How the Heat Is Changing Us
Reading Time: 14 minutesYou’re Not Imagining It—It’s Hotter Now. The Consequences Are Becoming Clearer and Clearer., Ten ways—small and enormous., Heat waves: We can’t ignore the fact that the planet is warmer anymore.
You’re not just imagining it. June and July had the highest global temperatures on record for those months. And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this summer we passed the 14th month in a row that saw such record temps. That’s the longest streak yet.
What researchers are doing is like ‘when you take a person’s temperature to see if they have a fever,’ said David Easterling, a scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. To take the whole world’s temperature, scientists combine measurements from the surface of the oceans, from observation stations on land, and even people’s backyards. ‘The whole globe has been the warmest it’s ever been,’ at least in recorded history, said Easterling. ‘The Earth has a fever because we’re injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.’
We’ve been experiencing—and can expect in the future—longer heat waves, with higher lows, and sweat that won’t evaporate as easily off our bodies. The summer heat will, on balance, last longer in the season than it used to. In the 1980s and ’90s, ‘maybe there were a few days where you’d go through a heat wave—you’d deal with it,’ said Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a researcher at the Columbia Climate School who grew up in New York City. ‘Now, if it’s one, two, three weeks in a row, that’s a much different impact profile.’
We’re changing the planet. And now, those changes are changing us. As the temperature gets brutal, we’re learning to adapt, in ways large and small. Sometimes, despite our efforts, the results of the heat are scary—and even tragic. Climate change is here, and this is only the beginning.
I’ll always remember the water park. It was 2011, and hot enough that my sleepaway camp—based in the Northwoods of Wisconsin—loaded us onto buses to take us to the nearest indoor aquapark to splash around for the day. The high in the area that summer was 92.
Over a decade later, the heat is undoubtedly worse, threatening the ability of summer camps all over the country to function. Rising temperatures affect children differently—and usually more intensely—than adults. Because children are smaller than adults, heat reaches their inner body more quickly, plus, young ones might be too distracted to notice when they are getting heatstroke. This leaves children more susceptible to dehydration and heat-related illness.
Camps across the country had to pivot activities to deal with the temperatures this summer. Many camps have relied on tried-and-true methods of keeping campers cool: extending pool or lake time, water fights, popsicles, and generally making sure children are well hydrated and spend ample time in the shade. My old camp breaks out the beloved Slip ‘N Slide on hot days. At a YMCA in New York City, kids will freeze a T-shirt in a block of ice and melt it down with water (an activity that presumably involves a lot of splashing). Others have also moved activities inside, offering air-conditioning time to offset the heat. And some have had to cut camp short, sending kids home prematurely or just canceling camp for the day altogether. Yes, the weather is keeping kids home from camp. In June, Axios suggested it might just be a feature of childhood now, declaring: ‘The heat day is the new snow day.’
Sitting in my best garden-soirée attire, I could feel beads of sweat dripping down my back. Pennsylvania, like much of the country, was in the midst of a heat wave, and I was in the midst of sweating off all my makeup at an outdoor wedding. Someone involved in planning had been thoughtful enough to put a paper fan on each chair for the ceremony. But by the time the vows concluded, that fan was starting to feel, well, like a feeble piece of paper, slightly tattered already.
I’d seen people on the subway, walking down the street, and even on the beach using handheld plastic motorized fans to cool off. Some were even wearing fans around their necks. If during past summers these people seemed dorky or extreme, insistent on bringing an indoor comfort outdoors, now I wanted to be one of them. At a concert recently, my friend Andrea passed hers down the row, each of us taking in the battery-powered breeze, if only for a moment. She calls her fan ‘my ride or die.’
After that day at the June wedding, I took Andrea’s cue and bought a personal fan of my own.
I felt silly pulling it out in public the first time I used it, but any embarrassment was soon overtaken by the joy of feeling a little more comfortable. An individual, consumerist solution to a warming planet? Sure. But as Andrea told me, ‘It can make or break an experience, especially when that experience is sitting in direct sunlight while the Phillies leave three men on base.’
I don’t really know what I was thinking when I signed up to run a half marathon on the Coney Island boardwalk the second week of July. I guess that it was early enough in the morning (start time, 7:30 a.m.) that it wouldn’t be that hot? But when I arrived oceanside that morning, it definitely was that hot. So when the announcer gathered us to start the race, none of us were surprised that he gave us a bit of a lecture about taking it easy. Don’t be heroes, he told us, nobody cares about your time. Take breaks and drink water to deal with the heat. This is serious.
What we were all surprised by was when he announced that the course was actually 10 miles. We all looked around uneasily—we’d all signed up for a half, right? The signs all said ‘half marathon.’ Our bibs said 13.1. But standing on that boardwalk realizing that we were already essentially cooking in the shadeless, humid air, not a single person raised their hand to suggest that we might want to run the full distance.
Even running 10 miles was brutal. The first time I turned around to double back on the boardwalk, I felt some kind of temperature relief before realizing that it was just the result of switching which side of me was exposed to direct sunlight. The race was more of an effort of heat endurance than any kind of running endurance.
The experience made me think about a story I edited a few years ago about the first deaths that could be undeniably the result of climate change. Those deaths occurred during a 2018 heat wave in Japan that could have only happened in our warmed world, and I remember asking the author to include a description of what exactly happens to the body when it is overexerting itself:
If the body doesn’t cool down quickly enough, that temperature rise can start to damage the organs; indeed, extreme temps have led to deaths for people while exercising. Those deaths have occurred in ultrarunners who are very dramatically challenging their bodies. But for the sake of keeping exercise a healthy activity, the rest of us are having to modify our routines and ambitions, too.
Sweating: It can be uncomfortable at best, and embarrassing at worst, depending on your perspiration levels. Many people are turning to the same places they do for other cosmetic enhancements: plastic surgeons.
In 2004, Botox was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating. Injected into a patient’s armpits (and sometimes palms or other sweaty areas), the neuromodulator paralyzes the nerves that cause your body to produce sweat. But like most injectable procedures, this one requires upkeep, and with each round of underarm injections costing up to $1,000, the price really adds up.
There’s also an alternative that’s gaining some popularity thanks to its promise of permanently reducing sweat. MiraDry targets and eliminates underarm sweat glands, and it outperforms ‘even the strongest antiperspirants and alternative treatments,’ according to the Bucky Body Center, with a promised sweat reduction of approximately 82 percent. Luke Levin, a surgical nurse at the center, said they perform the procedure about 50 times a year.
The treatment uses a combination of suction and heat to destroy the sweat glands, rather than just paralyze them. A local anesthetic provides some relief, but providers still recommend taking ibuprofen shortly before your appointment. The rising temperatures are one reason some people consider this fix. ‘When the summer months roll around, we definitely have a handful of new patients come in who have just hit their limit with having to handle their sweating,’ said Levin. ‘The heat and high temps are the final push they need.’
Most people find out about it through word of mouth—that’s how I learned it existed—and it’ll run patients a couple thousand dollars. As the person who shared their experience with me said: ‘Invest in yourself.’ She’d previously gotten armpit Botox but was tired of the upkeep, and the little bit of swelling was a trade-off she was willing to make to be (mostly) sweat-free.
Maybe it’s the latest thing to join a growing list of procedures and treatments that propose being high-maintenance in order to be low-maintenance. (Though even for the excessively sweaty among us, how hard is it to swipe on prescription-strength antiperspirant?) Or maybe it’s a sign: As the world warms, the rich will simply modify their bodies along the way.
For those of us not shelling out to alter our sweat glands, we’ll have to accustom ourselves to what the Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu has called ‘infinite moistness‘: nonstop perspiration clinging to and pouring off our skin—and into the fabric of our clothing, making it necessary to toss it into the wash sooner than we might otherwise.
It’s a reality that Brian Wallace, an Illinois-based laundromat owner and the CEO of the Coin Laundry Association, is thinking about. ‘We do feel people bring in larger loads than they used to,’ he said. He added: ‘The way we responded to that as an industry was to feature larger-capacity washers in new or newly equipped laundromats.’
This means going from machines that take two or three typical loads at a time to behemoths that can handle what would be eight or 10 loads in a normal washer. These appliances are more expensive for the laundromats, but there’s also ‘a lot of innovation in the industry with the conservation of utilities—machines that use a lot less water, so a lot less natural gas to heat the water, and a lot less electricity overall,’ Wallace said. ‘Washing more with less makes sense in terms of both profitability and sustainability.’
It’s true that laundry machine efficiency only improves each year, so if you buy a new washer, you might be doing more laundry than you used to, but you won’t be spiking your energy use accordingly. Still, on a warming planet, all energy use matters. You’ve probably heard eco-friendly laundry tips like washing with cold water or lowering the dryer temperature—or ignoring the machines altogether, washing by hand and using a drying rack.
Fashion expert Cora Harrington offered more suggestions for how to optimize your laundry habits:
Both Harrington and Wallace have another tip: Don’t use so much soap. Detergents are quite strong these days, and the more you use, the less clean your clothes will be. Seriously.
When it’s hot out, you water your garden. Amsterdam waters its bridges.
The Dutch capital is known for its canals, but Amsterdammers also have to get across them on a network of more than 1,700 bridges. Nine of them, mostly moving bridges, need to be cooled with canal water to prevent the metal from expanding in the heat and harming the structure.
‘It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment we started cooling, but bridges have been cooled for at least 50 years,’ said city woordvoerder—spokesperson—Manon Koffijberg. ‘If we don’t cool the bridges, there is a chance that the bridge and the road surface will expand. If this happens, parts of the bridge could be damaged.’ Bridge-watering is more common during hotter summers, though less common as bridges are gradually renovated or rebuilt to account for increased ‘thermal expansion’ in extreme heat.
It’s not just an Amsterdam problem. Last month in New York, the Third Avenue Bridge (a swing-bridge) opened to let a barge pass and got stuck there for four hours, as fireboats hosed down its swollen steel connections. As Christopher Bonanos writes in Curbed, this is actually a less common sight than it used to be, despite the hotter weather, because there is less boat traffic: ‘On a sweltering day in June 1936, not one but three spans over the Harlem River got stuck open at once, causing a spectacular traffic tie-up.’
Whether a bridge is vulnerable to this type of sticky summer behavior isn’t just about how it’s designed, or how it’s used. It also depends how it is maintained: Expansion joints, which give steel bridges this thermal flexibility, can get clogged with debris. With historically unusual heat affecting some U.S. bridges more than others, some civil engineers argue the nation should rethink which bridges need to be repaired first, factoring in the effects of climate change. You can only do so much with a hose.
It’s easy to take the huge variety of foods available at the grocery store for granted. But it’s possible because of the technology—and huge amount of energy—that keeps dairy, meat, fruits, and vegetables cold, safe from rot, and free of bacteria growth. To find out how the heat is affecting the process of keeping things cool, I talked to Nicola Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Henry Grabar: Do you think that climate change is impacting this incredible system of refrigeration that we’ve built and on which we are so dependent?
Nicola Twilley: It definitely is. The world’s first and only professor of cold economy, a guy called Toby Peters, has been working on the calculations of what happens when you have to refrigerate food at 50 degrees Celsius—rather than, you know, the 40 that we have today, or the 30—in summertime. It takes a lot more energy to remove heat from food in a 50-degree world than it does in 30-degree world.
You’re talking about the outdoor temperature, outside refrigerated containers, warehouses, buildings.
Yes. And what you’re doing when you’re refrigerating warehouses is you’re simply moving heat from inside to outside. Doing that in a world that is much hotter than today takes more energy.
The estimate is that for every degree-Fahrenheit rise in ambient temperature, your refrigerator uses 2 to 2½ percent more energy. So it’s significant. It has to work significantly harder to cool things. So there is a real problem.
We might face a trade-off between maintaining the refrigeration standards that we’ve come to expect and maintaining the level of energy that we’ve come to expect is required by those systems.
We can’t just store our food at a much warmer temperature. But there actually is a big push to raise the temperature that frozen food is stored at by a couple of degrees. Currently frozen food should be transported at minus 18 degrees Celsius, or zero degrees Fahrenheit. But for every degree that you go below minus 12 degrees Celsius, you’re using an extra 2 or 3 percent energy.
The company that owns Birds Eye [the frozen foods giant] has studied this and found that if their foods were stored at minus 15 degrees centigrade, rather than minus 18, it wouldn’t affect the food safety or the texture or taste or nutrition level. And it would likely reduce energy consumption by about 10 percent, which is a lot. All the big frozen-food warehouses and shipping companies are behind this right now. Americold, Lineage, Maersk, Nagel.
All the big transportation companies are pushing for it.
Is that … OK?
With chilled food it’s hard to see much room for wiggle room, but frozen food is generally transported at a much lower temperature than it needs to be. Early equipment wasn’t as reliable as today.
Imagine placing your hand on a frying pan as it warms up over the stove. How long do you think you could hold it there for until it got too painful? The surface of the pan needs to reach a minimum temperature of 158 degrees Fahrenheit before it becomes hot enough to fry an egg. Could you last until then? Could you get close?
Now imagine instead of a frying pan, it was the floor beneath you. Rising temperatures create extremely dangerous road and sidewalk conditions. Asphalt is capable of absorbing 95 percent of solar radiation, according to NASA. This means that these surfaces can be up to 60 degrees hotter than the air temperature. In places like Phoenix, NASA discovered the ground reached up to a whopping 140 degrees during hot days. That’s almost enough to fry that egg from earlier, and certainly enough to make it painful to walk on. That means that if you slip and fall on the ground for just a moment, it could be enough to give you a second-degree burn.
In 2023, the Arizona Burn Center treated 136 patients for such contact burns, the New York Times reported—14 of whom ended up dying as a result of their injuries. ‘The people dying from these types of burns are not people who just end up with some blistering on their feet,’ Clifford C. Sheckter, a burn prevention researcher at Stanford, told the Times. Instead, what can happen is a person passes out on a hot sidewalk or road due to heat exhaustion. This can result in second- or third-degree burns throughout the entire body. ‘Your body just literally sits there and cooks. When somebody finds you, you’re already in multisystem organ failure.’
The hot ground can affect pups, too. Joe Casados, the public relations manager for the Arizona Humane Society, told MediaDownloader that of the 11,000 calls that his organization has received for service so far in 2024, roughly 1,600 of them have been for heat-related issues in pets. This includes pets that are ‘suffering from heatstroke or have burned paws.’
He recommends checking if the pavement is too hot by placing the back of your hand on the surface. If it’s painful for you, it’ll be painful for your dog. You can walk them in the early morning or late at night when the weather is cooler. Or you can walk them on the grass instead.
There are also heat-safe booties you can buy for your pup that’ll not only protect them, but will make them look fabulous, too.
When temperatures soar, folks in an office can turn up the air conditioning. But that’s not an option for the people whose job requires them to be outdoors—an expansive group that includes construction workers, farm workers, landscapers, delivery drivers, and airport tarmac workers.
Lauren Jordan, a 33-year-old leadman who works at Canyon State Electric, based in Phoenix, regularly deals with days that hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit. He compares the heat to standing over an oven for an extended period of time. ‘Sometimes the wind blows, and it’s just as hot,’ he said. He once fainted the morning after a day he spent hours on a lift in direct sun, which he attributes to heat exposure and dehydration. Recently, one of his workers required medical attention when he became lethargic while working on the 12th floor of a hotel being built in downtown Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there were nearly 34,000 work-related heat injuries and illnesses severe enough to require time away from work between 2011 and 2020. That’s likely a vast underestimate due to underreporting by employees, employers, and medical professionals. Heat-related anecdotes are endless: Outdoor workers have reported nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, and more. If left untreated, symptoms can devolve into heatstroke, tissue breakdown, or even heart attacks.
To help manage extreme heat, many employers provide water and electrolytes, shift work schedules to avoid the hottest hours of the day, set up shading canopies, and offer frequent breaks. They may reduce exposure by switching out workers, or they take time to acclimate workers to extended time in the sun (the majority of workers who die from heat do so in the first few days of working in the heat, according to Vox). Canyon State Electric has adopted a mobile IV program where they can call upon nurses to provide a hydrating IV treatment to workers experiencing heatstroke symptoms. Thomas received an IV after the instance where he fainted at work, and experienced ‘instant relief,’ he recalled.
However, not all workers who are exposed to high temperatures feel so supported. For instance, Amazon drivers have reported struggling to meet their intense productivity metrics in extremely hot vehicles, as the company’s ‘engine-off compliance’ requires them to turn off the engine—and its air conditioning—every time they get out of the car. There are still no federal regulations in place to protect workers from extreme heat; some states, such as Florida, have even banned such protections.
Instead, many workers have to look out for themselves, and each other. The buddy system can sometimes be more effective for folks who are accustomed to pushing themselves physically at work. Construction workers ‘just want to suck it up and get it done,’ said Sidney Hawkins, the safety and training director at Canyon State Electric, ‘and you rely on your crewmates standing next to you to keep you safe.’
For Muslims, the Hajj has never had an absence of danger. The number of pilgrims who embark on the dayslong annual journey to Mecca has swelled over the decades, as have horrific death tolls from stampedes, physical ailments, and infrastructure disasters along the way. But this year’s Hajj, occurring in the thick of the hottest June in recorded history, was the scene of a different kind of tragedy.
More than 1,300 Muslims perished during this year’s pilgrimage, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Temperatures in Saudi Arabia climbed up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit—the highest in decades. The majority of those who died from heat stress were the poorer, older, and sicker visitors who were unable to afford the costs involved in obtaining an official Hajj package (running into the several thousands of dollars, a package gets you a visa, travel, food, shelter, and an official Saudi ‘coordinator’). Thus, they were often turned away from means of relief like air-conditioned tents and cool-water centers. And there weren’t enough medics, CNN reported: ‘Witnesses said worshipers losing consciousness and walking past bodies covered in white cloth became a norm.’
The Saudi kingdom has taken measures over time to mitigate the potential heat deaths, especially after the 1987 heat cycle that killed more than 1,000 pilgrims over the span of a few days. Zahra Jamal, a senior consultant for Interfaith America, listed a large variety of improvements the Saudi government has already made: increased building capacity, and reflective coating and ventilation; more tents, trees, and buses for heat protection; a ramp-up of ready health workers handing out umbrellas and water; and a surveillance system for issuing extreme-weather alerts.
Even so, these measures obviously haven’t been enough. ‘You can’t really blame the government because their capacity is strained, and they can’t really plan ahead of time,’ said Jamal. On top of the cost for accommodations, it can be tricky to get one of the limited number of visas. ‘They go by a visa lottery system, and if they don’t have another 100,000 unregistered people on their list of folks to prepare for, they can’t adequately do so,’ said Jamal. It’s likely that, in the future, Saudis may impose more restrictions on the movement of vulnerable pilgrims. Yet the Hajj is so essential to Islam that there will always, inevitably, be those who flout the rules in order to make the trip, including because they can’t afford the price of participating safely.
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