High Heat
“It feels like I’m inhaling fire,” my mother told me over a late-night WhatsApp video from Kolkata last week. She had turned off the lights and was sitting in the stifling dark, fans whirring overhead. India, as you may know, has just suffered through one of the worst and longest heatwaves in half a century that has killed more than 100 people across the country. Its cities — crammed with heat-trapping concrete structures, asphalt roads, and vehicles — have borne the brunt, in line with research that shows urban areas there are simply not cooling down at night as much as they did even 15 years ago. The advent of monsoon rains in many parts of the country today brought some relief (along with extreme flooding in some parts). But it's not just India that’s been suffering this way. As we move into peak summer, intense heat is claiming lives across all five continents. In Saudi Arabia, more than 1,000 of Hajj pilgrims died of heat-related illnesses. In Greece, at least six tourists died while out walking in scorching weather. Mexico reported around 125 deaths during its recent heatwave. Here, in the US, more than 100 million people on the East Coast began this week under heat warnings. On the West Coast, at least six people have died from heat-related complications in Phoenix, where my sister lives. Last Saturday, her family drove over to my home in Berkeley, California, dog in tow, to escape the sizzling temperatures for a while. It's been unsettling to scan news of the heatwaves, to see my family on both sides of the planet, especially my aging parents, suffer through it as well. Sadly, all of this is now par for course given the rapidly shifting baselines of what’s normal in this world. Faced with such extremes, it’s especially important that we look out for each other, and ourselves, as much as possible. I hope all of you are staying hydrated, keeping cool, and taking care.
|
