Woah. Or Woe, as the Case May Be

The other week, I wrote the following:

Vermont is mostly under water. Parts of the Southwest are way too hot, day after day. Last I heard, Canada was still on fire. The planet as a whole has apparently been hotter this week than at any time is the past several thousand years.

Since then, the list of woe has not gotten any shorter.

One Thing Puzzling Me

Why am I not hearing more about head-related deaths in Arizona? After all, the city of Phoenix is not just breaking records for high heat (reaching closer and closer to 120 degrees Fahrenheit), but also the heat is going on and on–28 consecutive days with highs over 110 degrees. Now, heat injury is cumulative. The longer a person is exposed, the higher their risk of heat stroke gets. So why hasn’t this story been being covered as a major disaster?

Today, I looked up some figures, and it’s not as bad as it could be, but it’s not good, either. As of eight days ago, 18 people in the Phoenix area were confirmed dead from heat. 69 more deaths are under investigation, meaning it’s not yet clear whether those people died from heat-related causes or not. That means that the death toll stands at somewhere between 18 and 87 people–and that was six days ago. Doubtless, more have died since then. And more will die; those who survive the initial crisis of heat stroke remain at greater risk of death from various causes for years.

Of the confirmed dead, a third were homeless. Another third were elderly. Heat is not an equal-opportunity killer.

And this isn’t counting people hospitalized with severe burns from touching hot pavement. It’s easy to say “don’t touch pavement,” but these are people sitting or lying down from exhaustion or even collapsing. Last year, there were people who died from their burns.

These figures also don’t include deaths in other parts of the region.

They also don’t include information on how these numbers compare to other years, because a typical year’s heat death figure is not zero. So do this year’s tragedies count as a disaster or, so far, a bullet dodged?

How Long Have We Got?

What I really want to know, though, is how long until the United States loses its ability to keep up with the disasters? I’m asking about the United States because I live here, but the same question applies anywhere.

The thing is, we in the US are used to being able to help disaster-impacted areas recover without really having to make any sacrifices or suffer any collective losses. An injury to a part does not threaten the whole. That might not last much longer. At the number and severity of disasters increase, eventually that won’t be true anymore. We will start losing ground.

When?

There are signs that it may be soon. Allstate and State Farm both announced they would no longer write new policies in California, for multiple reasons including the greater frequency of disaster. It’s part of a trend across the country, where insurance companies are either raising premiums or pulling out of specific markets because of the increasing cost of doing business. At the same time, FEMA is in serious danger of exhausting its budget well before the end of hurricane season. Of course, the insurance industry and FEMA have budgets set by profit motives and politics, respectively–they aren’t absolutely measures of how much the US can actually afford. But it’s still startling.

How long does it take a place to recover, if it recovers?

Housing

One of the most obvious problems in the wake of a natural disaster is that the physical structure of a human community is damaged or destroyed. Businesses may be temporarily or permanently closed. People may be living in shelters or tents, or they may be staying elsewhere as temporary or permanent refugees. For how long?

Rebuilding housing typically takes about four to six years until it is 90% complete. My source did not include figures for 100% completion, probably because some rebuilds drag out for reasons that have little to do with the disaster itself–but that missing 10% represents housing that existed before the disaster that doesn’t exist even the better part of a decade afterwards. And none of this counts people who had to sell out and move away during the rebuilding process–FEMA payments run out after 18 months, and while there is another program that can sometimes offer further assistance, it does not start paying out until twenty months after the disaster. Two months is a long time to go without help. Plus, these figures only apply to the construction of housing–people who didn’t own their homes, or didn’t have homes to begin with do not necessarily get housed because a building is reconstructed.

Renters do not fair well in disasters. Details vary from state to state and from one rental agreement to another, but even the total destruction of your apartment building doesn’t automatically void your lease or suspend your rental payments. Ideally, landlords will either substantially reduce rent until repairs can be made or terminate the lease and return the security deposit, but they’re not actually required to do that. It’s entirely possible that after a major disaster there are newly-homeless people trying to figure out how to sue their landlord to get the lease terminated while racking up debt for unpaid rent on an apartment that no longer exists. Probably these renters’ place of employment doesn’t exist anymore, either. This is the sort of set-back that people don’t necessarily come back from.

And none of that counts homeless people.

Economic Recovery

Of course a major disaster causes generalized economic problems, too–workers may be injured, dead, or no longer in the area, businesses are damaged, and so forth. How long does that last? One source I found said that short-term recovery takes six months to a year, while long-term recovery is tracked for three years. What does that mean? I suspect it means that whichever agency is doing the tracking thinks that by the end of three years most of the economic recovery that is going to happen has happened. Certainly it doesn’t always happen at all–a big disaster can send some communities into a decline they can’t recover from. The article does not that rebuilding sometimes takes more than three years.

It may be reasonable to conclude that during the first year after a big disaster, a community is still severely damaged, economically, and during the first three years economic impacts are still likely significant.

Human Recovery

What about direct injury to humans?

In the United States, human deaths during disasters are usually few–tens of people might die, possibly even a few hundred, rather than the thousands of deaths in some poorer countries. But obviously, dead people, however many people they are, don’t recover–their survivors can recover from their loss to some extent, but that’s hard to quantify and I’m not going to try. I’m also not going to try to assess how long it takes people to recover from physical injuries as there are just too many variables.

But after a major disaster, mental/emotional trauma is widespread and can impact a community’s ability to function. How long does that last?

According to the American Psychological Association, most people will recover enough to function normally again within a few months. That “most” implies that there are people who don’t recover so quickly, and of course being able to function normally is not necessarily the same thing as feeling alright, but that does give us a timeline for how long a community is likely to remain “walking wounded.”

Combined Timeline

So, it looks like after a major disaster, for the first several months the affected area is likely to be severely impacted. That is, it’s not in the news anymore, for the general public in the rest of the country, the disaster is over, but the community that lived through it is not functioning well, needs a lot of help, and is really wholly occupied with just trying to get things back together.

After the first year, most people are back on their feet again psychologically, and the local economy is functioning again, but many people are still dependent on outside assistance of various kinds, and the physical recovery of the community has barely begun.

After the first three years, the community is well on its way to full economic recovery if the needed interventions have been successful. If not….. And in any case, although physical recovery is proceeding, rebuilding is well underway, there are still people living in various forms of temporary accommodation, and there are people falling through the cracks or simply moving away.

After six years, the vast majority of the rebuilding is complete, and it’s no longer obvious there even was a disaster, but there are people who have slipped through the cracks, people who are still hurting, and people who are just gone. Recovery continues, but more slowly.

All this depends on the disaster in question, of course, but it seems reasonable to me to consider disasters in general as five-year events. So the question is how many disasters are occurring in the same five-year period? And how many recoveries can we afford to assist with at the same time?

I don’t have an answer. I wonder if anyone does.

The Thing About Fire

Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash

My husband went to go fight a wildfire this morning. I can’t help but worry a little. Fire is fire, and anyway this is the year I’ve been seeing pictures of a fire tornado on social media and blogs and so forth.

Actually, the fire tornado is not the source of any rational fear on my part. My understanding is that they grow out of the sort of fire-created storm cloud that my husband says are inherently unstable–they can collapse at any time, sending an outward splash of fire in all directions. When such a cloud develops, the teams all pull out and away. If a “firenado” happens, chances are good nobody’s there. But it’s still a scary thought.

The more pressing concern, the rational one, is not the fire itself, but the heat. He’s going to Arizona, in the middle of a serious and record-setting heat wave. Hot weather kills more people than all other natural disasters combined.

I mentioned my concerns, and my husband assures me that air conditioning will be available. And I know that he and his team are professionals, they know how to be careful, how to recognize and get out of bad situations and, yes, into air conditioning if necessary. I’m only nervous, as spouses tend to be in these situations, not actually scared.

But there is a larger issue that bears noticing.

I’ve written before about how climate change is not only increasing fire danger directly, but also making fires more dangerous to fight simply because the weather is often hotter, now. Not only must firefighters work in heavy, heat-trapping protective clothing, but hotter conditions at night mean they can’t sleep well. Exhausted firefighters are more likely to make mistakes and get hurt.

The thing is that climate change is rendering some places uninhabitable in the summer. I’d suggest, actually, that some places count as uninhabitable already, despite the fact that people live there–these kinds of problems always exist on something of a sliding scale. How many days a year does a coastal area need to flood before we consider it lost to the rising sea? Less than 365, I can tell you that. How many days a year can a place get so hot that the ill or the impoverished (those who can’t afford air conditioning) are at serious risk of death?

We’re making these places where human life is getting marginal, but we still want firefighters to go into those places.

This is my realization of the day; in changing the climate, humanity is not simply making things difficult for ourselves in general, we are creating problems that specific other people have to deal with. Lots of folks have the option to move to cooler climates or to structure there lives so as to avoid going outside–and especially to avoid being physically active outside–when it’s dangerously hot. For these folks, climate change might still seem like some abstract problem of the future, and they may act accordingly. But there are people who can’t avoid the heat, people who have no where to do and no way to get there. And there are people, like my husband, who choose not to avoid it because they go in to deal with problems made by others.

Stop causing problems for other people. Vote for climate action.

Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash

What’s Hot, These Days

Over the last month or so, while I’ve been preoccupied with disasters closer to home, a series of alarming articles have wafted across my social media feeds–articles with titles like:

• The Arctic Is Burning!
• The Arctic Is Melting!
• This Was the Hottest July on Record!

Alarmism? No, not at all. We live in alarming times, is all. But it’s high time I got caught up. I’ll catch you up in the process, just in case I’m not the only one who was more or less unavailable for a month or so. Then we can get on with talking about ideas, issues, and events in more detail.

News

Let me catch us up.

Fire in a Cold Place

The earliest article on the arctic fires I could find dates from July 13th and includes satellite images of smoke and fire taken that day. The article is a little vague as to exactly when the fires had started burning and whether the story was actually about a few large, long-burning fires or many brief, small fires operating, as it were, as a team. But the article did note that the burning has been extreme and is linked to climate change.

For more on the connection between fire and climate, please see my earlier post.

A somewhat later article from The Guardian provides more detail, confirming that the intense fire activity began in June and continued into July. Areas of Alaska, Siberia, and Greenland are involved. All told, it is the worst fire season the region has had in 16 years–which is as far as the satellite record goes back. Before then, it’s hard to know how many wildfires there really were, as the arctic is sparsely settled. The Guardian also confirms that in some areas the peat is burning. Peat, as you may recall, is organic material that doesn’t rot because it is normally waterlogged and highly acidic. The material builds up over thousands of years and represents a major carbon sink. That this stuff is burning is very bad news.

Other articles have covered similar territory over the past few weeks. More recently, NASA has explained why it is using its resources to study arctic fires; among other consequences for ecological function and public health, burning tundra has the potential to dramatically increase climate change. There are two main, and interrelated, mechanisms.

First, and most obviously, burning that peat releases a lot of sequestered carbon. But the other problem is that burning away vegetation and soil exposes the underlying permafrost to warmth, and it starts to melt. Without that ice, the ground can slump badly, and, of more global consequence, the organic matter previously trapped in ice can rot, releasing methane–a very powerful greenhouse gas.

So, on to the next bit of recent bad news.

Melting Records

This summer has broken global heat records, so it’s not surprising that the Arctic sea melted back to its second-smallest extent on record. Now, it’s important to be clear that sea ice is different from land ice. When glaciers melt (and that’s happening, too, of course), the water runs into the ocean and raises sea level. Melting sea ice does not raise sea levels because it was in the sea already. Put some ice in a glass, pour in enough water so the ice can float, and mark the level of the water. Let the ice melt, and you’ll see the water level stays the same. The sea works the same way.

Melting sea ice causes other problems, of course. Most obviously, polar bears depend on sea ice for hunting, but there are other issues. What makes the Arctic ocean distinct from the Atlantic is not geographic separation, but rather the ice, which both provides unique habitat and alters water chemistry and circulation. Without the ice, the Arctic ecosystem will collapse and merge with that of the Atlantic.

For example, the ice forms a substrate on which micro-algae can grow, sequestering carbon. Various animals eat that algae, notably copepods–an important food source for marine mammals. Copepods who don’t get eaten eventually die and sink to the ocean floor, taking their carbon with them. The Altantic has its own micro-algae and its own copepods, of course, but Altantic copepods are smaller and don’t carry as much carbon down to the sea floor.

The important thing to remember is that without sea ice, we’ll have one less ocean than we’re used to. The impact of that will be far-ranging.

This year has not been decisive. We knew the ice was melting before, and a significant amount of ice remains. This year’s heat is simply a reminder of what’s coming.

Heat

July was the hottest July on record–and the hottest of any month on record–worldwide. Before that, June was the hottest June on record, globally. The hot weather is the direct cause of the aforementioned melting and the indirect cause of the extensive fires. The heat itself is not caused by climate change; it is climate change.

Implications

I’m not saying everything is awful or hopeless–I wrote about hope last week, and Spock is still right. This is simply the world we live in, the context of everything we do. This is why it’s important for us to vote, to advocate, to educate ourselves and each other, and to protest.

Because climate change is real, and it’s not going away until we make it go away.

 

 

 

 

Covering Climate Coverage

CNN recently posted a striking summary of major wildfires and heat waves around the world, including the US, Canada, Sweden, Japan, and Greece. There is also major heat and drought in the British Isles, literally changing the color of these countries as seen from space. This is all not to mention recent, dangerous flooding in the US and Japan.

It’s been a rough July for a lot of people.

The standard line is always that while climate change causes more, and more severe, extreme weather, individual weather events cannot be attributed to climate change. I have reason to believe that’s not always true, as I have detailed several times on this blog. In recent years, though, I’ve become less interested in specific extreme weather events, and more interested in the pattern of extreme weather as a whole–while it certainly seems like our planet is getting more extreme weather than it used to, it’s also possible it’s just making the news more frequently. After all, some extreme weather has always been normal. Humans are notoriously bad at intuiting such things (many people insist we’re in a national crime wave when the opposite is true, for example), that’s why we invented statistics. So, how abnormal is our current spate of abnormal weather?

I’ve asked that question before, but was unable to find an answer.

Now, I have another question; irrespective of whether climate change is behind this particular difficult July, are major news outlets covering this as a climate story?

Reviewing the News

A few weeks ago, Media Matters published a study showing that broadcast media coverage of heat waves at the end of June and the beginning of July rarely mentioned climate change–CBS had the one lone exception for the period–and that the mainstream media generally under-cover climate change.

I’ve just done my own quick study, covering the month of July, and including all weather-related disasters (not just heat waves), and three newspapers, Accuweather, and The Weather Channel, as well as broadcast media sites–and in the case of the latter, in most cases I’m looking at articles posted on their websites, not stories that aired. Prior searches suggest that media outlets may be slightly more willing to cover climate on their websites than on air, so if anything my survey overestimates what was aired.

For each of several mainstream sources where Americans might get climate-related news, I searched online for the name of the organization and “climate change July 2018.” I ignored articles about climate politics and anything posted before July 1st of this year. I looked specifically for articles that discussed current events in weather in the context of climate change.

CNN

CNN post an excellent article putting this summer’s extreme weather in context and including a copy of an important graphic I’ve seen elsewhere explaining how slight changes in average temperatures translate to major increases in extreme heat.

FOX News

Nothing about the weather and climate change, but their site did run an AP story on Pope Francis’ call for climate action. In June there were several other solid AP articles on climate issues.

NBC News/MSNBC

Nothing, although there were a few articles on climate change earlier in the year.

ABC

Nothing from the American Broadcast Company. The Australian Broadcast Company is doing some interesting things, though.

CBS

The website of a local CBS affiliate (CBS8) ran a USA Today story on a recent study linking increasing suicide rates to climate change. The main CBS website ran an AP story on melting glaciers.

PBS

PBS  Newshour summarized the recent heat waves–but didn’t mention flooding–and briefly mentioned that scientists connect the heat to climate change. There was also a story on the social and economic impact of climate change in Afghanistan. These were on-air pieces, not web-only articles. WNET, New York’s PBS station, has produced a series on climate change, airing through July, although none of the topics appear to address the context of current weather.

BBC

BBC’s website has posted several climate-related stories this month, but none directly addressed current extreme weather as an aspect of climate change.

The Weather Channel

You’d think so, but nope. There were some climate-related articles earlier in the year, though.

Accuweather

Nope, not either. There are several stories about climate topics, but none about the context of July’s weather. There is a video about the heat wave listed under the “Climate Change” heading, but it doesn’t mention climate change.

NPR

NPR has a series on climate change that has been airing through July, but does not address the context of July’s weather. Neither do the several other climate-related stories on the site.

The New York Times

The New York Times has published several interesting climate-related articles, but none focus on contextualizing the current weather–at least one article on current natural disasters did briefly acknowledge the role of climate change, though.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post published an editorial calling for workplace protections from heat in light of climate change, though it did not mention current weather events.

USA TODAY

USA TODAY has an excellent article on climate change in Pakistan, and an article about a study showing that humans have definitely made summers hotter. And then there was its aforementioned piece on suicide rates and an article with some very bad climate news. But nothing contextualizing the weather. Their article summarizing recent floods and fires and droughts does not mention climate change.

Thin Coverage

Basically, unless you’re watching CNN (and this is assuming that CNN broadcast something similar to its article–it might not have), you will have missed the big story about climate this July so far, unless you connect the dots yourself, or go beyond the mainstream media. PBS and the New York Times each acknowledged the connection between current disaster and climate change, but both mentions were easy to miss. PBS used language distancing itself even then, quoting unnamed scientists, rather than simply reporting the scientific fact (if they treated meteorology that way, they’d say “scientists claim that much of the Earth was unusually got this week.”)

The big question–whether the extreme weather this July has been unusual, or just run-of-the-mill for a variable planet–was nowhere addressed. Nowhere.

I’m struck by a couple of things. First, PBS and NPR are not outliers on this particular question. Neither is Fox News. Though these organizations may have real editorial differences, neither lived up to stereotype this time. The reluctance to cover climate seems simply to be general.

Second, and perhaps more important, many of these organizations DID cover other climate-related stories well this month–but only in ways that framed the problem as something that happens in another place or another time or another context. Nobody addressed what should be the obvious question; is what’s happening this week, to me (or any of their target audience) part of the climate change story?

Is it any wonder the climate sanity movement has stalled when no one acknowledges that the problem is personal?

Let’s Get Personal

The news is full of record-breaking heat-waves, torrential rains, mandatory evacuations because of wildfire, and the remnants of Hurricane Beryl just hit Dominica–which wouldn’t be so bad, since the storm had weakened considerably, except a lot of people there are still living in houses without real roofs since Hurricane Maria last year. All pretty normal, these days. But instead of the usual big-picture posts I usually make on these subjects (such as this one and this one and this one), I’d like to talk for a bit about someone I actually know.

I haven’t asked his permission to write about this, so I’ll keep his identity strictly under wraps–but he’s a real person, not  composite or a hypothetical character.

He’s a farmer. He has a very large farm which he typically puts into corn and soybeans, and then a cover crop in the winter. The corn and soybeans mostly become animal feed. He participates in a number of conservation programs, though he does not use organic methods. He usually makes a pretty good living for himself.

This year will likely be an exception.

In the spring, he got his corn planted, but then it all washed away in a series of torrential rains. So, he re-planted his corn, and started planting his soybeans. Then a serious drought developed and his crops are dying all over again. And, because of a technicality, much of what he has lost is not going to be eligible for crop insurance. Planting costs money and takes time (a lot of time–it’s a big farm), but he can’t not plant, despite expecting a total loss now on all his crops, because otherwise he won’t be eligible for the cover crop program. So he expects to lose money this year, and there’s not a whole lot he can do about it.

Since he normally makes a good living, one bad year is not going to break him. He’ll be ok. But the situation is a giant headache, and of course there is always the risk that multiple forms of bad luck could happen at once. He’s vulnerable right now, and that sort of vulnerability is never fun.

The spring floods were pretty definitely climate change-related, but otherwise I have no idea if this year has been a statistical anomaly relative to the historical average for his region. And I don’t intend to try to figure that out because it’s not my point.

My point is that, regardless of cause, this is what the economic repercussions of frequent extreme weather looks like–one problem following on another before you’ve quite caught up. And climate change does mean that years like this can be expected to happen more frequently. How many bust years can one farmer handle in a row? I don’t know.

One farmer having a bad year is a problem for his (or her) family and friends, but neither floods nor droughts happen to just one person at a time. Whole regions of increased crop failure stresses the crop insurance system and the food distribution system. In this case, we might see the price of chicken go up, since the birds have less available feed this year. The United States is wealthy enough that we can absorb the economic cost collectively, and those of us who are not friends with farmers will likely not notice the difference, but the cost is still real.

Given enough such costs, often enough, our absorptive capacity will eventually be compromised.

This is climate change.

 

Putting Heat in Context

Hi,

I am busy and tired and I can’t think of much to say right now. But it has not missed my attention that parts of Arizona hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit again. People are posting photos online of weird stuff melting in the heat.  I wrote about this same thing last year. At least six people have died in this heat wave, in other states (none reported in Arizona itself). But remember that heat stroke keeps killing days, weeks, even years after the heat wave is over. We won’t hear about those deaths in the news. We won’t learn their names. But think about those people as the days and weeks and years go by, please.

How Heat Hurts

I got heat exhaustion today. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual occurrence for me–I seem to be unusually susceptible. I don’t know why. Heat exhaustion is one of several types of heat-related illnesses. It is not, in itself, normally dangerous, but can progress to heat stroke, which can kill you.

Heat is a matter of weather—but it is also a matter of climate. Obviously, global warming means more hot days, but the increase doesn’t work quite the way intuition says it should. Intuitively, an average warming of, say, one degree Fahrenheit, should add one degree on to typical daily temps. So if your normal summer day was 90 degrees, now it’s 91 degrees. Not a big difference. But that’s not how it works.

As I have addressed before, a small increase in average temperature results in a large increase in the frequency of heat waves. This is because there is a well-established link between rarity and severity across many different types of variation, from body height to intelligence to air temperature. A slight increase above average (a few degrees, a few inches….) translates into a dramatic decrease in frequency of occurrence. How often do you see people who are six feet tall? Now often do you see people who are seven feet tall? The difference seems larger than what a mere twelve inches would imply.

A hotter normal means that severe heat waves that used to be very rare become common-place, while the human vulnerability to heat injury remains roughly the same.

My illness today is not particularly a climate change story–it was not one of those events that make it obvious normal has changed. Hot days in mid-June are not new for Maryland. But the experience did inspire me to do some reading about how heat stroke actually works—more people die from heat than from all other natural disasters combined. I decided I wanted to know more about what happens in the body when it gets hot.

Please note that I’m skipping over issues like how to recognize and treat heat-related problems. For that information, look up a public health website maintained by a reputable medical institution

Definitions

When I received emergency medical training years ago, I learned that heat exhaustion is essentially a form of aggravated dehydration—the body is not hotter than it should be, but keeping cool is taking too much effort, including loss of so much water through sweat that blood volume drops. The symptoms are mostly the body’s attempt to compensate for lost blood volume in order to keep adequate blood flow to the brain. Heat injury and then heat stroke, in contrast, result when the body’s cooling system fails (sometimes because dehydration has become critical and the sweat response shuts off—when a person who should be sweating isn’t, that’s a very bad sign) and body temperature rises uncontrollably. Doctors then have hours or even minutes to act before the patient literally cooks to death.

Like most simple explanations, this one is not quite right. For example, brain damage in heat stroke is not caused by the brain tissue heating up, as I’d been led to believe–instead, excessive heat causes the blood/brain barrier to become leaky, allowing substances into the brain that should not be there, and that causes damage. Heat stroke, though triggered by heat (either through passive exposure to high temperature or to excessive exercise in hot weather or under too much clothing), actual injury—and often death—is not the direct result of the body cooking. After all, cooking occurs at specific temperatures (that’s why recipes work), but the temperature at which heat injury occurs is variable. There are documented cases of people surviving core temperatures above 107 degrees Fahrenheit, but there are also many cases of people dying at much lower temperatures. The body is a complex system. Heat-related injury and death are the result of complex responses to heat, not the heat itself.

The information in this post, except where noted, is taken from a document produced–or at least presented–by the US Military (service members are at high risk for heat stroke, therefore the military is interested in the issue). The “report date” of the PDF is listed as 2012, although since it is evidently a chapter in a longer book, I don’t know if the report date is earlier or later than the copyright date of the book. I don’t know how old this information is. It’s a dense read, but I’ve attempted to summarize the main points below.

How Heat Stroke Works

Not everyone is equally vulnerable to heat stroke. There are long lists of circumstances that create higher risk, so many that it might seem everybody must belong to at lest one of them—but it’s important to note that some risk factors are a matter of choice (running marathons on hot days) and some are not (being very young, very old, already ill, or poor). There are obvious social justice issues here, as I’ve discussed before.

Interestingly, several risk factors do not involve simple vulnerability to heat (as in our marathon runner, or a home-bound elderly person without an air conditioner) but rather impairments of the body’s ability to respond. A sunburn or a heat rash can impair the body’s ability to cool itself, for example. Illness or inflammation (e.g., pneumonia) makes heat stroke more likely. Heart problems, certain medications, or low potassium or sodium levels also either make heat stroke more likely or more dangerous. These facts alone should suggest the medical complexity of the problem.

Heat stroke is also a much more drawn out process than the idea of cooking would imply. Literal cooking ceases as soon as the object being cooked cools, but heat stroke isn’t over when the victim’s core temperature is brought back to normal. If he or she lives long enough, the bodily changes initiated by the heat will continue to play out. The patient will probably run a fever (which actually helps the body heal), and may also go through periods of abnormally low body temperature.  Kidney failure will probably occur between two and 24 hours after the initial collapse. The liver will likely fail after 24 to 48 hours. Mortality rates often rise about a month after mass heat stroke events (like heat waves), after patients have been discharged. The risk of dying from cardiovascular, kidney, or liver disease can remain elevated for 30 years. There may be long-term cognitive impairment. And since many illnesses or deaths are either never recognized as related to a patient’s heat-stroke history, or never reported as such, the true prevalence of these problems is likely much higher than the data we have indicate. There has been little research done on how these long-term problems happen, and no one really knows what to do about it yet.

The bottom line is that the number of people who die of a heat wave is much higher than the number of people who die in a heat wave.

Heat stroke is actually several processes, although the whole story is not yet clear even to scientists.

The dominant process may actually be an immune response called Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS). This is the same–or at least very similar–to what happens when an infection enters the bloodstream, a condition called sepsis or, less technically, “blood poisoning.” Its symptoms include fever and a whole series of both helpful and non-so-helpful biochemical changes.

Heat-induced SIRS is actually not caused directly by heat. Instead, when the body redirects more blood flow to the skin (heat stroke victims are typically bright red), the internal organs necessarily get less. Insufficient blood flow can damage the gut lining, causing it to leak endotoxin into the blood. The endotoxin, in turn, triggers SIRS–if severe enough, the endotoxin or SIRS (I’m actually not clear which–it looks as though scientists might not be sure, either), destroys the major vital organs, causing death.

Injection of endotoxin alone (into animals) triggers the clinical symptoms of heat stroke.

Another important process is DIC, which stands for Disseminated Introvascular Coagulation. Essentially, the blood starts clumping up, leaving the blood remaining in circulation way too thin. DIC can be caused either by tissue damage (sepsis is listed as a common cause, suggesting that DIC can be caused by SIRS–the immune response I just described–although that is not clear to me from the article) or by direct heat injury to the vascular system.  Besides the real risk of bleeding to death, DIC also causes, or helps cause other problems associated with heat stroke.

DIC can cause kidney failure, for example. But kidney failure can the proteins released by muscles damaged by SIRS, or by heat toxicity itself.  It can be difficult to tell which problems are causes and which are results.

Heat stress is one of several possible triggers for the release of cytokines, a class of messenger proteins that in some circumstances are a necessary part of healing–but experimental injection of these proteins triggers heat stroke symptoms including excessive body heat. In other words, the body doesn’t just get sick because it gets too hot—it also gets hot because it’s sick. Exactly what role cytokines play in actual heat stroke isn’t known, yet, but cytokines are involved in many of the processes and subprocesses of heat stroke.

There are several possible treatments for heat stroke being developed based on this more detailed understanding of the malady, but so far, heat stroke is much easier to prevent than to treat. Prevention consists not just of staying cool, but also in becoming adequately acclimatized–general good health and fitness, plus a recent history of being uncomfortably but not dangerously hot fairly often dramatically increase the body’s ability to safely withstand heat. In other words, HAVING a working air conditioner can save your life, but using it often (hiding from summer heat) puts you more at risk for those times when you do have to get by without it–if, for example, there is a power outage during a heat wave.

So?

All of this might sound like unrepentant geeking out on my part. I am, in fact, an unrepentant geek, but my primary motivation for this post is, as I said, to take a close look at a malady likely to become ever more familiar, both to us individually and as a matter of public health policy.

One study that looked at the UK has predicted that, as a result of global warming, the incidence of death from heat stroke in that country will double by 2050. That’s only just over thirty years away.

 

 

 

Clear and Present Heat

At least eight people are dead, countless others injured, victims of a preventable disaster that has been exacerbated by politics.

I’m not talking about another shooting.

I’m talking about the heat wave in the American Southwest. Temperatures have reached above 120 degrees, F. Step outdoors into something like that, and you could develop heat stroke in a couple of minutes just by standing around. Heat stroke, remember, is a life-threatening condition in which the body’s cooling system fails and the organs literally begin to cook. These aren’t just unusual conditions for the United States, which is not, after all, tropical, this heat wave would be significant anywhere in the world.

The detail that really jumped out at me was the plane that couldn’t land in Phoenix because the pilot was afraid the hot runway would explode the tires. It’s not that hot weather has never impacted aviation before, but it’s hardly common practice in the US.

Is this global warming? Wrong question, of course, but yes. As I’ve discussed before, even a small increase in average global temperature yields a dramatic increase in the frequency of extreme heat waves, because of a simple quirk in the way the frequency of anything works—extreme events are typically rare, and the most extreme events are exceedingly rare. A rising average temperature makes triple-digit temps slightly closer to normal and therefore a lot less rare.

And we’ve known about global warming long enough now that if the world had acted quickly and decisively back then, our average temperature might not be so high now. This heat wave might still have happened, but it would be less likely. Those eight people might still be alive today.

Lest my comparison to a mass shooting seem exploitive, let me remind you that more people die in the US every year from heat than from all other natural disasters combined and that thousands more die from medical conditions likely exacerbated by heat. The affected are disproportionately the very young, the very old, the ill, the disabled, and the poor. In other words, the vulnerable among us are dying at a shocking and tragic rate from causes that American energy policy is unquestionably making worse—and making worse knowingly.

This is a human rights violation.

The irony in all of this is that the American Southwest would not have so many people in it today were it not for air conditioners. Seriously, with the invention of air conditioners, huge numbers of people, especially the elderly, migrated to the warmer tier of this country, a redistribution of voters that was pivotal in the election of Ronald Regan (who then took the solar panels off of the White House and famously tried to claim that trees cause pollution). Air conditioners have a terrible environmental impact, and not just through their electoral influence. They use vast amounts of electricity (often generated by burning fossil fuel) and leak powerful synthetic greenhouse gasses as well. And many of the people who moved south because of air conditioners are elderly or ill, and thus at higher risk for heat-related injury. And cities build with air conditioners in mind, such as Phoenix, Arizona, often lack other proven heat-reducing technologies, such as public green spaces and cooling architecture.

I’m not trying to blame the victim here on an individual level; I’m saying that heat waves and their associated deaths do not just happen. They aren’t uncontrollable, random events. There is a degree of randomness, yes, and no one can control the weather, exactly, but we’re looking at the results of energy policy, community planning, even architecture, all developed and carried out as if global warming did not exist when we know perfectly well that it does.

Vote for environmentalists. Seriously. Let’s do this.

It’s HOT!

Ok, it’s cooling down slightly now, but according to our home weather station, the high of the day was 93 degrees Fahrenheit. In the shade. The heat index reached 110 degrees, likewise in the shade. And we have not used the air conditioner.

No, we are not masochists. We actively manage the temperature inside our house by closing windows and drawing blinds, and it’s been at least ten degrees cooler indoors for most of the day–the temperature’s starting to climb in here now, we’re at 85 degrees, but fans and the option to take a cold shower make it bearable. In a few hours, when the outside temps come down, we’ll open up the windows and doors and cool down the house again and I will go for a walk. We put off vigorous physical activity, or anything that could heat up the house, like cooking, until the evening.

People used to live like this, adjusting daily activity levels to cope with the heat and using architecture, such as high ceilings, thermal mass, or, as in our case, excellent insulation, to keep living spaces as cool as possible. In some communities, in some parts of the world, such methods are still the standard. All our neighbors, on the other hand, seem to be running their air conditioners.

Air conditioners are a problem.

Not only do air conditioning systems use a lot of electricity–about 20% of US residential electrical consumption goes towards air conditioning alone. Even more seriously, the coolant inside air conditioners is a very serious greenhouse gas, sometimes thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide.  I want to go through that part in more depth, because it can be confusing.

Air conditioners (and refrigerators and freezers) work on the principle that the temperature of a gas is related to its density. These machines all feature a closed loop of some kind of gas. At the beginning of the cycle, the gas is compressed, making it hot. The hot gas then flows through a radiator-like coil, where it cools off (and condenses into a liquid). Then it is re-expanded–and now it’s much cooler. The process is something like wringing out a dish towel, squeezing the water out so that when the cloth expands again it carries much less water. The cooled gas then pulls heat out of the room (or out of the refrigerator) and then goes through the cycle again. The coolant itself could be any of several different kinds of gas, but for decades chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the standard because they’re non-toxic. Unfortunately, they are also greenhouse gasses and ozone-layer eaters.

When CFCs’ role in ozone depletion was discovered, the world stopped using them, as per the Montreal Protocol, although some CFCs lingered in older machines. They were replaced by HCFCs, which were less dangerous for the ozone, but worse for the climate. HCFCs were then replaced by HFCs, which do not damage the ozone at all, but are still very bad for the climate. The problem is that the Montreal Protocol only protects the ozone; there is no equivalent to protect the climate and thus no legal mechanism to limit the use of HFCs.

One complicating factor is that all of these chemicals can be called Freon, a brand name that covers multiple chemicals. So it’s easy to hear a lot of conflicting stories on whether Freon has been banned or not; the truth is that some Freons have been and others have not.

Refrigerant systems do not vent coolant when they are functioning normally; running your air conditioner does not release the gas. However, systems can leak. Worse, once the gas is created, it will almost certainly get into the atmosphere eventually. Freons don’t biodegrade, so no matter how much time goes by, they are still a threat to the climate. Choosing not to run your air conditioner, as we do, does not actually help with Freon. Only not getting the machine in the first place does that. But not running the air conditioner does cut down on electricity use, and that matters.

Climate-neutral refrigerants do exist, but have not yet won regulatory acceptance. There are cooling systems advertized as “green,” but usually because they use less electricity. That matters, too, but efficient air-conditioners, refrigerators, and freezers still contain those powerful greenhouse gasses. Keeping those systems in good repair, so that they do not leak, is important, all of this, efficiency, preventing leaks, everything, is all about making a situation less bad. Only switching to climate-friendly coolants–or giving up the machines–will solve the problem.

For individuals, efficient machines are a good intermediate step, but for society, they are a drawback. For one thing, the more efficient machines get, the more people use them–often resulting in even more electricity use. For another, cheap air conditioning leads to dependence on artificial coolness. For example, huge numbers of elderly people have retired to sun-belt cities. Not only is this demographic more vulnerable to heat-related injury and illness, but those cities have been developed with air-conditioning in mind–without architectural and community-planning details known to bring down the heat, like high ceilings, good night-time ventilation, and community green spaces. The result is a series of intense heat-islands filled with people who need air conditioning as a matter of life and death.

So what’s the value of an individual family, like ours, going without air conditioning on a day like today?

It does reduce electricity use, sometimes a lot. Just as important–or maybe more importantly–it’s a good way to remember that air conditioning really isn’t necessary much of the time, a way to remember that we as a society can turn the machines off, except for occasional therapeutic use. If going without air condition seems difficult, just remember–by turning on the chillers we’re actually making our days even hotter.

Indoors and outdoors, the temperature is now 86 degrees–outside, the temperature is falling. It’s time to open all the windows and doors.

 

The Ecology of Predator and Prey

This is another article I wrote in college about coping with various kinds of worry and grief, including that related to global warming and other environmental problems. I am not personally grief-stricken at the moment. Instead, I am tired and pressed for time, having just returned from a few days’ vacation. Hopefully this essay will prove food for thought.

Just before Yule this past year, I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine, Robert, while doing some sewing. I turned to do something in the kitchen only to discover upon my return that my cat, her ulcerated tumors bleeding again, had covered my workspace, including my dress pattern, with irregular, red spots. I hustled around trying to separate my patterns so they could dry and protect my fabric without interrupting the flow of conversation, whose subject seemed bizarrely civilized under the circumstances; we were discussing the genome of the grape and the proper ways to serve different kinds of wine while I stared, transfixed, at the red, Rorschached blotches like footprints, stalking, taking, slowly, my cat.

Here, observe, three views of life on Earth.

One:

Saturday morning in January, warm, hot as May; the breeze moves, gentle, as I stand on the sidewalk waiting for the bus by the Ethan Allen furniture store and St. Phillips Lutheran Church, chickweeds growing in delicate riot by my feet, so far so good, but also dandelions, clover, greening grass, while the trees stand mute above like skeletons. This isn’t right; though the air is pleasant on my simple skin I can’t enjoy it. This weather is as apocalyptic as last summer’s heat waves when I lay, sick and dreaming, too hot to work, all thought, all feeling driven off by the eternal, heavy, heat, save one; this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, but this is the way it is going to be, more often now, because of us. A funeral procession drives by, headed by slowly flashing police escort, dozens and dozens of cars of mute, hard-eyed people. Most of the cars have only a single passenger, or at most, two. An oil truck cuts through the line to make a delivery to the strip mall behind me, its presence as lyric to the day as a line of poetry. I wonder, whose funeral is it?

Two:

My cat wants to go out, and I can deny her nothing, except for all the things I have denied her and all the things it simply isn’t mine to give; this leash, for example, is a compromise between her exuberance and her body, too sick to take a rabies vaccine. She has never gotten fully comfortable outside and never developed her body to its feline potential; as far as I know, she has never climbed more than a few feet up a tree. Probably, she never will, now. Maybe she might have if I had simply let her out and hoped she didn’t get bitten, or maybe I should have gone out with her more, for longer. Who am I to draw this line here? Who am I to bring a cat in out of the sun just because I have something else I need or want to do? These are judgments I do not feel competent to make and I never have felt competent to make them through these long years of one kind of leash or another hanging between us, yet make them I must. Nothing that I gave her could ever have been enough to absolve her of further desserts. We walk, and she pauses to scent-mark the bottom twig on the lilac bush, rubbing it with her nose, her gums, sniffing it delicately. I sniff it after her and compare the scent to that of one higher up, above the reach of cats and foxes. I fancy I can detect a difference. She stalks a bird in the ivy bed, and I flatten myself out behind her, trying to move forward without frightening her quarry, giving her as much range as possible with the leash, my arm, and the length of my outstretched body. The bird must have flown while neither of us noticed, for now it is no longer there. The day is fine and high and blue, and she doesn’t seem to know she’s sick. Or, at least she doesn’t favor herself, she goes full-bore, always, along her small, plucky way. I mean, what else does she have to do? It’s not like she’s going to get better, it isn’t like she has time to spare in self-pity. She just plays the cards she’s dealt. This animal is a carnivore, whose kind prune and in so pruning, create the reproductive exuberance of small rodents and birds. Fed on organic ground beef through the agency of human loyalty and partisanship, this cat has lived almost nine years. In that time, how many steers have died young for her?

Three:

Walking through campus I can see that the remaining old elms are dying–they have brownish yellow stripes running up the grey and furrowed trunks. My Dad told me about Dutch elm disease when I was little; I have never known a time when its inundations were not part of my history, but as I’ve been watching, over the better part of thirty years, the pandemic has progressed and more of the great cambium fountains have come down. When I was little, I remember, the elms met over the walkways, across the greens. I remember walking, on Community Day, a visceral memory, the smell of cotton candy and funnel cake, a grown-up hand—whose? I only remember the hand—in mine, and above an arching green roof full of multicolored balloons escaped from the careless hands of other children. The greens are open, now, the places of most of the giants taken by smaller trees, another kind of elm, I think, their stems slowly thickening into adulthood. My friend, Robert, is an ecologist who is busy mapping the community types of my state. When I brought him here, on the way to a coffee shop, he remarked that the campus probably counted as Modified Meadow or Modified Hardwood Forest. He’s grasping at straws; this isn’t altered, this is new: American Collegiate, typified by dying elms, manicured grass and a fauna of Frisbee players, grey squirrels, and playful dogs. No matter how aberrant this slow death of trees seems to me, the elms would never have died in such numbers if they hadn’t been planted unnaturally thick to begin with.

Humans are capable of a certain impartial perspective, but at heart we’re partisan animals living in a non-partisan world. Global warming and human-associated habitat destruction are surely no more radical than the asteroid that marked the KT boundary. Life recovered, growing even more diverse in time, and will again; nothing stays the same for long. Similarly, the birthrate of any given species is adjusted to its mortality rate; if it takes three dozen mice born per one that makes it to adulthood to keep even with the hunger of cats, then that is the number that mother mice produce, yet every pup is an individual. One could say each mouse deserves a full and happy life, just as every cat does, but it is the nature of both cats and mice, in their fullness, to produce more than can so live; to lower the mortality rate would require lowering the birthrate which would change the nature of the animals’ lives. Anyway, which individuals don’t get born in that case? Isn’t it better to live for at least a little while? Like climate change and disaster, death and even personal tragedy are just part of how things work; if these things did not exist, life as a whole would be different and probably the poorer for it.

Yet we are partisan, and we must behave in partisan ways; we act, we do one thing rather than another, and so we must make choices based on some judgment, some assessment of value, even if the value is a purely private priority. Mass extinctions happen, and in the grand scheme of things may not actually be a problem, but I must throw my small weight either for this one or against it, and I do not want a mass extinction on my watch, on my conscience. Plants, animals, and diseases do invade each other’s territory; humans may be causing an unprecedented invasion, but we are not causing the only one. Communities adapt and change. Diversity will recover. Nonetheless, I want my trees not to die of some imported disease, even if their gothic branches were themselves an artificial presence. And I want my Gertie to have not had cancer to begin with, I don’t care if she’s no better or worse than a mouse or a beef steer–or me, for that matter, I wanted this one, this particular one, to get the proverbial sun, moon and stars. That I, a mortal human, couldn’t reach them for her does not reduce the injustice any less.

We live in a world of change and transformation; one thing eats another, one thing subsumes another, one thing takes another’s place. Even if it were possible to pick sides, once and for all, on moral grounds, it would not be possible on physical grounds, for not only does the success of a predator mean the failure of a prey animal–and vice versa–but it is the very opposition, the very dynamism of the system, that makes the system in the first place. Under whatever happy facade of civilization or rationalization, we are incontrovertibly members of a system where things break and change and die as an inevitable matter of course, without violating the integrity of the whole. Under whatever veneer of educated perspective, however, we remain organisms who fight and try to win.