Tag: Heatwave

Scattered thoughts

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A friend tightly hugs her knees to her chest as she tells me she’s not felt this anxious about environmental issues and the state of things for a couple of decades

It rains and people share photos of it with their friends and family. Look at this they say. Mad scenes.

My partner tells me that when he was in the office and it briefly rained, or really heavily drizzled, people went to the window to look at it in wonder – just as they would do for snow

At the same time – and there are so few times it rains of course it’s likely to be the same time – I stand outside feeling each drop of rain as it touches my skin. It feels so refreshing and also as though it’s making my skin burn. I hadn’t felt so hot, it’s been cooler the past few days – by which I mean in the late twenties – that I thought my body wasn’t so hot now. The contrast between the heat of my body and the cool of the rain tells me that’s not the case

I walk alongside the playing field on the way to the gym – a place I visit most days, sometimes twice a day – and I see the dry earth now has a crack in it. I try but can’t remember if it’s always been there, or if it just recently happened. How could I not have noticed?

We’ve not really talked a lot about his reasons why, but I have a friend who doesn’t believe in climate change. I think he says it’s because he’s not convinced by the science. I think it’s because he likes to be a contrarian, he feels he can look dispassionately at the science or other evidence and honestly who wouldn’t rather it was all made up and everything was fine? In an earlier heatwave – over a May Bank Holiday I think – he comes over to mine for lunch. When asked how I am in the standard just arriving kind of way, I languidly say I’m very hot. He quickly replies that it is hot but it’s totally normal for this time of year and this kind of thing happens all the time. In a later heatwave we’re exchanging stories about things we’re currently really obsessed by – I talk about the World Cup. He tells me about a theory he’s discovered that he’s very excited by. It’s by someone he connected with during the pandemic – they both agreed that it was basically not anything to be worried about and there was no need to take the kinds of actions that were being taken. Essentially the theory is that every c.5,000 years the Earth’s poles flip – that there’s a bit of a wobble in the rotation of Earth and eventually this wobble builds up and everything floods. And it’s getting ready to flip soon by this reckoning. This theory apparently explains why there are more earthquakes and volcanoes happening – it’s a sign of more wobbling. That isn’t the technical term but I can’t find it – when I tried searching for the theory after my friend and I met and I could remember the actual word I still struggled to find anything online. This theory also explains some aspects of climate change too. I wondered if the attraction of the theory for my friend was that it offers a way to continue to disbelieve the science of climate change while still acknowledging that things are changing – this isn’t normal. I don’t know how I could ask him that, what good it would do

Struggling one day to work, irritated and frustrated with myself at not being able to concentrate or get things done. The next day it’s down from the peak of the heat and all of a sudden work feels much easier. All of a sudden? Even as I try to recognise the need to adjust work or play, I can still bump up against my expectations of how it should be

I look online for news about when it’s likely to rain next. For some reason the algorithm shows me a story from February this year. I read it, astonished and half-remembering the news and reality of ‘biblical floods’ with some places experiencing rain every day for forty days. The jokes we made about at least we’re not going to be needing hosepipe bans this year

Same but different?

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As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.

This is bad weather

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There are different aspects to vulnerability and adaptation – some relate to physical aspects and some to capability – and the current heatwave in parts of the UK are showing both elements of that, but I’m particularly interested in the social elements of it. The social and cultural elements of adaptation, as with mitigation, are challenging but unlocking those aspects could then help provide the resources needed to deal with the physical aspects.

I’m, very slowly and a bit brain foggily, writing this piece as where I live in the UK experiences a heatwave and it doesn’t currently feel like actively enjoyable weather. I haven’t sleep well last night as it was too stifling, with no breeze. The room felt suffocating, I eventually got up and went outside where it was a bit cooler. Today I’m really not feeling very awake or engaged and I’m lucky enough to be able to arrange my work activities to do things that don’t require so much brain power. I was out in the hot, hot heat as I had an event to go to but it really didn’t feel like a good idea.

Yet I’ve heard and read lots of people describing it as nice or good weather – even as they might otherwise be talking about how uncomfortable the heat is. This does not seem like good weather to me, and nor does it seem like they actually think it is when they talk about different elements of their experience.

Perhaps the reason adaptation struggles to get much traction is that in the UK people associate ‘bad weather’ with rain, wind and cold weather. By contrast, hot weather can often be considered to be good weather – in part because of the conception that it’s really rainy and you can never trust it to be sunny in the summer. Hence the cultural idea of having a rainy Bank Holiday BBQ or rain-lashed picnic in the car. The idea that sunny weather could be ‘bad’ doesn’t fit with that view and so then the default for many is to describe it as good, even as they might talk about the impacts negatively.

While some impacts of hot weather can be obvious – such as wildfires, train cancellations or sunburn – it can be less so than floods or heavy snowfall where the impact is more visually obvious. If there are fatalities as a result of flooding or snowfall it tends to be more immediate and clearer to see the connection, whereas with heatwaves it can be harder to tell. Often people die as a result of an underlying condition which is exacerbated by the hot weather. These deaths show up as ‘excess deaths’ which is not a mechanism that is as easily communicated or has the same clarity of cause and effect.

However, a consistent message in the literature is that people underestimate the impacts and are reluctant to take action, even where it will affect them. In relation to flooding which has historically been more common than heatwaves, people can underestimate the likelihood of being affected, as the title of Burningham et al’s 2008 piece ‘‘It’ll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk’ suggests. Research on attitudes to and behaviours undertaken in heatwaves from by Erens et al (2021) found that people who were the most vulnerable or potentially vulnerable to heatwaves didn’t realise they could be affected and only a quarter of potentially vulnerable people changed their behaviour. Research by the British Red Cross found relatively high levels of understanding of actions that could be taken, yet there was a significant drop-off in the number of people who actually took action.

Helping to shift that narrative and getting people to engage with the fact this isn’t good weather for many feels like a pre-condition to then take steps to adapt to it. In the absence of that understanding, it is unsurprising people wouldn’t take action. It’s something that happens to other people rather than to them, until it isn’t of course.

London School of Economics research suggests there is a low expectation among people that government is taking sufficient steps to respond. This could partly be projection by them but also seems to be outsourcing responsibility to a government that is unlikely to be getting lobbied on this by people who don’t think it’s an issue for them. All in all it’s currently quite a hot mess and likely to keep getting hotter unless we can find a way to recognise how things really are and go from there.