From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Across the globe, this summer has been unusually unseasonably and scarily hot.

News clip: This summer feels like a page torn from the book of Revelation.

News clip: Here in the United States, 170 million people are under heat alert. The world has entered the age of global boiling.

News clip: Climate scientists say it's virtually certain July 2023 will be Earth's hottest month on record.

News clip: This heatwave would've been virtually impossible if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.

Brooke Gladstone: Which means this summer will not be a one-off, and yet the danger of extreme heat can be hard to grasp until we're burned by it. In Arizona, the temperatures soared to 110 degrees for 31 days straight, transforming normal sidewalks into massive stovetops.

News clip: The pavement and sidewalk can heat up to 150 plus degrees, and that can cause second and third-degree burns if you're not careful.

Brooke Gladstone: Heat is called the silent killer because often victims are unaware of the severe damage their bodies undergo.

News clip: Officials say at least 1100 people have died in Spain and Portugal already as a result of the heat and fear the true death toll won't be known for weeks.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, in parts of Florida, the ocean might look as blue as ever, but the temperature is positively steamy.

News clip: The water temperatures are so high in the Florida Keys that they're endangering our precious coral reef.

News clip: The Florida Keys there on your map, registered 101.1 degrees this week. That is ideal temperatures for a hot tub.

Brooke Gladstone: Jake Bittle is a staff writer at Grist covering climate impact. He's written about the invisibility of extreme heat compared to other climate disasters and the challenge that presents to news outlets.

Jake Bittle: The aftermath of a hurricane, the news crews go to a place like Louisiana, and you can see that there's thousands of homes that have been destroyed and the power lines have busted and all that stuff. The heat is more difficult. It's the deadliest climate disaster by a wide margin, but the deaths tend to happen out of the public view, and so do the health crises that follow. Heat stroke cases are confined to the emergency room. Heat deaths tend to be people who are unhoused. It's not as eye-grabbing. I think for a long time it was excluded from coverage of climate change and natural disasters in general.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a visual issue and it's also a class issue because you can insulate yourself from it to a degree if you have air conditioning.

Jake Bittle: Yes, certainly. Hurricanes destroy the houses of the rich and the poor alike, but heat, all you have to do is turn on the air conditioner and you should be okay. It's people who lack air conditioning or they lack consistent access to housing. Also, migrant laborers, people who work outdoors, those are the people who end up getting sick and dying as a result of heat. You can avoid it for the most part if you're even moderately wealthy.

Brooke Gladstone: Does AC solve the problem?

Jake Bittle: In Maricopa County, which is the county that includes Phoenix and its suburbs, over 75% of indoor heat-related deaths over recent years have been the people who had air conditioning units. They don't always run the air conditioning because they can't afford the electric bill or it's broken and they can't afford to pay a contractor to come fix it. That's a big expense. The other thing that I think people don't understand is that heat exposure is cumulative. They continue overnight, and I think a lot of people, they think that they're okay because it's not extraordinarily hot, and so they turn off the air conditioner to save money while they're asleep and the body continues to break down.

Brooke Gladstone: I did not know that.

Jake Bittle: Yes, it's remarkable.

Brooke Gladstone: Extreme heat, as you say, it's hard to depict visually. The media instead are filled with a lot of clichés of stories about fried eggs on pavements, lots of crowded beaches.

Jake Bittle: Fire hydrants. They all seem so inappropriate. [laughs] The stories are about people getting rushed to emergency rooms. This is really scary stuff. A lot of major news outlets have gotten a little better at this. They'll at least send enterprise reporters or disaster reporters to the places where we know heat stress is going to be highest. The Washington Post has been pretty good about this. I just think the general machinery of natural disaster reporting just hasn't been set up to do this in the past.

Brooke Gladstone: It's getting better and the coverage is certainly more abundant. Then you have critics like Molly Taft in the New Republic who worry that the coverage seems to normalize this disaster. She cites a Media Matters analysis of coverage of an intense heat wave in Texas that found that only 5% of national TV news segments on it mentioned climate change.

Jake Bittle: This has been something that climate journalists have been talking about for a very long time. I think that a lot of major news outlets have gotten a lot better at that too. Then if you think about heat, a lot of people still perceive heat as weather. It's just the way that it feels today as opposed to a catastrophe that's bearing down on my city. What's the difference between heat and again, a hurricane or a wildfire, is that they're going to send out a science reporter or they're going to send out one of their field reporters to stand in the blustering winds or to interview people. With heat, it's going to be the guy standing in front of the chart and saying, "Look, it's 100 degrees." Those people don't traditionally make connections with climate change.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's the part of your article that really grabbed me. You observed that no president has ever made a disaster declaration over a heat wave that in theory, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency can reimburse state and local governments for any disaster response that exceeds local resources, but in practice, it's never done so for a heat wave because heat disasters don't actually qualify as disasters.

Jake Bittle: Right. Yes. There's this law called the Stafford Act that governs what FEMA can and can't do. Heat is not listed as a disaster. There's a substantial debate about whether the fact that it's not listed means that FEMA can't declare a disaster. Certainly, the fact that it's not on there seems to have made it much less likely that they would do so. There's no precedent for declaring heat a disaster unless there's really no precedent for FEMA mobilizing all its resources to deal with a heat wave.

Brooke Gladstone: A major disaster is defined in that act as any natural catastrophe, including hurricane, tornado, high water, wind-driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought, or regardless of cause, any fire, flood or explosion. Heat doesn't appear on the list, but heat kills more people than any other natural disaster, right?

Jake Bittle: Right. If you look at that list again, what is one thing that all those things have in common? They all destroy property or they destroy crops. They inflict significant economic damage to things that people own, and heat is the grand exception to that. There are certainly cases where heat will make crop yields lower, where heat will cause an expressway to crumble or something. For the most part, the economic damages are to human beings and human bodies and to labor output. Not the kind of thing that this act was set up to deal with.

Brooke Gladstone: This leads to the other fascinating observation you made that the media frequently take their cues from the government. If the government isn't acting as if it's a disaster, then it's not covered like it is.

Jake Bittle: Because a disaster like a flood is accompanied by a huge relief effort and they send the helicopters to pick people up out of the water and stuff like that, and because local governments traditionally send out huge alerts, if there's a hurricane coming in rural areas, often the sheriff will go door to door and say, "Get out of here."

Brooke Gladstone: It'll be on TV and radio for sure.

Jake Bittle: Right. There's a huge relationship between what the sheriff and the mayor are saying is a problem and what the media's going to say, and then what people will actually do. It's not a perfect relationship, but there is a huge downstream effect there that has long been missing for heat. It's not that I say that local governments don't communicate about heat, because I think a lot of them do very well, but historically, it wasn't something that emergency managers and local planners were really thinking that much about. That's changing very fast. You have to give people credit where credit's due, but if you look at the most famous example is the 1995 heat wave in Chicago, one of the deadliest heat disasters in US history or disasters, period, there was literally no plan.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that Portland and Seattle after some really horrible heat waves, now have heat plans.

Jake Bittle: I think that the Pacific Northwest is a really good example because like Chicago they really weren't prepared for a heat disaster of this kind and because of this exceptional nature of heat and the way that the federal government responds to disasters, they haven't received an extraordinary amount of money since that disaster to adapt to a future heat wave. So, what they've tried to do instead is, "Let's figure out how we can get better at public communication, and let's take the resources that we have and try to be better at the next one." For example, Seattle has so few air conditions spaces where they can create cooling centers, so they're trying to find more spaces where they can do that. And then, I think the hospital infrastructure was just not set up to deal with extreme heat.

For a heatstroke victim, the best thing you can do is just make the body as cold as possible as fast as possible. That often looks like dunking somebody in a tub full of ice, but there wasn't enough ice in Portland. Ice machines were in short supply. So, what this looks like is just making sure you stock up.

Brooke Gladstone: What about the problem of isolation? Is there a way to address that?

Jake Bittle: The fact that Americans are lonelier than ever, they live by themselves more than ever especially as they get older, is a huge problem for heat, because people tend to suffer in silence, so to speak. One thing that sociologists learned from the heatwave in Chicago is that communities where there was more social cohesion when people lived closer to their families tended to fare better than other communities at the same income level and with the same degree of access to air conditioning. Cities and community groups could dispatch people to knock on doors.

Brooke Gladstone: There was some of that during the early days of COVID.

Jake Bittle: That's true. They could also put out public communication saying, "Go check on your neighbors." I think that that's something that people are going to have to get a lot better at. The question is, how do you make sure that those people know what the danger is and know where they can go?

Brooke Gladstone: What do you make of this push to name heatwaves like we name hurricanes? In Seville, Spain they tried to do it. This summer we've seen heatwaves Yago and Xenia. What's the point of that?

Jake Bittle: The idea of a named event I think is really powerful for a lot of people, especially in the United States in places that are vulnerable to Atlantic hurricanes. There's just this idea of like it's a monster. It has a personality. It's malevolent as opposed to just being a distributed phenomenon of it's just hot outside. They focus-group this a lot to figure out what the best kind of name to give the heatwaves would be. I think at one point they were talking about spicy food for instance. That is like, "This is a scary thing. It's a defined thing with a beginning and an end, it's going to arrive and descend on your town." And I think that they've found that it's decently effective in changing public perception.

Brooke Gladstone: I was wondering whether it enabled you to recall events and distinguish them like we remember Hurricane Sandy, or back in '92, Hurricane Andrew, or Hurricane Maria in 2017. We know where we were, what was happening, and how people suffered.

Jake Bittle: Absolutely right. In a place like Phoenix, for instance, you could imagine somebody in a year or two trying to think back on this summer, and they would just, "I think it was really hot out for a very long period of time," but they don't have like, "Oh, that one was Zoe or James or whatever," to distinguish it from something else.

Brooke Gladstone: An American meteorologist named Guy Walton, is trying to name heatwaves after oil companies like the BP Heatwave.

Jake Bittle: It's a clever statement, because many of these heatwaves, there's scientific evidence as I said that it certainly would have been impossible for them to be as bad as they are even if they maybe would have happened under the same circumstances. While you can't tie an individual heatwave to an individual oil company, you can tie the combustion of oil to heatwaves. Beyond heat being a deadly disaster, that's something the public really hasn't grasped yet and may not grasp for a while.

Brooke Gladstone: Jake, thank you very much.

[music]

Jake Bittle: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Jake Bittle is the author of Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. You can find more of his heat coverage on Grist's Record High newsletter. Coming up, a couple of our obsessions, history, and books and how history books have become the genre de jeu. This is On The Media.

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