In grade school one of my classmates talked of having lived in El Paso before moving to southern California. Apparently the heat in west Texas was intense, so intense that an egg could be fried on the sidewalk.
About the anecdote provided, they suck. At the same time, there’s a saying about adding up enough of them and you have a statistic. My own anecdote could be multiplied by the readers of this opinion piece many times over. Intense summer heat is hardly a modern concept.
Looking back on the 1970s, and an allegedly much cooler decade during which El Paso’s sidewalks could cook food, there are memories of a summertime drive with my sister, mother and an aunt from Michigan to California. The mode of transportation was a Ford Mustang. And let’s just say air conditioners were far from standard back then. It was nightmarish.
Again, the notion or even the intimation that the summers of decades past (or even recent years) were somehow comfortable is truly laughable. Not even close.
Yet intimate some media members still do. Think the understandable discomfort related to the deaths of Muslims making their 2024 pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. As reported on in the New York Times, “this year, amid record heat, at least 1,300 pilgrims did not survive the hajj.” A tragedy no doubt.
At the same time, the tragedy speaks to why it’s important to not just read headlines in the New York Times, or for that matter the opening paragraphs of any article. More than most would like to admit, there’s balance to be found, albeit deeper into the articles. This is important considering the headline of the Times article written by Rana Sweis, Emad Mekay, and Lynsey Chutel: “As Temperatures Rise, Profit Seekers Amplify the Dangers of the Hajj.” To just scan the title, or read its opening paragraphs, the impression is given that heat of the killing kind is more of a 21st century thing. Perhaps even a 2024 thing.
Except that as you read on, you see that the death toll from this year is not necessarily novel since “Saudi Arabia does not normally report the numbers.” It turns out last year “774 pilgrims died from Indonesia alone.” Perhaps more interesting, “in 1985 more than 1,700 people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress; a study at the time found.” Which, while anecdote once again, at least provides a hint of what’s true: brutal summers are yet again not a 21st century thing.
What’s different now is that the heat is reported on a great deal more, and of much greater importance, the intensity of the heat has been mitigated a great deal. In other words, the contrasts of extreme heat and cold created through “climate mastery” (Alex Expstein) if anything animate the extremes. To be clear, the latter is a speculation, but not an unreasonable one.
Think again the long car-rides of decades past that took place in cars that weren’t necessarily air conditioned. Truly awful. We all get a taste of this now when we get into a car that’s been sitting for a long time in the hot summer sun. This was the norm decades ago for much longer stretches, and it surely helps explain why classified ads for cars invariably included “AC” or not. It was a factor. Cars without AC weren’t as desirable.
Which is the point. In the past, the cruelty of hot summers was very well noted. Thankfully the profit-motivated responded to it as air conditioners in cars became increasingly standard, but so did they in houses, apartments and businesses around the country. As in, it’s not just low tax rates that are luring people to Arizona, Texas and Florida as pundits claim. Arguably, the much bigger story is the proliferation of air conditioning.
Of course, the proliferation was a market response. A response to the intense human disdain for high heat and humidity. As evidenced by the growing ubiquity of air conditioning, brutal summer heat was always with us contra efforts by some with a pen (and ironically, access to AC that they’ll never give up) to make “global warming” a modern notion, and very oddly an effect of the profit motive that mitigated the worst qualities of hot weather.
