Heat

In this episode, we explore the question of how tackle those rising temperatures worldwide…

It’s hot here! Definitely hot! Yesterday was up at 34C; today was higher, at 37C; tomorrow’s going to be even higher again, at 38C or more.

Gruelling…

The UV radiation-level is huge, too: level-13 today, about as extreme as it can get. I went out for a walk at noon, before the worst of it, and still got sunburn on my head, straight through the thick leather of my hat. Skin-cancer is one of the greatest killers in this country now: those insane levels of UV-radiation are the reason why, and they’ve certainly gotten worse in the past few years.

Heat. Relentless heat.

It’s been like this for days now. A bunch of thunderstorm-cells trundled past this afternoon: they made vague grumbling-noises in the background and dumped just a small number of big splashy raindrops around the house. But that was it: they didn’t cool things down at all. And we’re up in the highlands here: it’ll be even worse down in the lowlands, where it’s always three to five degrees more than here. The only place that’d be any cooler would be down at the coast, which is why Australians flock there at this time of year - though given those UV-levels, I’m not sure it’s a good idea…

And the way people round these parts deal with the heat is to use even more heat to drive the air-conditioners that are howling away flat-out all down the street. Especially on the houses that don’t have solar-cells, and hence can’t counter the sun’s heat with itself. Crazy.

Okay, later in the week we’re expecting an Antarctic blast to barrel past, dropping the temperature right back down to the low-20s for a day or two. And elsewhere in the world right now, up in the northern hemisphere, it’s cold, of course - seriously cold. In the US it’s right down to the point where the Fahrenheit and Centigrade scales meet, at -40F and -40C. “So where’s all this global-warming?” they say - “it’s a whole lot colder, not warmer!”

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Paradoxically, though, the reason it’s colder out there is because the world is getting warmer. The term ‘global-warming’ is, yes, technically correct: the world is indeed warming, and far faster now than anyone would like. But it’s a bit of a misnomer, because the actual outcome is quite a bit different: more like ‘heat-induced global weather-destabilisation’. All those seasonal variations of summer and winter, heat and cold, yes, they’re all still there: but all the old extremes are themselves getting more extreme now - and now more common, too. More unpredictable. More intense, in every way. In that sense at least, the outlook is not looking good, at all…

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So how do we adapt to these big changes? Yeah, I’ll give my usual answer to that: look first for small changes that could fit the need.

The most obvious place to start, but also often the hardest, is to look for changes in mindset, the way we look at the world.

For example, consider climate-related shifts in mindset about diet. The classic example on this is the early Viking settlers in Greenland. In Viking culture, wealth and status were signified by eating only meat; only the poor and low-status people would eat fish. Yet their cattle couldn’t survive on the grassless land there; and it was beneath the settlers’ dignity to catch any of the fish that abounded just off the coast. The result: they all starved to death, from a too-rigid mindset about diet. We need to do better than that…

Consider clothing. When we look at Arabic women’s classic clothing - the full-body shawl, the veil, the face-mask and all that - it might seem absurd in a Western temperate climate: yet think about the context where that clothing first came from. If the boots and gloves and layers of padding and furs are what we’d need for an Alaskan winter, then that Arabic clothing is what’s needed for a sandblasted desert heat. As the global climate tilts more and more towards the latter world, perhaps we ought to learn more from those women…

Consider environmental tactics. We do now know how to turn a desert green again; we know how to rework and replant around creeks and rivulets to slow down the flash-floods that are becoming increasingly common and extreme, and hence prevent more serious flooding further downstream. We need to do more of that, to make it routine everywhere. And if we can now use solar-systems to counter the heat of the sun, might there be a way to use the cold in the same way to counter itself? Something to think about, anyway…

Thinking of solar, consider also the technical-legal options here. Might we make it mandatory that air-conditioners and other cooling-systems can only be powered by solar, linking the energy-cost directly to the energy-source? That’s another change we could think about…

And consider work/social changes, too. If it gets much hotter here, maybe we’ll need to shift to a siesta-type work-model: start early, a long gap in the middle of the day, and then work until late. But what impacts would that have on social-life - on family-life, in particular - in a culture that isn’t as yet set up for that kind of model at all? It’ll need some serious thought and serious changes to make that work out well…

Whatever it might be, though, we’ll need real changes in mindset and more if we’re to adapt well to the heat.

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