Can You Even Call Deadly Heat ‘Extreme’ Anymore?

 

David Wallace-Wells

OPINION

Can You Even Call Deadly Heat ‘Extreme’ Anymore?

May 17, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/india-heat-wave-pakistan-climate-change.html

 

David Wallace-Wells

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

 

You're reading the David Wallace-Wells newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, and the future of the planet and how we live on it. Get it in your inbox.

It doesn’t take the end of the world to upend the way billions live in it. The punishing weather we are uneasily learning to call “normal” is doing that already.

 

Late last month, a heat wave swallowed South Asia, bringing temperatures to more than a billion people — one-fifth of the entire human population — 10 degrees warmer than the one imagined in the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson’s celebrated climate novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” where a similar event on the subcontinent quickly kills 20 million. It is now weeks later, and the heat wave is still continuing. Real relief probably won’t come before the monsoons in June.

 

Mercifully, according to the young science of “heat death,” air moisture is as important as temperature for triggering human mortality, and when thermometers hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit in India and 120 in Pakistan in April, the humidity was quite low. But even so, in parts of India, humidity was still high enough that if the day’s peak moisture had coincided with its peak heat, the combination would have produced “wet-bulb temperatures” — which integrate measures of both into a single figure — already at or past the limit for human survivability. Birds fell dead from the sky.

 

In Pakistan, the heat melted enough of the Shipsher glacier to produce what’s called a “glacial lake outburst flood,” destroying two power stations and the historic Hassanabad Bridge, on the road to China.

 

After a brief lull, the temperatures and humidity began to rise again. On May 14, it was 51 degrees Celsius in Jacobabad, a city of almost 200,000, with a “wet-bulb” reading of 33.1 — just below the conventional estimate for the threshold of human survival, which is 35. More recently, scientists have suggested a lower threshold, even for the young and healthy, of just 31 degrees Celsius. Ten weeks in, the heat wave is testing those limits.

 

But just as remarkable as the intensity and duration of the South Asian heat wave is the fact that it is, already, not much of an anomaly at all.

 

We want to call events like this “extreme,” but technically we can’t, “because they’re not rare anymore,” Friederike Otto told me, from London, just as the heat wave reached its April peak.

 

Dr. Otto is a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the Imperial College of London, whose World Weather Attribution group just published a “state of the science” briefing. Among other things, it concluded that climate change has made every single heat wave in the world both more intense and more likely.

 

She is herself a leading figure in the emerging field of climate attribution, which has grown increasingly central to the messy project of making sense of environmental and ecological disarray. With the impacts of warming growing evermore unmistakable, we no longer ask science only what to expect from further warming, but also how to quantify, categorize, conceptualize and narrativize the climatic anomalies we now encounter, somewhere in the world, almost daily.

 

A U.N. report published in April suggested that by just 2030 the world would be experiencing more than 500 major disasters each year. And the quickening frequency of what were once called “generational disasters” or “500-year storms” or even “acts of God” disorients us, too, so that it becomes hard to distinguish once-a-decade events from once-a-century ones — our disaster depth of field blurred by climate disruption. “What used to be a very extreme event is now probably not a very extreme event but something that we expect in this warmer climate quite frequently,” Dr. Otto said. “We really are in a quite different world.”

 

Different worlds, really, since the gaps in climate impacts between the global north and the global south are unconscionably large today, and growing. It should not surprise you to see, over the next year or two, wet-bulb data added to your generic weather app — just as, over the past few years, they have each added air quality data. That innovation can help response and aid precautions when air quality is bad. It has also meant that as I watched the South Asian heat wave unfold on my phone from New York — a string of days in New Delhi with highs above 110 degrees Fahrenheit — I could also track the local pollution. The famously smoggy city never registered an “air quality index” below 300 — a level that is meant to trigger health warnings of emergency conditions.

 

For a few years, I’ve startled people by pointing out that over half of all of the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that have ever been produced in the history of humanity have been produced in the past 30 years — since Al Gore published his first book on warming; since the U.N. established its climate-change body, the I.P.C.C.; since the premiere of “Friends.” But it is perhaps even more astonishing to consider just how fast the temperature is rising. As recently as 2015, the 10-year average of global temperatures showed, according to the I.P.C.C., warming of 0.87 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. Just five years later, it had jumped to 1.09 — 25 percent higher in half a decade.

 

When sociologists talk about “shifting baseline syndrome,” they mean we tend to base expectations for the future on our memory of the recent past. But just five years ago, it was exceedingly rare for more than a million acres to burn in a California wildfire season; today the record is 4.3 million acres, and in four of the past five years more than 1.5 million acres burned in the state alone. Over the past decade, extreme heat events have grown 90 times more common, according to one study, compared with a baseline of frequency between 1950 and 1980.

 

This shift is not just disorienting to lay people. The supercomputer math gets tricky, too, when warming moves so fast that any climate baseline extends for only a few years.

 

“I think we don’t actually know what this new normal or emerging normal will feel like,” Dr. Otto said, “because the temperature and greenhouse gases have increased so fast, and by so much, over just the last decade that we haven’t really had time to experience what that means. And we are starting to witness events that would not have been possible, and that we could have not really imagined to be possible, without climate change.”

 

For Dr. Otto, exhibit A is the “heat dome” that settled over the Pacific Northwest last summer, delivering Death Valley-like temperatures to temperate British Columbia — recently identified as one of the six most anomalous heat waves in recorded history. The South Asian heat wave almost qualifies as a nonevent if you are tracing the amplitude of climate anomalies. But the heat dome? “There we have seen what an extreme event looks like in a warmer world,” Dr. Otto said.

 

How extreme? Probably a one-in-a-thousand-year event, Dr. Otto estimates, given today’s climate conditions. But at just two degrees of warming it will happen once a decade, on average.

 

When I asked Dr. Otto what the probability of such an event would have been in the preindustrial era, before humans began haphazardly re-engineering the climate, she laughed. “It’s statistically impossible,” she said — so unlikely that the question was effectively “meaningless.” But she indulged me and guessed it would have probably happened about once every eight million years. Run the entire history of modern humans 25 times over without industrialization, that is, and you get the Pacific heat dome just once.

 

When anomalies arrive every day, the eye-popping extremes are even more so. The one I keep returning to is this chart.

 

 

That red dot is a temperature reading at Concordia station in Antarctica, taken on March 18, that was 38.5 degrees Celsius — almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit — above average. It was 20 degrees Celsius above the previous March record. On the graph of historical temperatures, it is high enough above the band marking all readings ever recorded there that it looks less like the sign of a warming planet than proof we’ve already landed on another one.

 

In a certain way, we have: A little more than one degree of global warming may not sound like much, but it means that the planet is already warmer today than at any point in the history of human civilization — warmer than any world any human has ever known. In that kind of world, which is ours, global averages often flatten and obscure as much as they illuminate. A 70-degree anomaly in New York City would be 122 degrees Fahrenheit in March, 134 in April and 142 in May. In Rio de Janeiro, it would be above 150; in New Delhi, perhaps 170.

 

Of course, these comparisons aren’t fair ones. The temperature anomaly was not observed in those other places, and no one expects anomalies of that scale to be seen on any part of the planet dense with people. The Antarctic, which is warming three times as fast as the world as a whole, is an extreme place to begin with, with much larger temperature variabilities than in the places where anyone actually lives, and even a day 70 degrees warmer than normal didn’t bring the thermometer above freezing. In fact, I’ve often thought that we tended to hear too much about the Arctic and Antarctic — that a rhetorical focus on the poles suggested things might be all right, relatively speaking, down in the mid-latitudes and tropics — and didn’t give enough weight to warming as an all-encompassing metanarrative for the human century to come.

 

But I also owe my own climate awakening to an Arctic anomaly — this one only 20 degrees Celsius warmer than average, half as extreme as this event this year at the other pole, and still a heat wave scientists called, at the time, “unheard-of.” It was in late November 2016. I was in a somewhat apocalyptic state of mind, or at least what passes for that in the well-insulated corners of the global north. My father had recently died. The American presidential election had delivered a shock outcome that made me think a whole bundle of expectations about the future I had long treated as a kind of inheritance had to be recalibrated, at least, if not discarded. My apartment had flooded twice in the space of a few months.

 

Probably this is not so uncommon an experience, to have climate anxiety triggered not just by scientific papers or news events or natural disasters but also idiosyncratic jumbles of more personal prompts. But that’s not to suggest that climate awakening is arbitrary, or elective, or anything less than tragically overdetermined. The warming world now furnishes expectation-breaking anomalies often enough that almost whenever you find yourself dreaming bleakly you can also find a news event or data point around which to bundle that existential panic.

 

And then, typically, the world continues. This can be bewildering, given how world-shapingly enormous an extreme event can seem. It is often maddening, given the amount of suffering being normalized along the way. But it can also be, to some degree, perspective-giving.

 

Take the South Asia heat wave, for instance. India and Pakistan are surviving their “not very extreme” temperature anomaly, though a lot depends on what you mean by “survive.” Almost certainly the ultimate death toll will run into the thousands, given that in 2003 a milder heat wave killed 70,000 in less-populated Europe and Russia.

 

But surviving like this is not a neat narrative of climate resilience. Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, and what looks like apocalypse in prospect often feels more like grim normality when it arrives into the present. However gruesome recent disasters may be, climate impacts are not the whole of our destiny but the natural landscape upon which our future will be built, and jury-rigged and contested.

 

Lately, that future landscape has started to look a little less hot, as well. We used to say “business as usual” and mean a future of four or even five degrees of warming. Now, thanks to a global political awakening and dizzying technological progress with renewables, we say it and mean three.

 

This is good news, of course, so far as it goes. But it also all means that we are living in the midst of some profound narrative confusion. Apocalypse may no longer seem quite as close at hand, but climate disruption is here now, distributed as though it was designed to deepen global injustice. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the global promise was to avoid “dangerous” warming. At that, we’ve transparently failed, since dangerous climate change isn’t just here already — it is growing increasingly commonplace.

 

These are hard impacts, which must be responded to. But they also raise some softer questions, nonetheless knotty: How do we imagine our future, how do we expect to live in it, what do we count as success and what as failure in a world beset by ecological disarray and all the human messiness that shakes out from that?

 

Within our own lifetimes we may find ourselves living on a planet warmed beyond a level scientists long characterized as “catastrophic,” though well below the level casually described as “apocalyptic.” The question is: how?

 

That will be the animating question of this newsletter. At the moment, the only honest answer, I think, is: We just don’t know.

 

What you’ve just finished is the maiden voyage of this project. I want to tell you, first, thank you so much for reading it. And second, since you’re here, a little bit more about what I’ll be doing going forward and what you’ll find in your inbox as a subscriber.

 

At least once a week, I’ll be writing about the near future in all its messiness and complexity — about climate change and life after warming, but also about health and disease, technology and disruption, new ideas and new frameworks and the ways we might think about and navigate this new world. Some of those pieces will be fairly long, like this column-style one, but I’ll also be publishing interviews and news items, the occasional profile and dispatch and even work of naked speculation. Occasionally I’ll be sending shorter mailings, as well: particularly eye-opening charts or striking photographs, for instance. And in each weekly mailing, I’m also planning to share some additional reading and news you might’ve missed. Pieces like these:

 

·        Two relatively recent critiques of “The Ministry for the Future,” one from the radical left, by Samuel Miller McDonald in Current Affairs, and one from the “eco-modernist” center, by Ted Nordhaus in the Breakthrough Journal (this one embedded in a longer essay on climate alarmism).

 

·        The World Weather Attribution group’s guide to the state of attribution science and its recent report on the floods in South Africa, which killed at least 435 people in April and were made, according to the study, twice as likely by climate change.

 

·        Saudi Aramco, the petroleum and natural-gas producer, has once again become the world’s most valuable company.

 

·        The 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who welcomed Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to the pre-crash Crypto Bahamas conference and recently compared forms of crypto yield farming to a Ponzi scheme, told the Financial Times that Bitcoin doesn’t really have a future as a payments network.

 

·        “The state of Texas allocated none of the $1 billion in federal funds it received to protect communities from future disasters to neighborhoods in Houston that flood regularly, according to an investigation by HUD.”

 

·        There are some signs that coronavirus infection may play a role in the worrying rise of hepatitis in young children globally, though the etiological picture of the phenomenon remains a bit unsettled.

 

·        According to the Sierra Club, pandemic lockdowns didn’t improve air quality in 2020, as we all thought.

 

David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.”