Our planet has just endured its hottest summer on record, with 2024 on track likewise to become the hottest year since recordkeeping began.
We see the impact of this heating in thousands of ways: The city of Phoenix this year endured 100 days of 100 degrees or hotter; some 1,300 Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia reportedly died in the heat; Arctic ice is shrinking and far below average; and in some places monkeys and bats have tumbled out of trees from the heat.
We tend to focus on the cataclysmic risks of climate change — polar ice caps melting, seas rising dramatically, our planet becoming uninhabitable — and those are real. But over the last couple of decades we’ve accumulated evidence that the more mundane impacts of heat are already upon us, impacting our daily lives. For example, more people fall off ladders on hot days than on cool days. They are more likely to kill themselves. They are also more likely to kill someone else.
Meanwhile, students learn less on hot days. They perform worse on exams. After a natural disaster, students are less likely to go to college. In other words, extreme weather damages far more than property, for it also is devastating to human capital.
“The familiar climate catastrophe framing may be missing some of the most important features of the real climate change story,” R. Jisung Park, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, notes in his excellent recent book, “Slow Burn.”
Professor Park argues persuasively that we have been so focused on apocalyptic scenarios that we haven’t focused enough on the other consequences of climate change.
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