Heatwaves all I think about is you
abandon all hope, ye who live here
I suspect that you can tell a lot about a person from the way they behave in a heatwave. Are you the sort of person who changes nothing about your daily routine — going to work and then back home unfettered and only occasionally remarking that, damn, it really is hot out. Or are you the sort of person who avoids the heatwave entirely, crouched inside somewhere near an air conditioner? More likely, you behave somewhere between these two poles.
There are variations of course, minor variations that say something about a person — how often you remark on the miserable heat. How often you check the weather/news of the weather on your phone. Who do you blame for all this? The Koch brothers? Your own environmental sins? Or do you blame nobody?
Whatever your behaviors during a heatwave, you’re about to start exhibiting them because the earth’s expected to hit a boil in the next few days. If you live in California or Arizona, you’re particularly screwed — temperatures are supposed to climb to over 120 degrees. This latest heatwave is the result of something called a Heat Dome, which unsurprisingly has roots in rising sea temperatures.
Anyway, this is just a thing that happens now. The earth is getting warmer and heatwaves sweep over the country every summer. Even if you stick your head in the sand and refuse to acknowledge global warming, your ass is getting hot. The last eight years were the hottest on record. Everybody is feeling it. In Europe, there were 61,672 heat-related deaths in last summer’s series of brutal heatwaves. In Italy, the rivers dropped so low that forgotten ancient Roman remains dried out on the river bottoms.
And Italy is boiling again this summer. There have already been heat-related deaths in the country. And — because Italy — they’ve named their current heatwave ‘Cerebus’ after the three-headed dog that Dante used in the Inferno.1 So yeah, things are awful. People are dying. The Texas heatwave earlier this summer killed thirteen people. Heatwaves are obviously natural disasters. So why don’t they feel like it?
We have this notion of natural disasters as cataclysmic events. We associate them with images — with palm trees turned upside-down like shredded umbrellas in hurricane winds. Sharks swimming through flooded highways. Mount Vesuvius burying Pompeii in pumice and ash. Tornados overturning trailers in Oklahoma. Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans in gulf water. But heatwaves offer none of these images. In a heatwave, well, it’s just hot outside.
The thing about a heatwave — or any natural disaster— is that we can’t do anything while we’re in the heat of it. Sure, you could donate to Greenpeace and familiarize yourself with Greta Thunberg’s ideology. But all that newfound activism doesn’t do you a damn bit of good when you’re boiling to death on the sidewalk. And climate change activists tend to vent their frustration with weird performance art bits like wearing matching t-shirts into museums and splattering red paint all over Monet watercolors. And that kind of behavior doesn’t get a lot of people to sympathize with their cause.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the argument against global warming: climate fluctuates. Some years it’s hotter (the earth is always hotter now) and some years its colder (the earth is never colder now). And, that’s bullshit, obviously, but for the purposes of this piece, it’s true — humanity has been suffering from heatwaves for centuries. The most famous of which was the Great Stink of 1858, when a heatwave cooked London’s River Thames into something the Londoners called Monster Soup. People walked around with handkerchiefs over their noses.
So, I guess this is just a thing that humanity is going to have to go through. It’s a thing that we’ve occasionally gone through before. But now, the difference is that there’s no through it. There’s no justification in saying “oh, well, I hope it doesn’t get so hot that people die next summer.”
Because it’s going to get so hot that people die next summer. And it’s going to happen the summer after that and the summer after that and the summer after that. Heatwaves are just part of life now. Yes, we have to do everything we can. We’ve got to transition to solar energy and end our dependence on fossil fuels. But, according to NOAA:
“if all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades as ocean currents bring excess heat stored in the deep ocean back to the surface. Once this excess heat radiated out to space, Earth’s temperature would stabilize.”
And so apparently, that’s another thing that we’ve got going for us — there’s excess heat stored in the deep ocean. That’s probably where Dante should have put his Inferno. It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve got it up here and, unlike Dante, we don’t even have a Virgil to guide us through hell. All we’ve got is Greta Thunberg.
P.S. — This week for The New Republic, I wrote about how right-wingers are already accusing Threads of censorship. Read it here. Or, don’t. whatever.
The Italians might be onto something here — why don’t we name our heatwaves? Would that grant them more legitimacy as natural disasters? We name our hurricanes and our tropical storms and our volcanoes. So why not start naming our heatwaves?