Global heating is no longer a tomorrow problem. It’s today’s

For decades, global warming was widely seen as a tomorrow problem, something for our hapless grandchildren to worry about. But with heat records tumbling relentlessly, it’s becoming clear that tomorrow has basically arrived. We are the hapless grandchildren. And it’s also becoming clear that we’re not ready for the heat.

Monday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average global temperature hitting 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.87 F), according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. That smashed the previous record set way back on, uh, Sunday.

Before Sunday, the previous record was set in July 2023. In fact, the past 10 years have had the 10 highest annual maximum temperatures on record, according to Copernicus data going back to 1940. The highs of the past two years shifted into a new gear, crossing 17 C for the first time. Last year, we could chalk some of that heat up to the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures. But El Niño has ended, and the mercury is still alarmingly high.

These are also probably the highest highs in roughly 125,000 years. As climate-change deniers never tire of pointing out, the climate has always been changing. That hot period 5,000 generations ago — when temperatures might have maxed out at 1.5 C above preindustrial averages, roughly matching this past scorching year — was followed by a long ice age. After that, the planet naturally warmed to the pleasant temperatures in which human civilization thrived for about 240 generations, a golden age of agriculture, air conditioning and Stanley cups.

Turbocharged weather

The bad news is that, thanks to that same civilization burning fossil fuels and spewing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, those pleasant temperatures are a thing of the past. We’re on track to zoom past 1.5 C of warming on the way to something closer to 3 C, speed-running a process that would naturally take thousands of years. These may be the hottest years in recorded history, but they will also be some of the coolest we’ll ever enjoy again.

Higher temperatures turbocharge the planet’s weather engines, leading to more frequent and severe heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods and increasingly destructive hurricanes and thunderstorms. As they rise, they will eventually melt ice sheets and raise global sea levels, eradicate Amazon rainforest, thaw boreal permafrost and unleash methane gas and ancient pathogens, kill the coral reefs and switch off the Atlantic Ocean current that controls Europe’s thermostat. They will lead to mass migration and resource wars.

But the deadliest immediate effect is simply the heat itself. It attacks human health on every level and already takes more lives each year than every other natural disaster combined. The problem is so big and so insidious that we don’t yet fully grasp its scope.

The more than 2,300 heat-related deaths in the United States last year were only those in which heat was an obvious contributor. A 2020 study by researchers at Brown University, Boston University and the University of Toronto suggested the true number could be more than twice as high. Uncounted global heat deaths could approach half a million each year.

Protecting the vulnerable

Quantifying heat’s threat to health is crucial but only the start. People also need to be better educated about its dangers so that they stop putting themselves in harm’s way. That includes changing a cultural attitude toward heat as “something that should be willingly embraced, bravely endured, blithely ignored, or in the case of some marginalized communities, entirely deserved,” Vox’s Umair Irfan and Aja Romano wrote recently.

To their last point, the people most vulnerable to heat are the elderly, small children, people with underlying ailments and people who lack air conditioning. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have fewer trees and suffer the most from urban heat-island effects. All deserve better protection than they’re receiving now.