Some Like It Hot, Just Not That Hot

 

“There’s no way that they can tell that a heart attack, for example, or a respiratory failure 

was due to the heat. But we believe that heat is the stressor that puts people over the edge.” 

Larry Kalkstein, a Florida-based researcher who studies how weather affects people’s health.

It is often called “an invisible death,” because extreme heat seldom kills directly. Sure, there is severe dehydration and heatstroke, but as the above quote suggests, it’s often hard to pin death simply on extreme heat. Nevertheless, climate change has seared regions of the United States where air conditioning is not standard, like the Pacific Northwest where temperatures exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit in so many places, or where impoverished residents use to be able to tolerate summer warmth without that “luxury.” We are more fortunate than some normally exceptionally hot regions of the planet, like the great deserts in Africa and the Middle East, as vast tracts of such land may soon become completely uninhabitable by human beings.

Health researchers and government statisticians are beginning to examine mortality and hospitalization rates, even adjusted for pandemic-surges, to measure increases where temperatures have soared. The numbers are deeply troubling, but we are suffering from a mere one degree Celsius average global temperature rise (higher in some places, lower in others), with more natural disasters than we have experienced in recorded history. See my recent Climate Change, Infrastructure & Hard Dollar Cost blog for some startling numbers. We have near term predictions that we are irretrievably headed to a further half degree rise and most probably a full degree in the near future. So, if the world is hot now, we can only imagine how intolerable life will be when that happens. “Great weather” California just might be an obvious test case.

Summarizing the findings of a research project by the Los Angeles Times (October 10th), Anna M. Phillips, Tony Barboza, Ruben Vives and Sean Greene tell us: “It was the hottest August on record in California… For more than three weeks in 2020, back-to-back heat waves settled over the Southwest, claiming dozens of lives and leaving tens of millions of people sweltering in triple-digit temperatures. The days brought suffering and the nights offered little relief. On maps of the record heat, Southern California glowed like an ember, its normally temperate coast shaded orange, its inland cities and desert towns a deep, smoldering purple…

“Extreme heat is one of the deadliest consequences of global warming. But in a state that prides itself as a climate leader, California chronically undercounts the death toll and has failed to address the growing threat of heat-related illness and death, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation… Between 2010 and 2019, the hottest decade on record, California’s official data from death certificates attributed 599 deaths to heat exposure… But a Times analysis found that the true toll is probably six times higher. An examination of mortality data from this period shows that thousands more people died on extremely hot days than would have been typical during milder weather. All told, the analysis estimates that extreme heat caused about 3,900 deaths.

“California’s undercount is one of the ways it overlooks the threat posed by heat waves, even as climate change delivers them more frequently, more intensely and with deadlier consequences. Other states are moving with greater urgency to confront this public health challenge that disproportionately imperils the elderly and vulnerable.

“Extreme heat did not suddenly become a threat to Californians’ lives. The Times found that state leaders have ignored years of warnings from within their own agencies that heat was becoming more dangerous. Data reviewed by The Times show heat-related hospital visits increasing in some parts of California, including Los Angeles County, for at least the last 15 years.

“Experts interviewed by The Times said an effective state response would include identifying and assisting vulnerable populations, and putting in place a surveillance system to track when and where heat-related deaths and injuries are occurring. But the California Department of Public Health doesn’t collect that kind of real-time data. It can’t say how many people died in last year’s heat waves because it does not examine death records during severe heat waves — as authorities in Oregon and Washington did this summer after days of record-breaking temperatures… Each year, extreme heat kills more Americans than any other climate-fueled hazard, including hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but it gets far less attention because it kills so quietly.”

It stuns me that, with all the measurable damage and the number of related deaths we have already seen from climate change, Congress is still unable to generate sufficient votes to begin to fund even the basic threshold investments to limit and perhaps, someday in the not-too-distant future, begin to reverse its ravages. But GOP deficit hawks are apparently willing to tolerate trillions and trillions of dollars of continuing damage, untold health slams and deaths, rather than allocate even enough to make a stand against climate change. Backed by a large cadre of evangelical climate change deniers, Republicans are quite comfortable watching the bad become absolutely intolerably horrible.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is little wonder that those who are going to bear the brunt of climate change damage, droves of our youngest generations, are leaving the Republican Party, which has responded with voter suppression rather than policy adjustment.