The New York Times made a bold and powerful statement this week. It says we need to retrofit the entire planet to survive the coming heat waves. In Australia, we already knew what to expect.
Right now, it feels like the entire northern hemisphere is facing dangerous heat and humidity. Australians are bracing for the impending climate nasties a Super El Niño will bring this coming summer, with searches for heat and summer temperatures on the rise.
Academics say we will face a greater likelihood of drought and water shortages in eastern and southern Australia, direct impacts on food production and prices and, along with that, local economies. Between 2017 and 2020, large parts of NSW experienced severe drought, and there were big job hits. Employment in the Hunter Valley region was down 75 per cent on estimates without the drought.
In its latest newsletter, Sweltering Cities said the Super El Niño will mean record-breaking heat on top of an already worsening baseline.
“A brutal summer means more people rationing the aircon, more people with asthma and chronic illness pushed to the edge, more workers and carers putting themselves at risk to look after others.”
A report finds the oceans are now hottest on record, and the last time a record breaking marine heatwave was recorded in 2023, large areas of Europe were hit by intense heatwaves, extreme rains, deadly floods in Spain and severe bushfires around the Mediterranean.
In a piercing article in The New York Times, science writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells said the planet needs to be retrofitted for the heat, and the task is enormous.
For decades, climate experts have said warming not only changes everything but requires “so much be changed”, Wallace-Wells said. Airconditioning needs to be deployed much faster; Europeans are suffering a slower rollout and a higher risk of heat mortality than hotter and poorer parts of the world, while anti-AC talk still dominates European media.
The reason is these conditions were “genuinely unthinkable not very long ago”, and it’s progressing so rapidly, is “they have become routine faster than large-scale adaptation has managed to keep up”. Estimates suggest that as many as 60,000 people died from heat events as recently as 2022.
And airconditioning “is not the cure all for extreme heat, Wallace-Wells said. “It does not address crop losses and the mass deaths of animals, as we’ve seen in Europe, let alone evaporative damage to soil and waterways or the effects on outdoor labour and infrastructure designed and built under entirely different climatic regimes.”
“… to pretend adaptation is simple is to live in denial of the pace and scale of warming”.
“But the job of retrofitting the planet is an enormous one, even if everyone were rowing in the right direction.”
Wallace-Wells points to America, which has “spent the last few years complaining about how hard it is to build anything”, as well as poorly managed wildfires, planning for inland flooding or adapting to insurance’s redrawn risk maps.
Airconditioning “is not the cure all for extreme heat, Wallace-Wells said. “It does not address crop losses and the mass deaths of animals, as we’ve seen in Europe, let alone evaporative damage to soil and waterways or the effects on outdoor labour and infrastructure designed and built under entirely different climatic regimes.”
“We’re going to have to do an awful lot to make a future punctuated by so many more of them manageable.”
That’s what climate experts mean when they say, as they have said for more than a decade, that warming not only changes everything but also requires that so much be changed. To pretend adaptation is simple is to live in denial of the pace and scale of warming.
Read more on The New York Times.
