What’s the climate like where you live? Do you have four seasons like we have here in New Hampshire, or do you live somewhere that is hot and dry, such as Arizona? If the latter is the case, you may be one of those humans who love hot weather and do not mind doing activities or working outdoors, because it allows you to sweat off a few pounds. That is a mindset I have never understood.
Hot weather has never been kind to me. As a child, I fainted in a hot, stuffy church one summer Sunday morning and had to be revived with smelling salts. The experience gave me a headache and made me feel nauseated for hours afterward.
Like my fellow Baby Boomers growing up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we made it through the occasional summer hot spell with the help of Kool aid and popsicles. Some nights when our second story bedrooms were especially hot and stuffy, we would lie out on the front lawn looking at the stars until late at night.
When my husband, Tom, was in the army and stationed at Ft. Rucker, Alabama, we lived in a trailer park off post in a town called Enterprise. The trailer we rented was air conditioned, so to speak, by virtue of a huge, noisy window unit situated in the living room but meant to cool that space as well as the two bedrooms, one on either end of that long, rectangular tin can.
There was not much to do in Enterprise back in 1970 once you had driven the two blocks of downtown and photographed the Boll Weevil Monument for yourself, though there was a better picture in a back issue of National Geographic Magazine. The boll weevil was revered in the deep south because its destruction of cotton ushered in the peanut industry.
Tom was an avid golfer and spent a good deal of time on the golf course on post. He tried to teach me how to play, but I had no talent for the game and not much interest in learning. It did not take long for me to realize I did not like the hot, humid climate of Alabama either. But one hot summer day we decided to play a short round of golf together out of sheer boredom. While on the course, I began to develop a headache and became sick to my stomach. My husband became alarmed at how red my face was and decided to take me home to cool off. As we passed the bank down the street from the trailer park, we noticed the temperature read 100 degrees on the marquee. I couldn’t wait to get home to that big, noisy air conditioner, because our car was not air conditioned, and the hot air blowing in through the windows did nothing to help me cool down.
Imagine my horror when we entered the trailer and realized the power was out. It stayed off for a few more long hours. I survived, but the experience left me feeling physically sick for days after the power was restored.
Seven years later, U. S. Steel transferred Tom to Birmingham, Alabama. His other two choices for transfer were Gary, Indiana—filthy back then from pollution from the steel mills—and Dallas, Texas—just too flat and dry. We already knew what to expect in Alabama, and the landscape reminded us of Pennsylvania.
We knew that winters in Alabama were mild with very little snow. We were ready for a break from snow and ice. However, summers could be brutally hot. But by then everything was air conditioned, including most cars. My husband continued to play golf on Saturdays, while I stayed indoors as much as possible between late May and September. That was difficult for me, since I was a biologist in one of the most biologically diverse of all the fifty states.
I couldn’t always avoid going outside in the summer. In June of 1993 I participated in a teacher training program for environmental science. One week of the two-week program took place at the outdoor classroom we were establishing for our county. It was wonderful to host teachers from several surrounding counties at the 21-acre Penney Farm, a former cotton farm the owner leased to our school district.
It was really, really hot that June. Each morning before heading to Penney Farm I filled a Coleman water jug with water and ice. I drank water all day and kept a wet bandana around my neck. And without fail, each day I developed a terrible headache from the heat and had to sit down to rest while the other teachers were conducting fun activities.
Why am I sharing these stories of my personal struggle with heat? It is because the world is warming at an alarming rate, and millions of people will suffer miserably in the coming years from heat-related illness and death. I feel their pain already.
In his latest book, Falter, writer Bill McKibben describes what happens when we burn fossil fuels in our cars, factories, residential furnaces, and backyard grills. Put simply, the carbon released from burning combines with the oxygen in the air to form carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that is able to trap the heat from the sun that would normally be radiated back into space. The air gets hotter, like the air in a greenhouse–or like the air in a vehicle with all the windows closed.
Bill uses jaw-dropping examples to illustrate his point about just how much heat our continued burning of fossil fuels is generating.
He writes, “The extra heat that we trap near the planet because of the carbon dioxide we’ve spewed is equivalent to the heat from 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day, or four each second.” (p. 22) If almost daily news reports of infants and pets being left in hot cars to die does not wake us up, the idea of 400,000 bombs exploding daily should.
What horrors await us if we don’t do something now to roll back emissions? Will we wake up and act when endangered humans are involved rather than endangered polar bears or penguins—those expendable “other” species?
Here is what already is happening:
- Record high temperatures and heat waves killing thousands from heat stroke. The most vulnerable are young children, the elderly, and people with existing medical problems such as heart disease and diabetes.
- Crop failures that endanger the global food supply. And the most vulnerable people can no longer count on fishing to survive, because globally, fish are migrating toward cooler water at the poles.
- Increases in violent crime. There is a known correlation between our warming climate and violent human behavior.
- Vast areas of the earth, especially those closest to the Equator, becoming uninhabitable. When even nighttime temperatures no longer cool below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, humans will simply not be able to survive.
As all these events begin to unfold, millions will be forced to endure the physical and mental stress of climate migration.
My mother was fond of a proverb popularized by Harry Truman, who served as U. S. President from 1945 to 1953, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
Of course, when President Truman said that, he was referring to the (political) will and fortitude required to rebuild the world after WWII. In today’s world, the proverb applies literally to heat. Millions, perhaps billions, will have to get out of that kitchen near the Equator in order to survive.
In the course of human evolution, we have developed the ability to deal with an immediate threat, such as confronting a bear on the Appalachian Trail. We have our flight-or-fight response programmed in our brains. What we lack is the psychological ability to deal with a problem as big and complex as climate change. This is obvious, given that the oil companies knew about the dangers of climate change for over thirty years. They actually looked forward to the arctic ice melting in order to make extraction easier. They had no moral compass. They appear to still lack one.
Finger pointing will not help now. We must all act, because it will take a Herculean effort to save ourselves. A well-meaning friend recently advised me to stop worrying about things I cannot do anything about, like climate change. She meant well, knowing that climate change and our lack of response as a species is what keeps me up at night. But hers is the exact mindset that will spell the end of our species.
We have only a small window of time to act, and we must use it to stop the fossil fuel industry from taking us all out in miserable ways—heat stroke, starvation, disease, violence—you name it. The extent of the possible human misery to come is staggering. And it is avoidable.
Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg has remarked acidly that we are way beyond recycling and turning off the lights when we leave a room. We must halt the ever-increasing emissions if we wish to continue living.
Recently I read The Uninhabitable Earth—Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019, Tim Duggan Books). He likens what we are doing to our atmosphere globally to being in a garage with the door closed and the motor running. How long do you suppose we can continue this practice before we suffocate on the fumes?
For more information on the health effects of global climate change, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/effects/default.htm.