The old story about the frog in slowly warming water is supposed to be a cautionary tale, or a joke –
but apparently not. Phoenix is our fastest growing city. Las Vegas I’m sure not far behind.
A lot of frog-level thinking out there.
John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Times:
Three and a half years ago I had a New Year’s Eve that I will never forget. Not because of a spectacular house party or dazzling fireworks display, but because I got stranded in a tiny Australian beach town when the only road out became cut off by a rapidly approaching bushfire. Lunch was coated in a fine layer of ash, the sky was black at 3pm but thanks to a bit of luck, and the bravery of the New South Wales fire fighting corps, we escaped unscathed the next day.
I bring this up for two reasons. First, because the record-setting Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 was facilitated by a clear long-term trend of increased hot and dry weather in the region brought about by global warming. And second because if you were to describe the ideal human habitat, it would not feature bushfires. Nor would it feature extended periods of temperatures at or near 40C (104F). Yet these have become commonplace across heavily populated regions of Asia, southern Europe and the southern US in recent years.
Would humanity settle on a new planet where going outdoors during daylight was potentially lethal, leading to time spent scurrying between buildings and vehicles in search of shelter from the environment? Surely not. Yet somehow Phoenix, Arizona, where maximum temperatures have now exceeded 40C for 26 successive days, is America’s fastest growing big city.
I fear that one of the reasons for such irrational behaviour is that most discussions about climate change continue to emphasise the risk of much worse things coming down the tracks. This is understandable, but a permanent focus on the future can blind us to what is already happening. We instead insist that life simply goes on, that we’re adapting.
The thing is, for a growing number of people, life does not go on at all. It’s all very well saying that Arizona has always been very hot, but there are degrees of very hot. Between 1970 and 1990, an average of 16 people per year died from “exposure to excessive natural heat”. Between 1990 and 2015, the average rose to 38. In 2020 it was 210, and 2022 came in at 257.
These figures are not estimates of excess mortality coinciding with extreme heat, where different methodologies can produce different figures. They are specific individuals whose death was judged by a medical examiner to have been directly caused by extreme heat. Some are people who suffered severe burns when their skin came into contact with pavements superheated to as much as 82C (180F). This is not a forecast for 50 years time, it’s happening today.
As climate anxiety grows, the risk that humanity continues to be the frog in a slowly boiling pot of water is only exacerbated by the fact that we continue to emphasise abstract statistics instead of things that people can really see and feel. I understand the focus on the 2C limit, but it a) sounds small, b) refers to some date in the future, c) lacks any connection to human experience and d) does a pretty bad job of describing what is happening with temperatures.
In much the same way that focusing on the average US lifespan of 76 years encourages one to think about older people and obscures the tens of thousands of young adults who died to create that tragic statistic, focusing on average temperature growth obscures the extremes that drive loss of life and total transformation of living.
Phoenix will become the first major city in American history to average over 100°F for an entire month.
The city has experienced a virtually continuous heatwave since the beginning of July, with an average high of 114.1°F and an average low of 90.2°F.
While Phoenix is used to severe summer heat, this July has been unprecedented in city history with a record three weeks straight of 110°F+ heat and 11 straight days of overnight lows at or above 90°F.
The record streak of hot nights is particularly concerning because repeatedly hot nighttime temperatures do not allow the body to recover from hot days, increasing the risk of heat illnesses and even death.
Unfortunately for Phoenix, this ongoing heatwave looks to continue for the rest of the month, with daytime highs expected to continue to soar above 110°F, with nights only dipping into the 90s.
In The Big Short (2015), after the mortgage market collapse that the main characters have predicted takes place, the shorters are confused by how the bank stocks are still doing well. They hadn’t counted on the banks hiding the problem from their investors until they could ditch most of the bad paper* on unsuspecting outsiders. It feels to me that we are in that part of the movie, where people don’t know that they live in—and how much they are invested in—a housing bubble. I expect it will happen in Miami first but just about any city can be the first domino.
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*As depicted in the also excellent Margin Call (2011).