Heatwave: Code red for our warming world
A factual book that reads like horror fiction. A novel set in a blazing summer 50 years ago
Image by Daniel R, Pixabay
This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context in just five minutes — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
The Big Story:
Europe’s scorching heatwave — the most severe and widespread ever to have affected so large a region — is a red alert for our warming world, according to scientists.
New analysis shows that conditions of extreme heat are worsening around the world, with longer, hotter, more frequent heatwaves, even as we continue to burn fossil fuels and increase carbon pollution.
Climate change is said to have made this year’s heatwave 2°C-4°C worse than it would have been under the same conditions in the second half of the 20th century.
As our first book notes:
The climate impacts you hear about most often, from sea-level rise to drought to wildfires, are all second-order effects of a hotter planet. The first-order effect is heat. It is the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible force that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture out of trees until they are ready to ignite. It revs up the bugs that eat the crops and thaws the permafrost that contains bacteria from the last ice age. When the next pandemic hits, the chances are good it will be caused by a pathogen that leapt from an animal that was seeking out a cooler place to live.
This Week’s Books:
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A call to understand and respect heat.
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A fictional take on a long ago British heatwave.
Click to read on about the books and the back story
Another relevant free-to-read post:
Can the climate change…from talk to action? Two brand new books speak truth to doomism
