It so happened that the first articles, books and documentaries outlining what was then called the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming were coming to my attention just as Pittsburgh, where I lived, experienced several very hot spells during consecutive summers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So my comprehension of the eventual effects of this phenomenon was visceral as well as intellectual.
Because I was hot.
Really, really hot. It was hard to breathe, hard to sleep and hard to think straight. For the next few summers I had one window air conditioner in my apartment, bulky but not so heavy that I couldn’t move it. So during heat waves every evening I installed it in a bedroom window so I could sleep, and every morning I moved it to the window of my home office, so I could think. If that wasn’t enough, I would brave walking through the visible heat waves up the Murray Avenue hill to the ice-bath air conditioning of the Eat & Park. But none of these strategies erased the oppression of heat.
I saw what the heat did to other people, too. It made some people testy and even violent, others lethargic and dull. Or both, in unpredictable syncopation. It got scary, or at least the nagging source of low-level anxiety. Muscles tensed against the heat as they did against the winter cold, and the worst of it was wondering if it would ever end.
And so I saw a contour of the future. There would be a period during which society would be challenged to stop a mortal danger before it started to take effect, to address a crisis before it arrived. It was to be the challenge of human civilization’s evolution.
As I soon learned, it was crucial that it be done this way, because once the danger was obviously here and doing its damage, it would be too late to stop it completely, and harder to stop it from becoming much, much worse in the farther future, pretty much forever.
But even at first I realized there was another reason. Because once it started getting really, really hot, people weren’t going to think straight. They weren’t going to be able to act with clarity and energy. They weren’t going to have the same cool, calm and collected judgment, they would become prey to impulses and anger, and have fewer inhibitions against violence, anti-social and self-destructive behavior. Because they would be too damn hot. And things would get worse, because overheated people would make them worse.
All this turned out to be a little naïve, but basically and unfortunately coming true. It seems that it didn’t take actual heat to turn people into hotheads (although some bright underemployed statistician might try coordinating heat indexes with places that host heavy concentrations of climate crisis deniers and other angry extreme right fanatics.) Who needed heat when permission to entertain crude prejudices and crazed ideas from the unconscious, to name scapegoats and profess the counterfactual was given by invisible prophets and very visible demagogues, and amplified by new and powerful social media to form electronically connected cults and mobs?
So now, largely because society has failed for more than 20 years to take the necessary action to address the causes and effects of climate disruption, the heat—as predicted, if a bit ahead of schedule—is on. At this moment, the effects are coalescing.
July saw mountain glaciers collapse, most visibly in Italy where people were killed in the avalanche. Meanwhile, Greenland ice is melting so fast and so much with enough water to drown all of West Virginia. Apocalyptic forest fires burn in Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere in Europe. A decade or so ago, Portugal made world news with its forest fires, but more area has been burned this summer than then, and there’s too much competition for attention for it to be much noticed.
But strikingly common at the moment is quite simply the heat. England (which is farther north than any US city) experienced its hottest days and nights possibly in history. Excessive heat ranged across Europe, from Greece and North Africa in the south to the Netherlands. Several cities in Germany recorded historic heat highs.
It’s hot around the world. Large areas of southern China were gripped in heat for weeks, as well as parts of India and Pakistan. And so on.
Taken together, deaths directly attributable to heat counted so far are in the thousands, while UN officials and climate experts warn that this is all just the beginning, and that climate distortion will keep adding heat and its effects well past the middle of this century, and if nothing effective is done to deal with causes, it will be much worse for much longer.
Heat can kill directly through heat stroke and dehydration (heat being the primary weather-related cause of death in the US), but it damages the human body in a number of other ways. It seems science is just catching up on this, and so far hasn’t done much of a job warning the public.
As for effects on the brain, there’s this almost incredibly deadpan report published in the Guardian:
“It can be hard to think clearly when you’re too hot. Studies have shown that extreme heat can affect mental performance. Hot weather has been linked to reduced cognitive function, judgment errors and higher risk of occupational injury. At extremely high temperatures, the blood-brain barrier begins to break down. Proteins and ions accumulate in the brain, causing inflammation.
Many people report feeling irritable on hot days, and evidence suggests that extreme heat negatively affects mental health. A recent study in New York found that, on hot days, there were more emergency hospital visits due to substance abuse, mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and dementia. Another study linked rising temperatures to higher suicide rates.”
Several other effects include excessive fatigue, and the body simply shutting down. None of these should be big surprises to anybody who has endured a severe heat wave, though there’s also short-term denial and bravado, and the tendency to forget the trauma that the body nevertheless remembers.
So consider the implications when the number of hot days per year increases, and the hottest days are hotter, until the coolest day in a future decade may be equal to the hottest days in this decade. Somewhere along the way, just addressing the effects of climate disruption would normally become a major societal concern, even if such efforts go under different names to soothe the deniers. This would be a normal function of a working society.
But these efforts will take planning, gathering resources, agreeing on ends and means, and working together, to deal with the hot present and to prevent climate disruption from getting worse. Such efforts will need to be multiple, because these effects affect everything, from emergency services to melting pavement, frying electrical infrastructure and toxic air. These efforts will require cool heads and calm hearts. But every hotter year that gets more difficult.
It’s work that needs to be done now, but there's still resilience and surplus resources in the system, so when the heat wave ends, it's possible to forget about it and go on more or less as normal, momentarily focusing on the next shiny and distracting object. But as our society loses this elasticity of resilience by using up its surplus and suddenly non-renewing resources, and dealing with multiple emergencies becomes overwhelming, it will get more and more difficult to ignore it. But recent experience strongly suggests some will try.
Absent changes that anticipate these problems (like a new economic model that prioritizes paying for efforts to address climate disruption, and perhaps even prioritizing basic sufficiency for all, while making billionaires impossible), as the systems of production, transportation, communication and simple governance break down, the challenges will be even greater. It will be no time for deniers to be in charge, and it certainly will be a dangerous time for hotheads to be influential, let alone calling the shots.
People generally underestimate the vulnerability of systems and resources that seem to work automatically, like the light going on when you flip the switch. Especially in a society that depends on global supply chains, the vulnerabilities are many.
But I also worry that everyone underestimates how hard it may be to keep a cool head in an overheated world. Our best chance may be to address these problems, the causes and the effects of climate disruption, and set the pattern for addressing them, while the heat is not unrelenting for long periods. To use the visceral knowledge much of this country and the world is helplessly acquiring this summer to provide impetus for a future in which cooler heads may prevail.
Because if climate disruption remains inadequately addressed, the choices we face are not likely to be simply between this society and the same society in a hotter world, with the predictable winners and losers. The choices may well be between a society consciously addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption, and a society that falls into chaos and violence, long before much of the country becomes unlivable because of climate disruption effects.
This is a possibility not only within the US but around the world. If I’m lucky I won’t be around to see if I’m right, but unless climate disruption is addressed (especially in an equitable way), this planet may see in this century the ultimate disaster movie in reality : Hothouse Earth v. Nuclear Winter. If the hotheads have their way.
