Runnin’ too hot, hot, hot!
What happens when we feel too hot? (Photo: @memehaooo on Twitter)
We talk about it all the time, temperatures are rising year by year, the poles are melting, and the world is on the precipice of catastrophic climate change. While most people do acknowledge that it’s a concern—it’s often dismissed as a “future me” problem. To be honest, even I like to think of it that way, because it’s just easier.
We go through our daily lives not really actively thinking about the consequences of climate change, because research is always framed to show how we have to deal with them over the next x number of years. If a scientist says that the glaciers will melt by the year 2100, then that sounds far away enough for me to not have to think about it now, right?
But the truth is that climate change has very real consequences to how we live our lives now, in more ways than we may even be aware of. So, what exactly happens when people are feeling too hot, hot, hot?
The little things
A visual essay from Spanish publication El Pais went through different studies that show the effects of high temperatures not just in the big, catastrophic ways, but also in the little, mundane ways that we probably don’t even realize.
First of all, did you know that people swear more in their tweets on hot days? A study examined millions of tweets in the US in different weather conditions. They found that on cold days, people swear a little more than usual. On slightly warm days, people swear less. But on days when the temperature soars past 30 degrees, the amount of swear words in the tweets skyrockets.
A classic study from 1986 showed that people get crankier in traffic jams when the weather is too hot. Upon comparing the number of times people sounded their horns at traffic lights in spring and summer, the study found that there was a direct linear increase in horn honking during the summer.
People are generally less productive in hot weather. People in heat-exposed professions such as agriculture or transportation cut their work days by as much as 70 minutes when temperatures are up.
Students also do worse in tests on days when the temperature goes above 26 degrees. Interestingly, this is only true for math tests, and not reading tests– researchers explain that this is likely because solving mathematical problems requires different parts of the brain compared to reading tests, and high temperatures do not affect the parts of the brain equally.
The big, catastrophic things
Heat is also associated with higher rates of violence, and even war. In Africa and other tropical regions, civil conflicts and acts of violence are found to go up by 40% to 50% in exceptionally hot weather. Not only that, mortality rates also consistently go up at the same time as temperature. In Delhi, there’s a 3% increase in deaths for every one degree above 20, and in the US, there’s a 2% increase in deaths when the temperature exceeds 32 degrees.
Extremely hot weather also affects harvests. In the US, farmers lose as much as 7% of a cornfield’s yield when the temperature goes up to 35 degrees. There are also less births and more hospitalizations. Economies slow down, forests burn, and rivers dry up.
All of this is to remind you, the reader, and also myself, that climate change is not a problem that “future me” has to deal with. It’s a problem very much in the present.
It affects all of us in the mundane activities of our day-to-day lives, and it affects the economy, politics, food production, and many more. So we ought to be thinking about it more actively, as it affects not only our lives now, but also the lives of people around us and the generations that will come after us.
Maybe if we put climate change higher on our all priority lists, people would be less mean and more productive. We would worry less about food security and war. Maybe we would all live happier, more fulfilled lives.
