It’s not the heat, it’s — no, it’s the heat
Can we discuss how hot it’s been lately? Is that a subject you haven’t been thinking about at all during these sweltering days? The temp hit 109 degrees in Long Beach on Friday with the National Weather Service unnecessarily warning people not to go on hikes in that kind of heat, as if any of us were planning on abandoning whatever we clung to for a semblance of coolness for an opportunity to take a speed walk up to the peak of Mt. Baldy or go on a stroll through Palm Desert slaloming between saguaros and scorpions.
When it gets this hot — and it was never this hot last summer despite 2023 being the hottest year ever on our planet — I always think of my faithful correspondent and former NASA climatologist Bill Patzert and our chats about heat.
In terms of humankind’s ability to adapt to the problem of heat, Patzert quizzed me: “Who was the greatest hero for adaptation to heat?” I guessed Willis Carrier, the father of air conditioning and, miraculously, I was correct.
“If anybody doubts that we’re not already adapting to global warming — imagine living in the Inland Empire or the San Gabriel or San Fernando valleys. Essentially, large megalopolises would already be uninhabitable without air conditioning,” Patzert told me when I was working on a Long Beach Post series on climate change.
Naturally, there are drawbacks to adapting to heat by way of air conditioning. Besides gobbling up electricity, air conditioners create their own heat outdoors, making big cities hotter (which makes us crank up our air conditioners — a climate ouroboros). As a result, said Patzert, Downtown Los Angeles’s average annual temp is over 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was 100 years ago. The average temperature in August and September is 8 degrees higher than 100 years ago.”
Without the ability to adapt, heat becomes one of the most deadly effects of global climate change. Heat waves in recent years have included a couple — in 2003 and 2022 — that have killed more than 70,000 people in Europe. It’s socioeconomic, said Patzert. It kills people on fixed incomes.
As for me, I keep the AC on pretty much all the time, and I’ve turned my spa down to 97, practically cool enough for ice skating, and I’m cognizant of my good-enough fortune and beyond appreciative for it.
What I’m Reading Now
“We Begin at the End” is the second novel I’ve read this year by Chris Whitaker and like “All the Colors of the Dark,” children, old beyond their years, play a big part in the story, although in this book they don’t grow up.
The main character is Duchess, a precocious, bitter and broken 13-year-old girl whose mother has been murdered, presumably by one in a long string of abusive men in her life. Her death leaves Duchess in charge of her 5-year-old brother Robin. She is hardened against love and the attempted kindness of their grandfather and another protagonist named Walk, the chief of police in the tiny town on the California coast.
The novel is fairly fast-paced, suspenseful, frequently heartbreaking and exquisitely written and has placed Whitaker’s 2019 novel “Twin Oaks” up near the top of my nightstand of things to read in the near future.
What to Watch
Looking for something to stream that’ll take you through to Christmas? The police procedural “Homicide: Life on the Streets” is currently streaming on Peacock. The series, which exploded the overused trope-riddled cop dramas of the time, ran from 1993 through 1999 on NBC and included a massive and talented cast that included Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, Richard Belzer and Ned Beatty.
Its release to streaming service was long delayed over squabbles with music rights, but now you can watch all seven seasons and 122 episodes.
It starts out a little sluggishly with character development using up the first five episodes, but really takes off after Episode 6.
The series was based on former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon’s book, “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.” Simon was also a creator and writer for the series “The Wire.”