The New Thermal Divide - Part 4: Accountability and the Future of a Superheated Planet

The New Thermal Divide - Part 4: Accountability and the Future of a Superheated Planet

Extreme heat operates as an invisible, destructive force that dictates the reality of the growing thermal divide. This heat is not an accident. It is an entirely human artifact. We live beyond the planetary Goldilocks Zone, the temperature range where life historically thrives. The heat propelling us out of this stable zone is deliberate and premeditated. Accountability for this extreme warming rests squarely on decades of reckless fossil fuel consumption. As the world faces accelerating chaos, the critical choice remains: we must roast, flee, or act.

Anatomy of a Crime Scene: Premeditated Heat

The consequences of burning fossil fuels have been known for more than a century. By 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson received warnings about the climate consequences. By 1977, Exxon’s internal climate models accurately projected the changes resulting from fossil fuel consumption. Despite this knowledge, the burning of coal, oil, and gas continued with reckless abandon.

Globally, the average temperature has risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era. The world is now more than halfway to the 3.6-degree threshold (2 degrees Celsius) identified by scientists as the limit for dangerous climate change. The cumulative heat generated is immense. The ocean, acting as the climate crisis’s hero, absorbs approximately 90 percent of the additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases. By one measure, the ocean absorbs heat equivalent to the energy released by three nuclear bombs every second. The carbon dioxide we release stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, meaning stopping new emissions will only halt the increase in warming, not reverse the heat already trapped. Humanity has essentially built a heat-fueled rocket ship taking us beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

Heat is not a slow, linear change. It is an active force driving entropy and disorder. Worldwide, extreme heat causes approximately 489,000 deaths annually, significantly more than the 250,000 annual worldwide deaths from firearms. The scale of this devastation demands accountability.

Science as a Tool for Justice

The science of extreme event attribution has emerged as a crucial tool for accountability. This field connects specific extreme weather events, such as heat waves, directly to human-made climate change.

The concept originated in 2003 when Myles Allen, a geophysicist, wondered who was responsible for the rising River Thames near his home. He argued that if researchers could attribute extreme weather events to climate change, the findings could potentially influence the public’s ability to blame greenhouse gas emitters for resulting damages. This science was developed with the legal system, or the “court,” specifically in mind.

Dr. Friederike Otto, a key figure in this field, refined methods for connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change. Otto’s work helped establish that human-made climate change made events like the 2003 European heat wave, which killed seventy thousand people, more likely. The science is now shifting mind-sets, providing proof that the climate crisis is happening in real time. Otto believes that it is possible a company like ExxonMobil could be held liable in a court of law for deaths resulting from an extreme heat wave. She stated without hesitation that she believes this will happen sooner than people think.

The Illusion of Comfort: The Thermal Divide

The idea that eight billion people can thrive simply by turning up the air-conditioning fundamentally misunderstands the future. Adaptation is expensive and slow, and the thermal divide ensures that the poor suffer most acutely.

Phoenix, Arizona, provides a stark example of this vulnerability. Mikhail Chester, an infrastructure expert, warned that a major blackout lasting more than thirty-six hours could result in “Katrina-like numbers” of deaths—in the thousands. Wealthy, highly efficient LEED-certified buildings become dangerous heat traps when the power fails.

The tragic death of Stephanie Pullman, seventy-two, illustrates the lethal intersection of heat and poverty. Living on a fixed income of less than $1,000 a month, Pullman had her power cut off by Arizona Public Service (APS) over an unpaid bill of just $51.84. She died in her bed on a 107-degree day from heat exposure. APS data showed the company cut power over 110,000 times in 2018, with more than 39,000 cutoffs during the scorching months of May through September. Pullman’s death forced Arizona regulators to ban summer power shutoffs.

In Chennai, India, residents face a similar plight. Anjalai lives in a small hut and her daily life is dictated by heat. Her husband, who has a heart condition, must work outdoors in construction, exposed to the sun, while her wealthy clients benefit from air-conditioning. In the Perumbakkam concrete high-rises, families relocated after flooding struggle without air-conditioning or trees. Mercy Muthu, 41, noted the spooky risk posed by elevators stopping during power outages, trapping people in the intense heat.

Air-conditioning itself is both a technological triumph and a significant problem. The invention of cheap, cold air enabled the building boom in the US South, making cities like Houston habitable. This technology created a cycle where the quest for comfort contributes to the very warming it attempts to mitigate. In this sense, air-conditioning is both a technology of personal comfort and a technology of forgetting. The addiction to comfort is wreaking havoc on the world.

Making the Invisible Visible: Naming Heat

The difficulty in addressing the heat crisis is amplified by its invisibility. Heat waves have no spinning eye or visible trajectory, making them harder to communicate than hurricanes.

In response, organizations like the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) decided to focus on making the risks of extreme heat visible. Kathy Baughman McLeod, Arsht-Rock’s founder, saw heat as a “silent killer” that deserved the same attention as hurricanes. The goal was to build a movement to take on heat by ranking and naming heat waves.

This approach is considered “branding” and PR, rather than pure science, but Baughman McLeod believes it is PR that will save lives. The ranking system developed by researcher Laurence Kalkstein uses a health-based methodology. It looks at air masses and correlates them with past mortality data to forecast how many people an air mass will kill when it arrives in a specific community. This approach blends factors like humidity and nighttime temperatures to provide a single score based on potential health impacts, making the ranking specific and relevant.

The city of Seville, Spain, was the first to commit to a pilot program to both rank and name heat waves. Because heat waves were becoming more frequent, doubling in frequency in recent decades, officials were looking for urgent solutions. The city decided only the deadliest, Category Three, heat waves would receive a name, using reverse alphabetical order: Zoe, Yago, Xenia, and so on. Heat Wave Zoe arrived in July 2022 when temperatures were forecast to soar above 109 degrees.

Naming Zoe sparked intense media interest internationally, effectively raising public awareness. A survey commissioned after Zoe found that residents who recalled hearing the name were more likely to engage in safe behaviors, such as drinking water and working from home. The success of the pilot led California’s legislature to pass a bill directing the California Environmental Protection Agency to develop a health-based ranking system for heat waves, impacting forty million people.

The Future: Decarbonization and Adaptation Limits

As the world continues to heat up, humanity faces the fundamental dilemma: roast, flee, or act.

The long-term solution requires stopping the burning of fossil fuels. Clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world. Current dependence on fossil fuels is mainly driven by inertia, political will, and the desire of oil and gas companies to maximize their investments. We are confronted by political dysfunction where people argue about fiddling while the fires spread through Rome.

Adaptation efforts are underway globally, but their limits are clear. Cities are working to decarbonize and become more resilient. New York City has planted over a million trees to provide shade and clean air. Paris, still scarred by the 2003 heat wave that killed fifteen thousand people in France, is undergoing massive urban remodeling. Mayor Anne Hidalgo is committed to transforming the city, which has only 9 percent tree canopy cover, by planting 170,000 new trees by 2026.

However, retrofitting existing infrastructure is immensely challenging and slow. Franck Lirzin, an advisor, calculated that retrofitting Paris’s historic buildings to insulate them would take seventy-five years at a pace of 1 percent per year. The Champs-Élysées makeover project, costing $300 million for one boulevard, is expected to take a decade to complete. Heat is rising faster than our ability to adapt.

The urban environment also suffers from profound tree inequity. Wealthy neighborhoods like River Oaks in Houston or Polanco in Mexico City enjoy majestic tree shade. Meanwhile, poorer areas like Gulfton in Texas or the east side of Austin are asphalt deserts with minimal tree cover, resulting in higher temperatures. Austin is noted as having the most unequal tree cover of any urban area in the US.

When adaptation fails, migration increases. Up to three billion people are projected to be left outside the stable climate conditions that gave rise to civilization. Yet, movement toward high-risk, hot areas continues due to cheaper living costs and job markets. Williamson County, Texas, an area with high heat risk, saw the highest net migration rate among fifty analyzed US counties between 2016 and 2020.

In the long run, extreme heat is an extinction force. The End-Permian extinction event, which killed nearly everything, was caused by a bolt of extreme heat from volcanic eruptions that dumped billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. The temperature may have jumped as much as 60 degrees, with ocean temperatures reaching 104 degrees. That ancient reef, now Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, is a towering mass grave from a time when the Earth was so hot all the ice was gone. This history serves as a stark reminder that as hot as today’s climate is, it can get much, much worse.

We are not beyond the point of control. Humanity retains the power to influence how hot the planet gets and how much we protect one another. The urgency is immense: we are deciding now which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will be forever closed.

The choice between the future and the past is a constant battle, like trying to retrofit a massive, ancient library during a quickening flood. You can spend decades shoring up the foundations, insulating the walls, and ensuring access for everyone, but if you don’t turn off the tap causing the flood, all the beautiful new improvements and expensive labor will eventually be swept away.