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25 Years on the Climate Beat
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Wall mounted air-conditioning units adorn a building in Hong Kong.
The heat gap
Hello, and welcome to the last issue of Record High. I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today, we’re going to talk about the elephant in the room: heat inequity.
In his book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History, the physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer explains, unflinchingly, why the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 Africans while almost every single Westerner who contracted the illness survived. The difference between life and death came down to, quite simply, access. In clinics in Guinea, Libera, and Sierra Leone, equipment and fluids that would have saved countless lives were nonexistent. A few simple interventions would have made all the difference. “How many of these deaths were caused more by the virulence of social conditions than by the virulence of the pathogen?” Farmer asked.
I was reminded of Farmer’s book recently while interviewing a researcher about an unrelated topic, a study on the temperature thresholds at which the human body can no longer keep itself cool. That researcher, a scientist at the Univer... Read more
This week's Record High newsletter looks at the science of sweating: It may be the pits, it’s the body's best defense against extreme heat.