Here comes the sun: warmth, waiting and worrying

“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (2021) The Ministry for the Future. Orbit: London. p. 14

“Ah, yes – I remember – you wanted it cut shorter last time because you were going on holiday, to somewhere hot.” So recalls my barber as a I sit, at the end of the summer in his chair, and in his hands. He’s right. My last visit was in June. When for what seemed like an eternity the days and nights had been hot that month in my home city and the prospect of a trip to somewhere likely hotter was causing me some anxiety. For many days sleeping had been fitful, like ascending each evening into an attic-sauna.

You know it’s hot when you need to keep the windows shut in the daytime, lest the intrusive breeze otherwise stoke the inferno.

I don’t do ‘hot’ well, and as I’ve grown older I find it ever more oppressive. But it was the record-breaking day in July 2022 that seemed to deepen my heat-anxiety. Admittedly, there was a novelty to that day. The predicted record heat spike rather came out of the blue, and was short lived. That day we did all we could to turn our home into a cool-shelter, gazing out with bemusement at the empty street at mid-day, and dashing out into the garden in the middle of the day to check on a thermometer – would we go above 40^oC? (no – as it turned out – but we hit a still astonishing 39 degrees).

But a year later, stuck in an unchanging high temperature zone for weeks and with a sweltering UK summer then being predicted I was feeling anxiety rather than entertained by record-breaking novelty. Would this be the new normal? It felt like it.

So, travelling to traditionally hotter climes felt crazy. But we were paid-up and committed.

As it turned out our Spanish resort was only a fraction hotter than home climes, and a sea breeze took the edge off things. And yet, I recall a couple of occasions where the sun’s rays seems to suddenly intensify – inducing a different sensation on my exposed skin. And for a brief moment it felt like the heat was a focussed beam, burning into an exposed portion of my body. Later that day that brief assault had left its mark (despite sunscreen) and days-after of nagging discomfort. We felt humble, punished by the sun.

This summer – of course – others have been punished much more severely by the sun. On our return to the UK we found the heat wave over, and thereafter 40 days of wet, cool and calm to confound the predictions. But it was not that a heatwave had not come – it was simply that it had become stuck across mainland Europe. Viewed from the vantage of a soggy Britain the parade of heatwave and wildfire stories across continental Europe, and thereafter in North America.

Against this backdrop, my summer reading took a deep dive into climate change literature – with Jeff Goodell’s (2023) The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet regaling me with myriad insights into the limits of human bodily and social adaptation to rising global temperatures. Meanwhile Gaia Vince’s (2023) Nomad Century charted the existential implications of rising temperature in truly global terms – outlining the likely shifting of the Earth’s habitable zones to the extremities of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, with all in between laid waste to uninhabitable hotness (and consequent mass-migrations).

My reading journey started with the most disturbing heat-related examination of all. The first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, depicts in jaw-dropping detail the impact of a near-future heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, India. As the day dawns, the heat continues to rise and we follow the protagonist’s increasingly frantic efforts to escape the heat bubble that has descended upon his town: first seeking breeze on the rooftop, then sheltering shuttered inside his home, the evacuating to an air conditioned clinic, then finally seeking survival in a local lake. Each place becomes defeated as respite as its temperature rises to match the surrounding air temperature, and it can no longer cool core body temperature.

As the opening epigraph powerfully suggests – we ignore the power of the sun at our peril, and shorter haircuts are not going to be the solution.

References

Goodell, J. (2023) The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Little Brown: New York

Vince, G. (2022) Nomad Century: How to Survive Climate Upheaval. Penguin: London