My beloved wife leaned over to me and said: “Did you know that dozens of people have died in Canada because of the heat? Around Vancouver?” “Hmm,” I replied absent-mindedly. And then I woke up, suddenly aware of her words. “Wait, what?!” Canada is not the kind of place one associates with “people who died of heat.” And yet it is the grim truth of what awaits us all.
Much of the Pacific Northwest is trapped under what climatologists call a “heat dome.” It extends up and down the coast. Temperatures are off the charts. In Portland, Oregon, it was 46 degrees Celsius. That’s hotter than Cairo, Egypt, or Karachi, Pakistan.
This is a region of the world that should be temperate and cool, not boiling hot. But it is sandwiched under a “heat dome,” which is a huge area of high pressure that creates an effect literally reminiscent of a pressure cooker.
Yesterday’s “heat waves”-a few days of higher-than-normal temperatures-are giving way to “heat domes”-something far more catastrophic, as the planet heats up beyond recognition, in a direction deeply hostile to us.
Why do I say “dangerous”? Well, what does life in extreme heat look like?
The day before I read an article about the hottest place on Earth, which is Jacobabad in Pakistan. It claims this title because the average temperature exceeds 52ºC. Remember, the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest has already pushed the temperature there almost close to that mark – 46 degrees Celsius. Portland and Seattle have reached temperatures approaching the hottest city on Earth.
This is “climate change” and we don’t know the cause of it, but in fact we are starting to boil alive.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, think about life in Jacobabad. In this heat, people hardly ever leave the house. They stay inside, trying to keep cool as best they can. Business, commerce, trade, social events all come to a standstill.
What does it look like? It looks a lot like isolation. If you want to understand what the world will look like in a few years or decades, the last year, bleak as it may be, is a very good benchmark.
Extreme heat is very similar to a pandemic because both of these disasters put us on the brink of survival.
Jacobabad has been roasting for months. The heat dome of Portland, Vancouver and Seattle is coming down. But it’s a distinction without much difference. Because chances are the heat dome will be back next year, and even longer. Next year, too. That’s what life is like on a planet that heats up fast.
What will happen if it gets even hotter in Jacobabad? What happens if heat domes in the Pacific Northwest get hotter and longer?
For that, you need to understand the concept of “wet-bulb temperature.” It accounts for the heat stress on living things. When you cover the thermometer with a damp cloth, you record the temperature at which sweat cools the body through evaporation. Here’s how climate scientist Simon Lewis puts it. “Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to wet thermometer temperatures above 35ºC because we have no way to cool the body. Not even in the shade, and not even with unlimited water.”
Do you get it? At temperatures above 35ºC – at 100% humidity, you will die. Quickly. Bang. You can’t cool yourself down. Your organs shut down and you literally boil from the inside out.
This “humid thermometer” temperature has only been reached in a few places, for a few hours – so far. But now we are experiencing a dramatic, massive warming of the planet. Just think about how much hotter the summers have become, wherever you are, to literally feel how much our planet is heating up. We will cross that line. No one can say exactly when. But what we can say is that we are moving toward it at the speed of light, faster than anyone thinks. Will Portland and Vancouver be as hot as the hottest places on Earth?
Once we cross the wet thermometer threshold of about 35ºC, places will simply become uninhabitable. Lewis says, “There is something truly terrifying about creating conditions that are uninhabitable because of the heat.
So what happens when we cross that line? Well, you might think: I’ll just turn on the air conditioner harder! Wrong. Air conditioners need low humidity to work properly, and the more humid conditions get, the harder they have to work. Meanwhile, the harder they work, the more the power system, stressed by demand and unable to handle it, will regularly fail – just as it does in Jacobabad or Portland and Vancouver.
We don’t have the technology that will allow us to live comfortably on a boiling planet. I know you may think we do because, like me, you are used to the luxury of air-conditioned bliss. The truth is that the technology only works in a very narrow range of environmental conditions, perhaps 10 to 37 degrees Celsius, with relatively low humidity. We won’t be able to condition the air so as not to boil ourselves alive.
Instead, whole regions of the planet will simply become, as Lewis says, uninhabitable. Some places will suffer from the usual heat domes. Some, like Jacobabad, will simply be too hot, year-round. And some will have drier heat that will cause mega-fires, over and over again. There are many ways – too many ways – to get to “uninhabitable.”
And there will be many more such places than we think. All those glass air-conditioned towers in Miami? Good luck with that when the planet warms up. All those luxurious steel and glass skyscrapers in Manhattan? Have fun with a power grid that needs more power than the entire East Coast can provide.
What happens when a place becomes uninhabitable? Mass destruction takes place. People are already fleeing Jacobabad. As the “flight of human capital” occurs, disruption occurs on three levels. The place from which people flee becomes poorer and more unstable. The place they are fleeing usually does not want them, especially if they come with nothing.
And they will come with nothing, all these climate refugees and migrants, because most of us, if we are lucky, have only one real asset: our homes. But if you have to leave a place because it got too hot to live there… no one will buy your house. It’s not worth anything. Congratulations, now you’re something like a war refugee – running away with the clothes on your back and the money you can take with you.
When society faces these kinds of obstacles, it tends to become destabilized. Let’s talk a little bit about another consequence of extreme heat and warming – the mega-drought the American West has faced. Right now, most of us pretend it’s not a big deal. That’s because there are still scarce resources left to use. But once what’s left of water is gone, it’s gone.
Forever. How will cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles survive? The classic pattern looks like this: first the rural hinterlands suffer from drought and famine, and then it creeps in, into richer and more developed urban centers. Right now, the mega-drought in the West is being felt in the once lush farming valleys of California. But when it spreads east and west like a cancerous tumor, as it surely will, what then?
And then… bang. Disaster. There is another category of refugees you may never have thought about. Not people running from extreme heat, but people running for fresh water. What do we even call these new categories of migrants and refugees? We don’t even have names for them – and yet these changes are already happening. And that’s the bottom line.
We live on a dying planet. It’s not dying in a final and definitive sense – probably not, anyway, though there’s still some chance we’ll end up in a cycle of dramatic warming, so much so that we’ll end up like Venus. We are living on a dying planet in the sense that it is warming incredibly fast, faster than in hundreds of millions of years, probably faster than ever before.
And as the planet continues to heat faster and faster, living things will die. Many, many. Trillions and trillions. Trees, insects, animals, fish. Rivers, oceans, the sky, if you think of them as living things too. And us.
What will definitely not survive is this way of life. We cannot use the technology we have now to deal with the existential threats that are already on our doorstep. You can’t get out of a boiling planet with air conditioning. Nor can we use the cultural mores, values, norms, and institutions we have now-materialism, greed, selfishness, carelessness, indifference, and so on-to fight them.
Where does that leave us? You are probably already guessing my answer. This is not a heat wave-it is a dying planet.
Our civilization is beginning to crumble. When Portland and Seattle are almost as hot as Jacobabad–the hottest place on Earth–which itself is becoming such that it will soon become literally unlivable… then, my friends, we are a civilization that has literally boiled itself alive.
In the fire and smoke of our own addiction to exploitation, things, toys, hatred, rage, all the ways we try to escape our own demons of loneliness, despair, ignorance and powerlessness.
We live on a dying planet. The question is, who will survive?
Umar Haque, Writer
Education: Oxford University, McGill University, London Business School
