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By Caroline Mimbs Nyce • JUNE 29, 2021
This summer’s heat is no joke.
We’re not talking about an ice-cream-cone-melting, sweat-through-your-clothes kind of hot. This is a deadly, smothering, street-buckling hot. Extreme heat is a known killer, causing more deaths than other types of weather events most years. Vancouver police are already warning of a troubling spike in deaths.
Weather events such as the kind currently bearing down on the Pacific Northwest are not to be underestimated. Heat, and our ability to survive it, threatens to define the next century.
Our infrastructure isn’t ready for this. “It’s one more way that climate change will force us to improve every part of our society at once or suffer the consequences,” my colleague Robinson Meyer warns in his newsletter, The Weekly Planet. (Subscribe here.)
Give weather like this a name: “heat season.” And treat the season with the gravity that it deserves, argues Kathy Baughman McLeod, who advocates for heat awareness.
Heat is a new human-rights issue. “In the coming century,” Vann R. Newkirk II wrote last year, “the heat gap between rich and poor might be the world’s most daunting challenge.”