This is the Coldest Year of the Rest of Our Lives
Bankers, wet-bulb temperatures, and getting cool
As Europe experiences a record-setting heat wave, the Global Head of Responsible Investing at HSBC Asset Management gave a remarkably honest presentation at a Financial Times Moral Money event in London. He said that investors did not need to worry about the climate crisis and dismissed dire predictions as hyperbole. In contrast to the alluring rhetoric and empty promises of greenwashing, this sort of callous soft denial provides clear evidence why a system focused on short-term profit is incapable of preserving a habitable biosphere:
“At a big bank like ours, what do people think the average loan length is? It is six years. What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book. For coal, what happens in year seven is actually irrelevant.”
There is certainly a lot wrong with this guy’s ideas on multiple levels, but I want to focus on how he dismissively reduced the effects of future global warming to wildfires and rising sea levels that humans could easily adapt to. Of course, if the climate crisis is left unchecked, wildfires and rising sea levels will have devastating consequences in many places around the world that will be difficult or impossible to ameliorate. But there will be many other catastrophic harms from global warming, like droughts, famines, and heat waves.
The most dangerous heat waves are gauged in wet-bulb temperatures. This is a measure of combined temperature and humidity taken by placing a wet cloth over a thermometer to basically simulate how human bodies deal with heat via perspiration. When our body temperature increases, our sweat glands release their contents. When the sweat evaporates, it cools us down because of the energy transfer involved in this process. But when the wet-bulb temperature in our environment gets high enough, the human body literally cannot thermoregulate in this way. The ambient heat raises our body temperature and we sweat in response, but the air is too full of water vapor for the sweat to evaporate, so we do not cool down and we basically cook to death.
There is strong evidence that a wet-bulb temperature of 87°F is deadly for even young, healthy people (and the limits for more vulnerable people are thus even lower). The recent heat wave in India and Pakistan reached this dangerous threshold, reminiscent of the harrowing opening to The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 science fiction novel. The hotter the planet gets, the more frequent and extreme the heat waves that produce these deadly wet-bulb temperatures will be. So instead of focusing on temperature targets, we should remember that every iota of future warming that is avoided by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions will directly translate into saved lives and reduced suffering.
There is also much that can be done to adapt to a warming world. Air conditioning obviously helps with cooling off and escaping the heat. But in our present world, AC is a luxury that most people do not have access to. And it has limitations: AC units use a lot of energy and increase the ambient air temperature outside where they are being used. A better way to think about this is what Aaron Vansintjan calls the right to be cool. This type of holistic approach includes AC as part of the solution rather than the totality of it, designing cities and buildings to be cooler for everyone by increasing vegetation, reducing concrete, using passive cooling architecture (with social housing of course), and creating community cooling spaces for all.
Thinking about a collective right to be cool allows us to see how vulnerability to extreme heat is a political construction as much as a physical one. The way that high wet-bulb temperatures can kill is a stark reminder of not only the fragility of our biological form, but of the social and ecological conditions we require for comfort and survival. Many people have never had a right to those conditions, and more will lose it every day without requisite action. So the climate crisis is not a future asteroid to dodge; its effects are already here, unevenly distributed, the consequences of relentlessly burning fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems for profit.
No matter how successful we are at eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, 2022 will be the coldest year of the rest of our lives because this pollution is not only still increasing, its warming effects in the atmosphere are delayed. Whether the wealthiest people on the planet do not fully grasp the enormity of the problem or simply think they can escape its effects is immaterial. How much hotter it gets—and the type of world we build in the process—is up to the rest of us. The best salve for vulnerability is solidarity.