For decades, global warming was widely seen as a tomorrow problem, something for our hapless grandchildren to worry about. But with heat records tumbling relentlessly, it’s becoming clear that tomorrow has basically arrived. We are the hapless grandchildren. And it’s also becoming clear that we’re not ready for the heat.
Monday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average global temperature hitting 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.87 F), according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. That smashed the previous record set way back on, uh, Sunday.
Before Sunday, the previous record was set in July 2023. In fact, the past 10 years have had the 10 highest annual maximum temperatures on record, according to Copernicus data going back to 1940. The highs of the past two years shifted into a new gear, crossing 17 C for the first time. Last year, we could chalk some of that heat up to the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures. But El Niño has ended, and the mercury is still alarmingly high.
These are also probably the highest highs in roughly 125,000 years. As climate-change deniers never tire of pointing out, the climate has always been changing. That hot period 5,000 generations ago — when temperatures might have maxed out at 1.5 C above preindustrial averages, roughly matching this past scorching year — was followed by a long ice age. After that, the planet naturally warmed to the pleasant temperatures in which human civilization thrived for about 240 generations, a golden age of agriculture, air conditioning and Stanley cups.
Turbocharged weather
The bad news is that, thanks to that same civilization burning fossil fuels and spewing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, those pleasant temperatures are a thing of the past. We’re on track to zoom past 1.5 C of warming on the way to something closer to 3 C, speed-running a process that would naturally take thousands of years. These may be the hottest years in recorded history, but they will also be some of the coolest we’ll ever enjoy again.
Higher temperatures turbocharge the planet’s weather engines, leading to more frequent and severe heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods and increasingly destructive hurricanes and thunderstorms. As they rise, they will eventually melt ice sheets and raise global sea levels, eradicate Amazon rainforest, thaw boreal permafrost and unleash methane gas and ancient pathogens, kill the coral reefs and switch off the Atlantic Ocean current that controls Europe’s thermostat. They will lead to mass migration and resource wars.
But the deadliest immediate effect is simply the heat itself. It attacks human health on every level and already takes more lives each year than every other natural disaster combined. The problem is so big and so insidious that we don’t yet fully grasp its scope.
The more than 2,300 heat-related deaths in the United States last year were only those in which heat was an obvious contributor. A 2020 study by researchers at Brown University, Boston University and the University of Toronto suggested the true number could be more than twice as high. Uncounted global heat deaths could approach half a million each year.
Protecting the vulnerable
Quantifying heat’s threat to health is crucial but only the start. People also need to be better educated about its dangers so that they stop putting themselves in harm’s way. That includes changing a cultural attitude toward heat as “something that should be willingly embraced, bravely endured, blithely ignored, or in the case of some marginalized communities, entirely deserved,” Vox’s Umair Irfan and Aja Romano wrote recently.
To their last point, the people most vulnerable to heat are the elderly, small children, people with underlying ailments and people who lack air conditioning. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have fewer trees and suffer the most from urban heat-island effects. All deserve better protection than they’re receiving now.
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Meanwhile, millions of Americans who work outdoors lack relief from the heat. Florida and Texas have made it illegal for local governments to require companies give employees regular shade and water breaks, because not dying from heat is woke. The federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration could save lives by imposing nationwide standards, but it has only just begun a yearslong rulemaking process.
And even OSHA’s proposal announced last month, which drew virulent political backlash from Republicans, will leave 7.9 million public workers unprotected, Politico’s E&E News reported on Wednesday. That’s because the law establishing OSHA only gave it authority over private companies. Public workers must rely on states for protection, and 23 of them haven’t bothered. Along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bizarre reluctance to consider heat waves natural disasters, these are oversights that Congress needs to fix.
If Earth’s atmosphere suddenly included a colorless, odorless gas that never went away and killed and sickened millions of people every year, we would consider that a public-health emergency on the scale of a pandemic and probably dedicate the whole of society to fighting a War on the Colorless, Odorless Gas. We should treat the permanent new state of global heat with no less urgency.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. ©2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.