Caution: too hot
Issue 104 - 21 June 2022 (8-min read)
"If we go to hell, we’ll take a blanket," is a common joke in Jacobabad, Pakistan, one of the hottest cities in the world where the mercury hit 51ºC (124°F) last month. Imagine living under uninhabitable conditions and still having a sense of humour.
Nearly 550 kilometres south in Karachi, where I am right now, I can testify that humour is the first to go in this sweltering heat that seems to wilt humans and plants alike.
So on a serious note, The Global Tiller takes a look at the heatwave gripping most of the northern hemisphere, what havoc it is causing in these soon-to-become uninhabitable cities, and what is the scale of intervention needed to reverse it.
Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, you are most likely experiencing hotter-than usual temperatures. In Europe, temperatures soared to over 40°C in the last few weeks, much earlier than the usual high temperatures seen in July and August. It became so hot in France that they banned outdoor events and had to import electricity to accommodate for the unprecedented use of air conditioners and fans. In the US too, the heatwave has impacted Upper Midwest and northern Plains and will likely head south soon.
But South Asia is topping the charts when it comes to soaring temperatures. Normally, the heat arrives in May but, this year, it started in March and is likely to continue until August. So far, it has claimed at least 90 lives.
It isn’t surprising that living in extreme heat is brutal, and it is made worse with power outages and water shortages. People suffer from dehydration and heatstroke, and women are at an additional risk of stillbirths and premature deliveries. Even the common advisory to stay indoors during the hottest hours of the day do not apply to those at the forefront of the climate crisis as farmers and daily wage workers have no other choice.
However, such heatwaves would have been rare events had it not been for human-induced climate change. A global team of researchers from the World Weather Attribution initiative compared the possibility of such an event occurring in today’s climate compared with the climate in pre-industrial times and concluded that climate change increased the probability of the heatwave occurring to once in every 100 years; the odds of such an event would have been once every 3,000 years in pre-industrial times.
The humans who caused climate change aren’t these poor farmers who are suffering longer and longer summers every year. Pakistan has contributed less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions but is one of the top 10 most vulnerable nations threatened by climate change. According to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit focused on environment data, this region in particular is headed towards 3.5°C warming by the end of the century, much much higher than the 1.5°C threshold agreed in the Paris Accord.
Facing this extreme heat, I want to pray for rain but the catastrophic floods in India and Bangladesh and the normal to above rainfall forecast during the upcoming monsoon warn that this may not be the solution I want, or the one we are prepared to deal with.
There are some immediate interventions that experts say could help residents in hot cities, such as replacing fire stoves with clean energy ones, allowing women to access healthcare during cooler hours, or replacing tin roofs with cooler, white material to reflect solar radiation. But these will just act as bandaid on a much larger problem.
What we really need is for the big polluters pay their due share in helping those at the forefront of climate change deal with disasters that are happening with increased frequency. COP15 promised $100 billion in climate funding to developing countries by 2020 but not a single dollar has made its way to the Global South to this day, when climate activists say that Pakistan alone needs a billion dollars a year for mitigation and adaptation.
How can those of us in the Global South push our leaders to demand more on behalf of our most vulnerable, and how can those of us in the Global North push our leaders to do more for the most vulnerable?
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
Edwina Floch on the power of music to care for the environment
Don’t miss our latest Pacific Toks podcast episode on talking and sharing music with Edwina Floch, a social entrepreneur, activist and the founder of the Environmental Music Prize. Edwina is from Australia and has dedicated her career to promoting and bringing to our attention the musical creativity that cares for our planet and our future. And, as a bonus, you’ll be able to listen to one of the songs that made it to the finals: Ta’u Tama, a song written by Vaiteani, a band from Tahiti.
…and now what?
While Hira is boiling in Karachi, here in Tahiti, the winter is slowly settling in. Well, winter in Tahiti is not the winter you experience in other parts of the world but when you’re used to this winter, the record cold temperatures of 17°C that we’re experiencing are enough to make the blankets pile up on the beds.
But signs of this big change happening on the planet can be seen elsewhere on our islands. It’s in the dry land. The mountains usually so green are becoming brownish and yellow much more often than they used to.
So it’s not just extreme heat but other signs in our environment making us realise that things are no longer the same. The “new normal” that we’ve heard so much about the last two years is not the one created by Covid but one that has been decades in the coming. Or maybe this “new normal” has already lost its newness because climate change is the one defining the “new normal”.
From Pakistani farmers losing a year of harvest in the heat to Pacific Islanders watching their islands drown with sea-level rise, all the way to Europeans or Americans facing more and more droughts and hurricanes, we are all witnessing the fast change taking us to this “new normal”. A new normal that questions our ability to work together.
Unfortunately, it seems that Covid has shown us that, in the world we’re living in, with the systems that have been implemented (or imposed) on us since decades, we have all come down to a heavily competitive system that favours the single individual unit over the collective, where it’s not about what can I bring for the common good or what kind of compromises I can make for everyone not to lose too much.
I’d argue that this mindset is the one that will potentially leads us to failure to adapt and prevail.
The recent elections in France, in Columbia, in the Philippines, the state of the US union, and many other situations throughout the world show us that instead of gathering to face it together, the more we’re facing global major threats, the more we rely on the old “every man for himself” kind of attitude. But when we go down that way, it will eventually be one person facing a global catastrophe, million-year old systems crushing down on a single living being with a short life span. The “sovereign individual”, the “free man, master of his destiny” will not weigh much then.
One could argue that humanity has managed to overcome huge challenges and to get away from its “natural” state many times, including by being able to leave its birth planet. But that’s the thing: these successes, these amazing accomplishments have been achieved by working together, sharing ideas and knowledge. So why, when we face one of the greatest threats of our time, we struggle to connect?
Maybe because we’ve been hammered down the idea that “I” is more important than “we”. That “I” didn’t have to make the effort if other “I’s” were not as well. That “I” could oppose my own good. Forgetting along the way that if we face climate change as a species, it’s billions of individuals collectively sharing the wisdom of a hundreds- and thousands-year-old community who will adapt to the challenge.
We never envision the human body as a collection of single cells living their lives on their own and sometimes agreeing to work together. That’d be quite a mess! So maybe it’s time to level our mindsets and consider that the most important level is the one of the collective and not the one of the single individual.
It’s time to consider the Pakistani farmer as our kin, the Pacific Islander as our kin, the American, European, African, Asian and all the others as parts of the same ensemble, the same community. As we’re entering an age of de-globalisation, we have to fight against the falsely natural urge to focus only on our selves, and realise that it’s together that we can prevail.
This may sounds utopian, idealistic if not completely out of reality. Maybe, or maybe today is the time where the wise words of Martin Luther King will find their true meaning: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury