The Reality of a Hotter World is Already Here

As global warming makes sizzling temperatures more common, will human

beings be able to keep their cool? New research suggests not


Douglas Kenrick, rangy and grizzled, squints through the shimmering heat of a late-summer afternoon in
the Sonora desert. You live here long enough, he says, crossing to the south side of an empty street for
the five-minute walk across the campus of Arizona State University, and you become like a desert
animal, searching out shade. Having grown up on Long Island, and coming from the frequently
snowbound campus of Montana State University, he relished the heat when he moved to Phoenix in
1980, but by the end of his first full summer, it had become oppressive. I came from New York with the
attitude that it cant ever be too hot for me, says Kenrick, but I was wrong. It seems likely that most
people who move to Phoenix, where the temperature reached 118 degrees one day last June, make the
same discovery, but as an evolutionary psychologist, Kenrick wanted to do more than complain about the
climate. So he did an experiment.
His method had the elegance of all great science: He recruited a volunteer to stop her car at a green light
and he counted the seconds until the driver behind honked the horn. He did this once a week from April
to August, on days when the high temperature ranged from 84 degrees to 108, and he found that the
thermometer accurately predicted how soon, and how many times, thwarted drivers would protest before
the light changed. When the weather was comfortably cool, the typical driver just politely tapped on the
horn for a second, Kenrick wrote. When it got up near 100, though, they started blaring their horns,
yelling out the window, and making hand signals they probably did not learn in drivers education.
The link between heat and angerpeople are fired up or steamed up, or they keep their coolis so
deeply embedded in folk wisdom that it has gone mostly unquestioned. But it is increasingly a subject for
psychologists and other social scientists concerned about the implications of a world in which 108
degrees may no longer be exceptional. Under one scenario studied by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, by the end of the century, todays North Carolina summers would become the norm for
New Hampshire, while Louisianas climate would migrate up to Illinois. In Phoenix itself, temperatures
could regularly hit the 130s...by the second half of this century, University of Arizona climatologist
Jonathan Overpeck has predicted.
The various environmental effects of greenhouse gases are potentially devastating, as we have often
heard. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, made public in March, underscored
the danger of widespread hunger, even starvation, resulting from crop failures. Other health threats have
been enumerated by Robert Repetto, a United Nations Foundation economist, who says climate change
will intensify smog, leading to increased outbreaks of asthma and allergies, and exacerbate vector-
borne diseases such as hantavirus, West Nile virus, Lyme disease and dengue fever. Repetto also
worries about the extreme weather events that some researchers say climate change will engender.
Biological systems and engineering systems are all designed for a range of climatic conditions, he says.
Within those limits, were OK, ...but outside those limits, the damage increases rapidly and becomes
catastrophic, and were going outside those limits. Heat waves themselves pose a health risk, especially
for young children and the elderlyand world-class athletes. Temperatures at the Australian Open in
January reached 104 degrees for four consecutive days, a condition that one tennis player called
inhumane after competitors collapsed on the court.

The weather is always changing, to be sure, and any given event might have happened independent of
global warming, but some trends are clear. Melting glaciers and disappearing sea ice, combined with the
thermal expansion of the oceans, will almost certainly lead to increased coastal flooding of low-lying
areas around the world, including parts of the United States. Like the iconic polar bear stranded on a
shrinking ice floe, we are all facing an uncertain and perilous ecological future.
There may be hordes of climate refugees, fleeing homes on islands and coasts made uninhabitable by
climate changeanywhere from 25 million to 1 billion people by 2050, according to the International
Organization for Migration. Even people who dont have to move will experience a bewildering sense of
dislocation as the environment changes around themas Northern winters start to be measured in
weeks rather than months. Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, coined the term solastalgia for
this emotion, a kind of homesickness you can experience without leaving home.
We will see the emergence of novel climates, environments weve not seen before in human times, and
the extinction of others, around the Arctic and in high Alpine regions, says Laurence C. Smith, a
professor of geography at UCLA and author of The World in 2050. Smith says cities, industry and
agriculture may benefit in places such as Canada and Scandinavia, though at some cost in psychological
and cultural disruption. Very bitterly cold winters will be less common in some places, he says, but
instead of a nice blanket of white snow, they will have slush. And people who move north for the
weather, or for jobs that may open up as the Arctic melts, will discover that climate change doesnt make
the winter nights any shorter.
But climate is about more than ecology: Its also a force in human behavior, a fact often overlooked in
global-warming scenarios. And new research suggests that a hotter world may, for one thing, be more
dangerous, and not just because of road rage. Craig A. Anderson, of Iowa State University, pioneered
research on climate and aggression, and derived the formula that each additional degree of warming
increases the rate of violent crime (homicides and assaults) by 4.19 cases per 100,000 people. Solomon
Hsiang, a public policy specialist at UC Berkeley, has found that climate change historically leads to
social disruption, up to and including war. Property crime, personal violence, domestic violence, police
violenceeverything you want less of, climate change seems to bring more of, either directly by making
individuals more violence-prone, or indirectly by promoting conflict related to diminishing resources or
deteriorating economic conditions.
For reasons Hsiang is still studying, hotter temperatures depress economic activity. In a study of 28
Caribbean economies, he found that short-term increases in surface temperature are associated with
large reductions in economic output. I was stunned by how large the effect was. I dont want to be
alarmist, but I think the evidence is extremely concerning, and it hasnt been seriously considered by
policy makers.
Violence, disease, social chaosthese are irresistible themes for science fiction, at least since the
classic Twilight Zone episode The Midnight Sun in 1961, in which a cosmic accident sends the Earth
out of its orbit and spiraling toward the Sun. Since then, of course, weve come to realize that humanity
has supplied the mechanism for calamity all by itself, through greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming
does pose some special challenges for fiction, as the editor Gordon Van Gelder points out: Its hard to
write a story where the characters are grappling with climate change. You cant just pull out a laser gun
and shoot at it. Still, Van Gelder managed to recruit 16 contributors for his 2011 collection of
stories, Welcome to the Greenhouse. Families driven out of their homes struggle to reach the Arctic,
where temperatures are bearable; monster tornadoes level whole towns; the military battles six-inch-long
honeybees. And, in a story in Van Gelders magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, tribunals in the future
pass judgment on tippers, the wastrels whose giant carbon footprints led the world over the edge to
disaster.
Science fiction is one way to get a feel for what daily life might be like in a hotter world. Another way is to
go to Phoenix during a late-September heat wave when temperatures hover around 105, where the first
thing you learn about the future is that it will apparently be lived indoors.
***
It is, as they say, a dry heat. On the East Coast, summer heat envelops you, like a hot, wet blanket, but
step outside in Phoenix and it swats you, like a rolled-up newspaper. When I worked in Atlanta it was hot
and humid, but there was never a day I couldnt go outside and hit a tennis ball, says Royal Norman, a
meteorologist for station KTVK. But there are days here where Im never outside except to get in and out
of my car. An advertisement for air conditioners in Phoenix uses the slogan, Some of the best moments
in life happen indoors, which could well be true, unless your passion is, say, golf or gardening.
Newcomers have to learn the hard way what happens to a soda can left inside a car parked in the sun, or
to dogs whose owners take them out on sidewalks without protective booties.

O utside my hotel, in the heart of downtown, the streets illustrate why the noun desert is cognate with
deserted. At mid-morning on an ordinary weekday, I can walk around the block twice without
encountering another human being on foot. In late afternoon, I meet a radio reporter named Jude Joffe-
Block. She arrives a few minutes late, apologetically; she says she was once two minutes late to meet a
friend at a bar, which happened to be closed that day; he was gone, unable to bear 120 seconds on the
sidewalk. Phoenicians defend their city with variations of the claim that everyone has air conditioning,
but during a heat wave last June, whose average high temperature was 107, Joffe-Block interviewed
people who were doing without it, usually because they couldnt afford monthly electric bills of $400 or
more. Sharon Harlan, a sociologist at Arizona State University, who has been studying how communities
are affected by extreme heat, says that in some poor neighborhoods a third of the population says the
high cost of electricity keeps them from using their air conditioning. Joffe-Block herself was living in a
rented apartment with a device called a swamp cooler, a machine that blows air over a water-saturated
pad, lowering the temperature by evaporation. On a recent 105-degree day, the swamp cooler chilled
Joffe-Blocks apartment all the way down to 95. The machines are common in the small stucco and
cinder-block houses that line the streets of south-central Phoenix, a low-income neighborhood a 15-
minute walk from the skyscrapers of downtown, if anyone was around to walk it.
And by the iron law of real estate values, people too poor for air conditioning tend to live in the hottest
parts of town, flat and shadeless under the relentless desert sun, far from the soothing balm of golf
courses and parks. Wealthy neighborhoods receive the microclimate ecosystem services of trees and
shrubs. Over the course of a summer, Harlan measured temperatures in the yards of houses in various
neighborhoods and found differences up to 14 degrees. Plants provide shade, intercept sunlight and cool
the surrounding environment as water evaporates from their leaves, whereas the built environment
absorbs energy from the sun and radiates it back as heat. Driving by a golf course at night during
summer, with the windows down, the change in air temperature can be startling, says Chris Martin, a
professor of horticulture at Arizona State.
Unfortunately, the cooling effects of plants come at a cost, namely water, which is becoming increasingly
a precious commodity in the Southwest as the climate warms and population increases. With the advent
of air conditioning and high-insulation building materials, people felt less need to surround their houses
with shade trees. Improvements in artificial turf have made it an acceptable alternative to grass in small
patches, even in wealthy neighborhoods. Such a yard can be 15 or 20 degrees warmer at night than the
same yard if it were irrigated, Martin says. You can see very nice homes in a yard without a single living
thing in it. Its one hot place, but most people are inside so they dont care.
***
Phoenix, like most big cities, is what meteorologists call a heat island, hotter than the surrounding
countryside, or than the land would be without the burden of civilization: of asphalt parking lots and tinted-
glass skyscrapers, of the air conditioners, automobile engines, appliances and light bulbs of 1.5 million
people. (Or, for that matter, the people themselves: The population of the Phoenix metropolitan area,
over four million, generates as much energy in the form of body heat as a medium-size power plant.) The
heat island effect creates a phenomenon that meteorologists and ordinary citizens find even more
disturbing than the occasional 115-degree afternoon: the trend toward higher nighttime temperatures.
Citing National Weather Service data, Norman, the meteorologist, said the last record low in Phoenix was
in December 1990. Since then we have set 144 record [daytime] highs and 230 record-high [nighttime]
lows. Back in the 1980s, even in the hottest part of the year, there were cool mornings, but this year there
were nights it never got out of the 90s. I wonder if eventually we will never get below freezing, and that
worries me because when it happens, the next summer we get hammered by the bugsspiders,
roaches, antseven mice.
Fifteen to 20 times a year, Ken Waters of the National Weather Service issues a heat warning for the
region, based on predicted highs and, equally important, nighttime lows. No question it has a major
impact on people, he says. When it stays above 90 all night, it makes it very difficult to recover from
daytime heating. If you dont have a home to go to, you are at the mercy of the elements, Harlan says,
no less than someone sleeping on a subway grate in Manhattan to stay warm in December. In a study
that looked at heat-related death by occupation, men in the category unknownwhich usually means
homelesshad a rate ten times that of men in known occupations.
For the rest of uswell, we will just have to get used to sweating more, and put up with what Anderson,
of Iowa State, describes as the crankiness factor. Being uncomfortable colors the way people see
things, he says. Minor insults may be perceived as major ones, inviting, even demanding, retaliation.
That was just what Richard Larrick of Duke Universitys Fuqua School of Business, along with his co-
authors, found when they examined the box scores of some 57,000 Major League Baseball games
played since 1952about 4.5 million plate appearances in all. They were looking into whether hot
weather made pitchers more likely to throw at batters, and based on records of game-time temperatures,
they found that it did, but in a specific and telling way. In theory, hot weather might increase the incidence
of wild pitches by affecting pitchers control (distracting them, or making their palms sweaty), but thats
not what the study focused on. Instead, it found that after one or more batters were hit, intentionally or
not, hot weather made it more likely that the opposing pitcher would retaliate later in the game. Whats
interesting is that the same actyour teammate being hit by a pitchseems to mean something different
in a hot temperature than a low one, Larrick says. An ambiguous act now seems more provocative
when your own mind is in turmoil because of the heat.
Of course, very cold weather makes people uncomfortable also, and in laboratory experiments cold has
in fact been shown to increase aggression. But that doesnt appear to translate into more crime during
cold spells. There is some evidence from brain imaging that the perception and regulation of heat
involves some of the same regions that process angerthe proverbial hotheadalthough the
significance of those findings is unclear. Anderson speculates that in evolutionary history, extreme cold
has generally posed a more immediate threat to personal survival than heat, and people are driven to
escape it, with clothing, fire and shelter. If Im cold, I have to deal with that right away, he muses. I dont
have time to be irritable.
And if you suffer from the heat, like Kenrick, the Arizona researcher, and you work on an academic
schedule, you can head north for relief. I go to Vancouver for a couple of weeks a year, he says, and I
enjoy being able to go out for coffee without having to stop each time and think, is it worth it. He should
enjoy it while he can, because Vancouver recorded its two hottest days ever in 2009, and the city is
considered at risk of flooding owing to climate change in the coming decades.
That honking sound you hear? It may be the climate apocalypse, right behind you.