We usually call June in my corner of Oregon “Juneuary,” because it is often cold, gray and rainy. Climate change has made this nickname increasingly quaint. I was working in the ICU during the heat dome event in June of 2021 in the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures reached 116 degrees, over 23 degrees hotter than the average hottest June day. It was horrible. Half my ICU filled with people who were critically ill from extreme heat. One of them died despite me doing all I could do. We transferred this person to another hospital with even more advanced life support capabilities, and they still died within 24 hours despite maximal critical care. These extreme heat events are happening more frequently.
10-20 years ago, around 5,900 people were dying each year due to excess heat, and that number is increasing and almost certainly an under-estimate. At least 600 people died from the heat dome in the Pacific NW alone that year, and at least 400 in British Columbia.
Why does this happen when the air is so hot? What can we do about it? To understand this more, I wanted to speak to a human physiologist- that is someone who studies how the human body works, from the cellular level to organ systems. For the podcast episode for this post, I spoke to Professor Ollie Jay. He is the Director of the Heat and Health Research Incubator and Thermal Ergonomics Laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at The University of Sydney in Australia.
His research activities primarily focus on developing a better understanding of the physiological and physical factors that determine human heat strain and the associated risk of heat-related health problems during work and/or physical activity, as well as among the general population during heat waves.
Ollie Jay has led several large-scale projects that have directly influenced international public health heatwave policies in the United States (CDC) and Europe (WHO). He has also led extreme heat policy development for Sports Medicine Australia, Tennis Australia (Australian Open), and Cricket Australia. In 2021, he co-led the first-ever Series on Heat and Health in The Lancet, a major medical journal. That series provides a series of images and figures that are helpful in understanding what happens when the body is exposed to heat.
We talked about the three main ways that heat affects the body- through heat sickness directly leading to breakdown of internal regulation, as well as through heart and blood vessel system damage and damage to the kidney system. Listening to the episode is very helpful to increase understanding of the potential deadly effects of heat.
I sincerely appreciated our conversation. It gives me hope to have scientists working on solutions. Our response to a changing climate has to include not only decreasing greenhouse gas emissions but also to adapt to a hotter world with more extreme heat events. We discussed their research on how to keep buildings cool and evidenced-based ways to cool off a body at different temperature thresholds.
Whenever there is a heat advisory, I think back to my ICU shifts of June of 2021. I also think about the lovely hot day the following summer in which my kids had been playing in a park while wearing sun hats. Afterwards, one of them became increasingly sleepy. She didn’t want to drink water and became very hot and lethargic. She also developed heat illness, and we spent many anguished hours working on hydrating her, applying wet washcloths for evaporative cooling, and more. It was a very scary thing for a parent, especially after what I had seen in the ICU the year before. This is one of the reasons kids can be so vulnerable to heat illness- they love to run around and play, even when it’s hot, and often need reminders to take shade breaks, hydration breaks and more.
We need to have plans for future heat waves on a warming planet. But it is important to realize that just hoping to have air conditioning for all is currently the most costly in terms of financial resources, energy and greenhouse gas emissions, and it also really doesn’t help us if there are brown outs or black outs or a utility has to cut power due to wildfire risk. This has been seen with power outages around the world, including in the 2003 power outage in New York City, in which the death rate increased by 122%.
We can insist that our communities plan for a warming climate with increased green spaces, more heat-resilient buildings that use passive cooling techniques, and ensuring we have community-wide plans for heat events. In our own families, we can use non-energy intensive ways of cooling our home, ensuring we know who is vulnerable, and more.
So what can you do?
To Do
- Install the ClimApp for personalized thermal warnings.
- Make a plan for heat events with your family and for what you will do in case of power outages, brown outs and black outs.
- Find out who is vulnerable in your home, make sure they know what to do
- Check with your school about heat events plans. Let them know about the Extreme Heat Sports tool Ollie Jay shared in this episode.
- Consider a “fan first” strategy in your home in warm weather- set the thermostat higher and use fans for circulation prior to turning on the AC. Save on energy bills and decrease greenhouse gas emissions, though if there is no AC, make sure to pay attention to alerts of thresholds at which fan use may be harmful.
- Find out what your city, county, and state are doing to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and build for heat resiliency in your community.
TLDR= Don't Light Things on Fire to Cool your World- try other things first
References
Ebie et al. SERIES|HEAT AND HEALTH| VOLUME 398, ISSUE 10301, P698-708, AUGUST 21, 2021
Global Heat Health Information Network
