Today, Explained - Heat waves been faking me out

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

As devastating heat waves like the recent one in China become more common, we’re going to need new ways of talking about them. Vox’s Neel Dhanesha explains a proposal to name heat waves. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. About 11 weeks ago, a strange thing started happening in southwestern China. It's summer. Heat is normal. So the temperature went up, up some more, more. The nights are hot. The days are hotter. And people are sweating through their shirts when they go outside. And there's just no relief. It didn't stop. 100 degrees, 102, 104.

A construction worker dropped dead, and when they took his temperature, it was 109.4 degrees, China Youth Daily reported. 110 degrees, 113. The thing was, people kept going to work and going about their lives. The heat was an annoyance. In the U.S., the deadliest weather phenomenon is heat, but we kind of treat it like an annoyance too. Coming up, heat waves have been faking us out,

a plan to make us realize they're dangerous. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Sha Hua, reporter with The Wall Street Journal. You've been covering two record-breaking events in China. There's the heat wave and there's the drought. Tell me first what the drought's been like. Rivers have run dry or they're at a very low level, which means that a lot of vessels can't actually ship along the river. A record heat wave and drought in China are drying out the Yangtze River, the longest in Asia. The river is a crucial source of water for nearly 400 million people and is vital to China's economy.

The water level in some places along the river is more than five meters below normal. And of course, a low water level in the river leaves the goods that move along it high and dry in one year. The river is used to transport more than one billion tons of cargo. A drought in China has revealed ancient statues of Buddha on an island that's usually submerged. The statues are believed to be 600 years old. You know, farms have no water to irrigate their fields. 4.5 million people are short of drinking water.

Water reservoirs, the places where you store water, especially along the dams, are near dead water level, which is basically the level of water at which you can still use the water to generate electricity. Hydroelectric power stations in these areas have halted operations to provide water for farmers and households. Now tell me about the heat wave. The heat wave has been going on for a long time, actually.

So it started in June, and Chinese state media calls it the longest heat wave in recorded history. So about 70 days of extreme temperatures upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Scorching temperatures melted the roof of a museum in central China. There have been an increasing number of reports of COVID workers collapsing and fainting on the job due to heat stroke. This is the kind of weather that is suffocating even in a T-shirt and jeans. Now imagine wearing a full body hazmat suit. In different places, it looks differently, obviously. In the cities, you basically have people sweating through their shirts. And in the countryside, you have fields where all the crops have wilted. If China can't rescue its autumn harvest and has to buy more food from overseas, this could have an effect on global supplies. A lot of the poultry, the livestock, is not really taking well to heat. And I think some livestock has also died of heat.

Tell me a bit about how ordinary people are experiencing this heat wave. So the area that has been impacted by the heat wave is huge. The places that have been impacted by the drought, about six provincial level jurisdictions. And I just looked up their population number and it's about the population of the United States. And obviously, depending on whether you're rich or whether you're poor, you most probably experience it differently, whether you're in the city or in the countryside. If you're in the city and you're middle class, you most probably have access to air conditioning. It's not so great if you have to step outside to

take a PCR test, but otherwise you're sitting amid the splendor of air conditioning if you're in the countryside air conditioning might be less prevalent and you may have a fan I saw a girl being interviewed by Chinese state television and she was asked how the heat wave felt like for her and she said pointing at the fan that was blasting air at her, that even that air felt hot to her. Now, I should also say about some of the areas that have been affected by the heat wave, that they are actually quite accustomed to hot temperatures.

Sichuan and Chongqing and Wuhan, for example, all of these places are known as furnaces in the summer. So heat as such is not so uncommon. What was truly outstanding for everyone was just that it lasted for such a long time. Tell me a bit about Sichuan, which you said is used to heat. Where in the country is Sichuan and what kind of province is it? What's the economy based around?

So Sichuan is in southwestern China and it has about 84 million inhabitants. And that's where a lot of the mountains are from which the rivers spring forth. It's a very, very lush province. And it's also home to the giant panda, which it prides itself with. And it has a lot of water. So it produces so much hydropower that it can actually export power to other provinces in China. Sichuan itself relies 80% on hydropower, which is a huge number. During this heatwave and drought, we've also learned how much you can be susceptible to extreme weather events when you rely on something like hydropower. Because once you have a drought,

you basically don't have the thing that gives you electricity. And when there's a heat wave, what you want is electricity because you're turning to your air conditioners. And that tends to drive up electricity demand. We looked at the numbers and in July, when the heat wave was already ongoing, residential electricity demand increased by 45%. That's huge. How did the Chinese government respond to both the heat and the drought? So in the short term, they had the fire brigade deliver water to a lot of the places that lacked water in the countryside.

The state broadcasting agency there says a three-month-long cloud seeding project is underway in the southern Hubei province. They released footage of meteorology workers firing rockets, carrying what it said was the chemical silver iodide into the sky, which they hope will create rainfall. They did something which in China is actually quite common, which is to cut power use. So what they do is they send out notices, usually to industrial users like factories,

and tell them to maybe curb production, maybe use it during off-peak hours when other people aren't using the electricity. Or to say, hey, you know, maybe stop production completely, because we need all the electricity to power the air conditioning, to keep people cool at home. And I think this is how you saw all these pictures of, for example, Shanghai, turning off the lights along the Bund, which is its famous promenade where you see all the high-risers. And the city of Chengdu, the subway system there is running on low power mode, and there have been photos going viral on Chinese social media showing people boarding a subway in the dark. Does China have policies to deal with heat in the future?

I mean, the unfortunate thing is that if you get a heat wave or a drought, in a way, it's a natural disaster. And there's only so much you can do. You can try to mitigate the impact. But there are things that you can maybe do in the long term. And I think China's government has realized that climate change is real and that they need to address it. And this is why they are also trying to build out renewables at a record pace. I mean, there are these huge

solar farms and wind farms in the west of China. They're trying to build a lot of nuclear power plants. And they're trying to switch a lot of things from coal to gas to cut emissions. But China is a huge manufacturing hub, and it's a huge industrial nation. And the industrial sector just needs a lot of energy. And the truth is, renewables aren't there yet. One of the things that a lot of climate experts will say is that China is an authoritarian state, but because it is an authoritarian state, it can just make decisions and then pursue them. And it doesn't always have to take into account every group's interests and have this democratic process involved. So it can act quite decisively and quite quickly.

And this is part of the reason why it's been able to roll out all these huge renewable projects and build a lot of nuclear plants, which is just not so easy in a lot of Western democracies, liberal democracies, I guess. I understand that in the last 48 hours or so, things have started to get better. The temperatures in some of these hardhead areas are a bit cooler. What's going on in terms of relief? The rain that everyone's been waiting for has finally come down. And it's actually come down in some areas with such gusto, I guess, that some people had to be evacuated because the rain was so torrential. But generally, I think it's a good thing that rain has come down and now the hydropower plants are working again and electricity is restored and a lot of the factories can produce again. Has the heat wave also started to lift? Yes. So actually, my father

lives in Chongqing and he just told me that he's been able to step outside again after enjoying the splendor of air conditioning for many, many days. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Another guy just collapsed out there. Oh, but the Good Samaritan to the rescue. Oh, damn, Good Samaritan just collapsed. Oh, an UPS guy to the rescue. And the UPS guy just collapsed. Oh, ladies stealing packages. Ah! Oh, and the ladies just collapsed.

It's Today Explained. We're back with Neil Dinesha. He's Vox's science and recode fellow, and he's been looking into why it's so hard to talk about heat with any sense of real immediacy, like floods and lightning and tornadoes and hurricanes, by a pretty significant amount. And if you look around the world, we've seen pretty devastating impacts this year alone. An excessive heat warning is in effect in Seattle, Washington, where just 44% of residents have air conditioning. A heat wave sparked by climate change is causing death and destruction across Europe. Power outages in India and Pakistan have made it even harder to cope with record-shattering weather. The Chinese heat wave is the third heat wave this year where nearly a billion people are being essentially cooked at

one time. And when you put them all together, we're just seeing heat wave after heat wave after heat wave coming and hitting everyone. What makes heat waves so different and dangerous than other extreme weather events? I think the two big things about heat that I keep thinking about are that it's invisible and it's subjective. Heat waves are different because, like, you know, you're surprised because heat waves don't have, like, catastrophic winds ripping roofs of houses or, you know, rainstorms bringing floods. It's this thing that we like, you know, we feel it on our skin, we feel it in our bodies, we might see it shimmering in the air, but it doesn't have the sort of like, you know, apocalyptic impact on our cities and on our homes. And that means that we can take it less seriously. And how exactly does heat hurt people? What is a scientific process by which

heat kills me, not to be grim? Well, that depends on how many gross details you want. I want all of them, frankly. It's pretty gnarly. Sweat is your body's primary mechanism for regulating temperature, right? And so the first thing that happens when things get hot is that you sweat. I think we all know this. And when it gets especially hot, you start sweating too much. And that means that your body starts to lose all the water and the salt that you need to stay alive. And if it gets especially bad, you start experiencing heat stroke, which is when your sweat mechanism just shuts down because it can't regulate your temperature well enough. And so your skin turns red and dry and your internal temperature rises extremely quickly.

It can go above 103 degrees Fahrenheit in like 10 to 15 minutes once your sweat mechanism breaks down. Then your heart starts to beat faster and you develop a headache and nausea and dizziness and confusion. And eventually you pass out. And this is what you see when people get heat stroke, but you also see with heat exhaustion. And you see it faster with people who are older or who have like these pre-existing medical conditions. It's a painful process, you know, like it's something that really brings you down to like a level where you feel pretty helpless. I know that you've been looking at areas around the country that are unused to heat,

in addition to ones that are used to heat. Can you tell me some of what you found in your reporting that surprised you or that's sticking with you? Yeah, one thing that really sticks with me is that people who aren't used to heat, they do things that they think would help them cool down, but actually ends up dangerous. And every year in the Pacific Northwest, when my sources told me that a handful of people will go out into the lakes, they'll take a boat out into the lake

and jump in the lake thinking it will cool them down. But the lake is so cold that it sends their body into shock. And if these people jump into that life jackets, they start gulping in water and they drown and they essentially die of the cold in the middle of a heat wave. And it's just this sort of like terrifying idea. And it's especially terrifying because it makes total sense that they would do that. You know, if it's hot, go find some cold

water. Meteorology tries its best to keep us like apprised of what's going on. There are ways in which the meteorologist on my TV or radio talks about heat waves. Your reporting seems to suggest it's not going far enough. What doesn't the nightly news or the morning news tell us that we should know? Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of what the news focuses on is the temperature, right? We have this number that we all kind of understand. And when the number is high, it's hot. When the number is low, it's cold. I think that there's just such a focus on this one metric, the temperature, that we lose these nuances of all the different ways that heat can affect us. You've been reporting on some groups who've been thinking about how to communicate the dangers of heat waves more effectively.

Who's doing what? Who's interesting? Yeah. So there's this one group I talked to. It's a nonprofit called the Adrian Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, or ARSht Rock, which studies climate resiliency. They're a nonprofit affiliated with the think tank in D.C. called the Atlantic Council. And they've been working on the system that would sort of treat heatwaves like hurricanes. It's virtually invisible and silent.

It doesn't have a brand. It doesn't have a name. So it needs PR. And so we believe that naming and categorizing heat waves is the best way to quickly get people on top of how deadly this is. It's been a very effective tool for hurricanes. We know when a hurricane is coming and we call it by its name. You know, like when we talk about historic hurricanes, we can just rattle them off our tongues like people we might know, you know, Katrina or Maria or Sandy, which was a super

storm. When we say them, we, you know, their impacts are immediately known to us. And so the idea is that if you do the same thing for heat waves, we might be able to, you know, better tease apart the differences in these heat waves and really come to terms with how they affect us. How would meteorologists go about categorizing heat waves? Would it be by temperature? It's very tricky. So they're making a system that's very localized for, you know, specific cities and towns. And what they do is they look at past heat waves

and they see how they've affected the cities and towns over 25 years and which ones have caused the most deaths. And they look at the combination of weather conditions like heat and humidity and wind speed and cloud cover, feed all this data into an algorithm, which then tells them how deadly a future heat wave will be. So if a heat wave rolls in and it matches all the characteristics of a heat wave that was super devastating 25 years ago, it'll go, oh, this is going to be a really deadly heat wave. Let's give it a Category 3.

Consider this. When there is a Category 4 hurricane, you don't expect a pizza delivery person to bring a pizza to your house, nor do you expect people to keep working in a construction site. However, we don't have such considerations or policies in relation to a category four heat wave because there is no category four heat wave. We don't have metrics and we don't have categories. Hurricane categories are based on exactly one thing, and that's wind speed.

And hurricanes are so much more than just fast winds. But that is what determines the category. The ARCHRAC system is different because it takes mortality data, it takes health data, and marries it to weather data and creates this category that's like, hey, this weather will cause this health impact. And that makes people uncomfortable. Meteorologists are like, we're not health officers. You know, we're not people who give health recommendations. We tell you about the weather and then you do what you want with it. Neil, these groups that are interested in

changing the manner in which we designate heat waves, giving them names, have they tried them out in the real world? Or is this all scientists sitting around in the lab discussing? Yeah, they have tried them out in the real world this year. So they're running pilot projects in six cities, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Kansas City in the United States. The two in Europe are Seville, Spain and Athens, Greece. And in both those cities, they're launching these initiatives to give heatwaves names and categories and sort of see how the people respond to them. Five names have been identified based on the expected number of extreme heatwaves. Seville was the first city in the world

to ever give a heatwave a name, and that was heatwave Zoe, which hit this past summer. These names might be names that civilians will remember forever. The names are Zoe, Yago, Zinnia, Wenceslao, and Vega. And tell me how the experiment in categorizing and naming went. Did people behave themselves? Did they behave differently? We don't quite know yet. You know, the names and categories got a lot of attention. They got a lot of media attention and social media attention. But, you know, they're still collecting the data to see how it played

out in the real world and how people, you know, responded to those categories. These categories came with all kinds of recommendations for what people should do. The question is if they did that or not. So may have worked, may not have worked. Either way, sounds kind of cool. We're taking a thing seriously that deserves to be taken seriously. Do you have a sense of when we might see widespread adoption? I do not. And that's partly because it's not being accepted by the institutions that govern weather for us around the world. The World Meteorological Organization, or the WMO, which is the UN agency that sort of coordinates weather data and planning around the world,

it released a statement in July that seemed kind of targeted about these efforts, saying that they had no plans to name and categorize heat waves. They don't think that, you know, it's a good idea. If we get into this issue of naming and then there's a different name, it's Tom in Montreal and Alice in Toronto and people are traveling. We think that the communication there would be a detriment to civil protection. And there's also, there's a lot of institutional pushback because there are other tools that other agencies, you know, like the WMO, have been trying to use. And so there's this fear among these institutions that, you know,

the AARCHTROC initiative could undermine these efforts by local meteorological agencies and organizations to talk about heat in different ways or to raise awareness of heat. And for the scientists who make the argument, no, we should actually be doing this, even if it means getting into drama with the WMO, what's the argument that they're making? Yeah. So to be clear, they would like the WMO to adopt their idea.

You know, they would like this to be something that these organizations are like, oh, this is great. We'll do it. And then they can just run with it. If the WMO doesn't adopt these ideas, they're just like, well, we think it's a good idea and we'll continue to work with whoever wants to use our idea, which is kind of getting exactly at the fears that these people at the WMO and other meteorologists have. You know, this idea that, like, if you have competing systems, you know, we currently have a very unified, sort of agreed-upon, non-politicized approach to the weather.

And if this does happen, if there's a sort of fragmentation of some people who are using the Airstruck model and some people who are using the WMO's approaches, that could be kind of confusing for people. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard

and it was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.