets too hot too fast—it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever—you are in big trouble.
In fact, being young and strong allows you to fight off the warning signs of heat exhaustion until it is too late.
drinking water does not in itself cool off inner-core body temperatures.
proper hydration cannot prevent heatstroke.”
The only effective treatment for heatstroke is to get a person’s core body temperature down, fast.
Taking Tylenol or aspirin doesn’t help. In fact, both can interfere with kidney function,
Exactly how long it takes to acclimatize to a hotter climate depends on a variety of factors, including how much you exercise in the heat and your physical condition. Two weeks is average for most people. Interestingly, exposure to air-conditioning even for brief periods slows or even stops acclimatization.
Birds are not like flying dinosaurs,” a scientist once corrected me. “They are flying dinosaurs.”)
“What will the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat look like?”
who?
Whom
Hurricanes are heat engines, powered by warm, moist air rising over warm oceans (that’s why there are no hurricanes in the Arctic).
Sometimes bumblebees get so hot that they fall dead out of the sky,
In many places in the world today, heat is rising faster than our ability to adapt to it.
Here in the US, unfounded fears of brown people invading the country and stealing jobs and committing crimes are disguised as a policy debate about immigration.
During the 2003 heat wave in Europe, which killed seventy thousand people—that’s more than the number of US soldiers killed during the entire Vietnam War—
By blockading Ukrainian ports, blowing up rail lines, stealing grain, and killing farmers, Putin effectively took about 20 million tons of wheat off the market.
“The largest single global change that threatens food security is high temperature.”
Purple urchins are the cockroaches of the sea,”
I have visited the Great Barrier Reef twice, once in 2011 and again in 2018, and have seen the decline in real-time.
Somebody still has to build houses, grow food, fix roads, deliver your packages.
Postal workers and delivery drivers are particularly at risk, in part because their delivery vehicles often aren’t air-conditioned and heat up like convection ovens.
UPS workers shared photographs on social media with thermometer readings of 150 degrees in the backs of their trucks.
“The combination of poverty and extreme temperatures can be lethal.”
In El Salvador and Costa Rica, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease has hit farmworkers who work in hot sugarcane fields—
And when it’s hot, workers make more mistakes and are injured more often.
In the US, there are no federal rules related to heat exposure for workers—indoors or out.
All Mexicans are no more “used to” hot weather than all Californians.
“By far the most significant factors in increasing a person’s heat load are external temperature, humidity, and the amount of heat the person generates as a result of exercise.”
Even after slavery was abolished and scientific racism was exposed as a manifestation of white privilege and stupidity, the idea that some races were better suited to heat than others persisted.
But the simple truth is that in twenty-first-century America, nobody should be doing physical labor in an open field when it’s 107 degrees.
Nowhere on the planet does heat have as much leverage over our future as it does in Antarctica.
“It turns out glaciers are much more responsive to heat than anyone thought.”
If all of Greenland were to melt, that’s twenty-two feet of sea-level rise. When Antarctica goes, it’s two hundred feet.
ice ages were triggered by small changes in the Earth’s orbit
By one count, half the people who have ever lived have been killed by mosquito-borne pathogens.
In Alaska, hunters are discovering parasites from a thousand miles away in southeast Canada alive under the skin of wild birds.
It took thirty years of detective work to determine that HIV likely emerged in 1908 in Cameroon, during a bloody interaction between a human and a chimpanzee.
The way we communicate about extreme heat is often distorted by nostalgia for a climate that no longer exists.
heat waves are the deadliest extreme weather events, killing far
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more people every year than hurricanes or floods.
In less than two weeks in 2003, fifteen thousand people in France died as a direct result of the heat wave.
We can save the future or we can save the past, but we can’t do both.”
