THIS IS NOT YOUR GRANDPARENTS' HEAT
Or your great³⁵⁰-grandparents' heat, either.
Reminder: I’m giving a special briefing on “The New Climate Foresight” this Friday. If climate is important in your work, or if you just want a handle on the latest thinking about anticipating discontinuity, this is for you.
Three hour live call, Friday, June 26th, on Zoom. Start Time: 12pm PDT // 3pm EST // 7pm GMT.
Personal Climate Strategy Workshop alumni and nonprofit discounts apply (see below for the discount code).
People who wonder if "discontinuity" isn't overstating the magnitude of the planetary crisis would do well to actually check the weather.
France just recorded the hottest day it’s ever had.
How unprecedentedly hot was it? Take Bordeaux: as meteorologist Jeff Barardelli notes, “Bordeaux’s high Monday of 41.8ºC (107ºF) falls on the extreme right tail, 3.6 Sigma with a return interval of 1-in-7000 years for June in a historical climate.” (Météo-France ended up clocking Bordeaux’s high temperature as 42.1ºC, or 108ºF.)
A one-in-7,000-year heat wave.
In other words, families in Western Europe could easily have lived there since a couple thousand years before the building of Stonehenge, and never lived through days as hot as these. If you gathered together that family’s last 350 generations or so, they’d probably agree 108ºF is not something they’d seen. It’s that kind of unprecedented.
And this blistering hot spell is just one in a barrage of historically unprecedented climate events we saw this month, extremes observed in a vast array of places and systems. There will be more next month — and every month to come for the rest of the lives of every person alive today.
In case you're wondering what the European heat wave is telling us, it's telling us that the five-decade struggle to limit global heating to a manageable level has failed. Now, we live in a world where the unprecedented is (and will be) increasingly common, but no “new normal” is coming — just wider and weirder unpatternings.
That, in turn, means the planetary crisis has eaten society.
Climate chaos and ecological upheaval are the context of every meaningful decision we make now. Even the climate movement itself has now been swallowed by the crisis, and changed. Ecology, decarbonization, and material sustainability have now become part of a vastly larger mission of discontinuity management: of climate defenses, reworked supply lines, preservation of soil and clean water, ecological restoration into an unpatterned future, the supported mass-relocation of millions of people — and a huge need to build housing and new infrastructure in the relatively safer places. Our entire future is in the belly of the beast, so to speak.1
But back to the heat.
The best guide I know of for thinking about extreme heat, its dangers, and why more and more of us will find ourselves struggling with unprecedentedly hot days is Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First. I recommend it in all my personal climate strategy classes and it’s outstanding.
(Jeff’s other books are also excellent, by the way.)
It is the convention, in the public discussion of heat risk, to compare new high temperatures to long-running norms, and describe the difference as the degree of vulnerability. This makes sense to a certain extent: the citizens of temperate cities like Paris, Seattle or Wellington are not used to very hot days, and often find themselves under-prepared, with fewer shade structures, buildings designed for breeze ventilation or air conditioners.
To the extent folks are reckoning with their heat risk at all, this is the problem most people in these cities are thinking about: how to be safer and more comfortable in the occasional heat wave. Staggering heat as something that just happens once in a while — like hail or locusts — and is now happening a little more frequently.
But the world we’re committed to now is something different, and the nature of hot is changing. More and more, we should be concerned not just with the relative dangers of heat, but the absolute threats of extreme temperatures and long, recurrent heatwaves, ones that are hard to handle — indeed that can kill thousands of people — even in places where heat is part of the culture and design of life.
We’re still figuring out what kinds of heatwaves (or “heatstorms,” a term it’s been suggested we use more to wake people up — if naming heatwaves doesn’t work) are possible: how hot they can get, how long they can last, how much night time high temperatures can linger, what the effects of drought and heat and pollution do to magnify each other and stress our bodies. But it’s really unlikely that any of this is going to be good news, in the sense that the problems are less severe than we think.
So heed the warnings. Install some sun protection. Plant some shade trees. Wear a hat. Buy an air conditioner, a good fan, a quality air filter — or all three. Hydrate. Take it easy in the middle of the day. Fill the bird bath. Check on elder neighbors.
Here in California, where big sleeper waves from time to time sweep people off the beach and out into the surf, we teach kids never to turn their backs to the sea.
The future is a kind of sea.
Yours in the warm shade,
Alex
PS: A few folks who are interested in my briefing The New Climate Foresight have asked about a non-profit/independent rate for those whose employers won’t cover professional education.
We’re happy to offer a 40% discount for folks doing good work on limited budgets. Please go to the briefing page, sign up and use this coupon code: SAVE40NCF (enter the code at checkout where it says, “Have a coupon?”). Enrollment closes on Thursday! Space is limited.
The discount code applies to both the one- and two-payment options.
“And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” This is going to last a little longer than that.