Comparisons Are Odious
It's not a competition, FFS
I should probably apologize up front for a rant, but... will you allow me to vent briefly?
I am soooooooo very tired of the Social Media Heat Olympics right now. Not familiar with this phenomenon? You soon will be if you read enough of the comments on a story about a heat dome, or spend much time on the socials chatting about global warming. (Clears throat.)
I rant at you from London, where it was recently quite brutally hot, for a definition of “brutally hot” that apparently did not satisfy some people as being sufficiently warm.
While doomscrolling through story after story about the heatwave in northern Europe and the UK, I saw lots of scoffing. Lots of it. A surprising amount.
I am calling this scoffing the “Social Media Heat Olympics.” These games are a variation of a genre of discourse that crops up after many natural disasters. It’s the “so you think YOU have it bad?” stance. The “welp, y’all must be whiny babies if you let that bother you” posture. It is combative or dismissive while masquerading as helpful. It is “corrective” commentary that hides beneath a veneer of “providing context.” The writers appear to frame someone else’s suffering as potentially undeserved - presenting themselves, wittingly or not, as grading the discomfort and health risks of others on a curve.
“Wow, I live in Tucson and we regularly have highs of over 105! We use evaporative cooling and no worries - we get through it just fine!”
“Not sure how you can complain from Paris when tens of thousands of folks in the global south have it so much worse almost every single day!” (Unsubtle subtext: “your bitching about the heat reveals your privilege.”)
“Thousands of folks on the Indian subcontinent have been dying and no one has paid attention to that catastrophe.”
Sadly, there can be more than a splash of truth in those comments.
It does get far hotter in the American South and Midwest than it does in Great Britain.
Tucson - and Chicago, and Atlanta, and New York City - do normally get hotter than London and Manchester and Edinburgh. It is of note that all of the British Isles lie NORTH of the northern border of the US and Canada, but it’s understandable that this geographic detail doesn’t spring instantly to mind when lay people are comparing places that, to them, read as broadly similar.
And people have indeed been suffering in the global south for years, while most of us privileged folks up north pay scant attention. There is a conversation to be had here. In fact, there MUST be a conversation. The record is a hissing and a shame and yes, blathering about a heat dome in Paris can feel like white Americans waking up to the horrors of ICE in Minneapolis only after Renee Good was murdered. There is no sugar coating that. I do not want to hand-wave this away.
But:
It is also true that it is hot. IT IS VERY HOT. It is also, depending on where you are, rainy, flood-y, drought-y, wildfire-y, hurricane-y, derecho-y, crop failure-y, and sea level rise-y. Sometimes it is more than one of those things at a time! And it is happening all over. The signal is now so strong that corporate-bought governments and craven media outlets struggle to tamp it down.
France has recorded 2,025 “excess deaths” from the heatwave thus far - but there is also a heat emergency in the United States, where even hardy, tough as nails, rootin’ tootin’, flag waving Americans are gasping, and passing out, and dying in the heat. In New York City, emergency room visits have spiked “as brutal heat grips over 180 million.”
Temperatures over 30F are miserable and deadly in places where infrastructure was not built with that heat in mind - places like northern Europe. But climate crisis-fueled heat is also miserable and deadly in places - like Texas and California - where infrastructure was constructed to accommodate higher temperatures. People in London are more blind-sided, and have far fewer air conditioned places in which to seek refuge, but folks die in sub-40F temps in Atlanta and Chicago, too.
Similarly, a deadly flash flood is as much of a calamity in a place where high waters were mostly anticipated as it is in an environment where no one expected flooding to occur.
A wildfire that kills people and destroys enormous swaths of property is just as tragic in places where populations think they are prepared as it is in a neighborhood where there is no history of such an event at all.
Any event that kills hundreds or even thousands of people is dire. The piling up of one event after another, on continent after continent, is more than just dire: it is an existential crisis. It is a global emergency. There is plenty of suffering to go around without people devolving into sniping over who has it worse and who isn’t prepared and who has the right to actually complain.
When the local weatherperson comes on with a chipper smile and a report about how “elderly and vulnerable people” are most at risk in the latest heatwave, it is worthwhile to bear in mind that they are deflecting from the seriousness of the situation - because we are ALL “vulnerable people.”
Even a young, fit person can easily succumb to heatstroke if they exert themselves in high heat. Young, fit people tend to be the ones on construction sites, driving buses, working in your garden, delivering packages, pulling a shift on the line in a hot restaurant kitchen, fighting fires, working security: all of those jobs where being outside in the heat and at the ready cannot be done as work from home or in an air conditioned office
.And of course less young, less robust, less fit human bodies are also vulnerable. It’s not only pensioners and medically fragile people who die under a punishing heat dome.
As for children? They are at significantly higher risk in heat than adults, according to Save the Children UK, and not just because they heat up three to FIVE times faster than adults!
All of the effects of the changing climate are dangerous - hurricanes, heat domes, sea level rise, wildfires, drought, catastrophic flooding, derechos, crop failure, habitat loss, migration of pestilent organisms - and those things are happening indiscriminately all over the world - more, worse, higher, faster, and increasingly relentless.
So this moment is not the time to compete over who’s hotter, who’s more miserable, and who is amusing to you because they seem hapless and unprepared. This isn’t a good time to throw down about who has it worse.
No. Right now is a good time to realize that we’re all one human family, living in frail, vulnerable human bodies.
This weather isn’t the new normal, and this will not be the hottest summer of your lifetime. Not even close.
It’s scary. It’s horrifying. But it’s the truth. Things are only going to get worse from here, and having a little mercy for our fellow travellers as we take this journey is the only humane course.
To quote Winston Churchill (,who, though he was tossed out as PM after WWII, often had pithy, heartening things to say):
Dharma bums ...
Well said. We'll said.