Extreme heat is different

Most climate calamities are in the future. Extreme heat is right here right now.

I sometimes feel we had a better grasp on what the problem actually was back when we called it Global Warming. Since rebranding it to Climate Change, we’ve lost focus. We fret about the second order effects, the hurricanes and droughts, the rising sea-levels and the floods — and yes, those are all things we have reason to fear going forward. But they are bad things that may happen as a result of the big thing that is happening: we’re trapping too much heat in the damn atmosphere.

It’s telling that try as they might, the IPCC can’t state with high confidence that any of the second-order effects can even be detected yet: the hurricanes, the droughts, the rising sea levels, the floods, all remain plausibly within the range of natural variablity.

Heat isn’t like that. When it comes to extreme heat, the evidence is already in: heat waves have already become more intense, more frequent and longer lasting. (There is, granted, one other first-order impact —ocean acidification— and a lot of evidence that it is ongoing.)

Of course the impact of extreme heat varies radically between geographies. Here in Tokyo, relentless heat waves turn the summer into a succession of sweaty, sticky sprints from one air-conditioned bubble to the next. People who have to work outside turn to ventilated vests or neck fans to try to blunt the impact. Nobody likes it, it’s pretty gross. A few older people do die when it gets very hot. For the most part, though, it’s not a crisis. People have the resources to refrigerate the spaces where they spend most of their time.

Where people can afford AC, summer heat is a nuisance, not a reason to turn your economic and political system upside down.

To make the case for deep climate action, you have to jolt people with scarier scenarios. Those ising sea-levels. Those massive storms and uncontrollable droughts and monster floods. The kinds of society-blighting disasters that models suggest will become more common in future, but that can’t confidently be blamed on global warming yet.

For poor people in hot countries, though, a heat wave is much more than an inconvenience.

It can be the thing that tips your community over the edge of ecological viability.

In South Sudan, where I’ve done consulting work for more than a decade, millions of people survive by farming millet and sorghum, crops that are naturally heat and drought resistant…within limits.

When summertime highs push past the 40-42 degree range that used to be the upper limit, when they start to flirt with 45 degrees, well, even the sorghum and the millet can’t withstand that.

Not that it’s possible to work outside when it gets that hot. (Or inside, for that matter.)

There’s no air conditioning to run to when the heat goes mad in South Sudan. Or in Bihar. Or Papua New Guinea. Or Nicaragua. Billions of poor people exposed to extreme heat have no way to protect themselves from it. This isn’t some fear for the future, this is right now.

And yet compared with receding glaciers, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and strengthening storms —compared to the whole lineup of ghouls climatism uses to scare us— extreme heat seldom gets top billing.

In a way, I get it. “Hot country gets even hotter!” doesn’t make for a particularly compelling newspaper headline. We find it hard to imagine heat as a catastrophe the way a hurricane might be.

And then, in the unwritten hierarchy of journalistic sympathy, we discount the lives of poor people in poor countries to almost zero. The collective journalistic yawn that has greeted the shocking civil war in Sudan is, I suppose, the most obvious current illustration of a point we all intuitively get.

If you can’t interest news readers in a straight-up shooting war that’s displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands, what chance is there readers will care about their struggles with the heat?

And yet, the way climate change shows up in our world today is overwhelmingly in extreme heat. The other extremes are all just hypothesized knock-on effects from adding heat to the atmosphere, second order effects from the one big thing.

Once you see this as the problem, I feel like you’re more open to solutions that target heat narrowly. Once you do that, you’ve solved 95% of the problem, and what remains —ocean acidification, basically— becomes much less daunting: nothing a good alcalinization program can’t handle.

Solutions that re-establish the earth’s energy balance directly, via albedo, will prevent the cascading second-order effects we so fear. But putting the second order effects first is putting the cart before the horse.