Heat epidemic warns of drought and hunger the day after tomorrow – 07/18/2023 – Vinicius Torres Freire

The first week of July had the hottest days recorded in history, a measure that is not very precise, but it says something about the end to which our time has come. More numbers arrive from the heat. The Northern Hemisphere roasts again in summer, with an El Niño. There is talk of global warming, of the climate crisis, although most of us react like passers-by to a horrible traffic accident, but which will be forgotten the day after tomorrow.

In Canada, since spring the fire has already claimed an area equivalent to two and a half times that of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Some of us learned about this from the news of the smoke cloud in New York. In Phoenix, Arizona (USA) he did more than 43.3º for 19 straight days. It is said that governments in the northern half of the planet open buildings with air conditioning in order to relieve the heat, that the Chinese say that their cities have become saunas, that schools close, that Europe from the cold of our tropical imagination roasts again.

Even huge statistics seem causal, given the scale of the climate crisis. Last year, more than 66,000 people died in the European summer, says a study published in the journal “Nature Medicine” this month. In the summer of 2003, there were more than 70,000, almost 15,000 in France, most of them elderly, for the rest a little abandoned —we are going to stop taking care of our old people, civilization is decaying. There was a crop failure.

It doesn’t have to be summer, New York or Europe. Our neighbors are experiencing the worst drought in 60 or 70 years (as has occurred in parts of Brazil over the past decade). Drought scorched Argentina’s crops and made the economic crisis even worse. In Uruguay, the distribution of brackish water through the taps caused a sensation here, due to the lack of an alternative; there, it caused street protest.

When will a combination of climate crisis and regional bad luck cause a global crop failure, of soy, corn, wheat; killing of herds? Hunger? In the forgotten countries of the world, the poor, it already happens. In part, this disgrace is a factor in the “refugee crises”.

The disproportion between the size of the problem and our short and, in general, powerless life in retail may make it difficult to grasp what is going on and what needs to be done. Scientific indifference, reinforced by social networks of ignorance, at least since 2010, does not help. Even most of us who are not denialists look at what passes for “anecdotal evidence”, “fait divers” or stories in the face of a dark and giant but distant backdrop.

Rich world governments have not heeded the warnings that their own research and intelligence departments have produced about the huge and close risk of an epidemic caused by a respiratory virus. Came to Covid.

In October 2019, the US Department of Health reported a simulation of how US officials would react to a flu epidemic coming from China. That’s right: they would react with the confusion that was seen, there would be a lack of equipment and hundreds of thousands would die. There were warnings about the problem being the lack of international coordination. As it turned out, rich countries disputed over scarce gloves and masks, a dismal embarrassment.

“Anthropic greenhouse gas emissions have caused a notable rise in global temperatures, which is associated with increased frequency and intensity of heat waves and hot summers. Globally, the past eight years have been the warmest on record, and 2022 was the fifth hottest year,” wrote Joan Ballester and colleagues in the Nature Medicine study “Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022”.

Perhaps such studies will become as frequent as weekend weather forecasts.

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