Heat eath

At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. Then, it was one of the worst weather events in Continental history, killing 35,000 Europeans, including 14,000 French; perversely, the infirm fared relatively well, William Langewiesche has written, most of them watched over in the nursing homes and hospitals of those well-off countries, and it was the comparatively healthy elderly who accounted for most of the dead, many left behind by vacationing families escaping the heat, with some corpses rotting for weeks before the families returned.

It will get worse the number of days warmer than what were once the warmest days of the year could grow by a factor of 100 by 2080. Possibly by a factor of 250. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the twentieth century.

In 2010, 55,000 died in a Russian heat wave that killed 700 people in Moscow each day. In 2016, in the midst of a heat wave that baked the Middle East for several months, temperatures in Iraq broke 100 degrees Fahrenheit in May, 110 in June, and 120 in July, with temperatures dipping below 100, most days, only at night. In 2018, the hottest temperature likely ever recorded in April was registered in southeast Pakistan. In 2016, a string of days topped 120 — in May. In Saudi Arabia, where summer temperatures often approach that mark, 700,000 barrels of oil are burned each day in the summer, mostly to power the nation’s air-conditioning.

In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population — including over a quarter of the men — has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is measured in weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to assail us in places other than our kidneys, too.

Utter improbability of anything as advanced as human intelligence evolving anywhere in a universe as inhospitable to life as this one: every uninhabitable planet out there is a reminder of just how unique a set of circumstances is required to produce a climate equilibrium supportive of life. No intelligent life that we know of ever evolved, anywhere in the universe, outside of the narrow Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed all of human evolution, and that we have now left behind, probably permanently.

When will the planet warm by two degrees, and when by three? How much sea-level rise will be here by 2030? Which cities will flood, which forests will dry out, which breadbaskets will become husks?

Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

To keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, all signatory nations have to significantly better their pledges. Renewed Chinese commitments are, at this point, just rhetorical, too; the country already has the world’s largest footprint.

China commands half of the planet’s coal-power capacity, with plants that only operate. If the world as a whole followed the Chinese example, it would bring five degrees of warming by 2100.