How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos
- Description
- Product Details
- About the Author
- Read an Excerpt
- Table of Contents
You might not realize it, but we’re already living through the beginnings of climate chaos. In Arizona, laborers now start their day at 3 a.m. because it’s too hot to work past noon. Chinese investors are snapping up real estate in Canada. Millennials have evacuation plans. Moguls are building bunkers. Retirees in Miami are moving inland.
In How to Prepare for Climate Change, bestselling self-help author David Pogue offers sensible, deeply researched advice for how the rest of us should start to ready ourselves for the years ahead. Pogue walks readers through what to grow, what to eat, how to build, how to insure, where to invest, how to prepare your children and pets, and even where to consider relocating when the time comes. (Two areas of the country, in particular, have the requisite cool temperatures, good hospitals, reliable access to water, and resilient infrastructure to serve as climate havens in the years ahead.) He also provides wise tips for managing your anxiety, as well as action plans for riding out every climate catastrophe, from superstorms and wildfires to ticks and epidemics.
Timely and enlightening, How to Prepare for Climate Change is an indispensable guide for anyone who read The Uninhabitable Earth or The Sixth Extinction and wants to know how to make smart choices for the upheaval ahead.
ISBN-13: 9781982134518
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 01-26-2021
Pages: 624
Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.40(d)
David Pogue is the host of twenty science specials on PBS NOVA, a five-time Emmy Award–winning technology and science correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, and a New York Times bestselling author.
“How to Prepare for Climate Change” by David Pogue (Simon & Schuster, 2021) is the first practical guide to adapting to the new climate. It covers where to live; how to invest; how to insure; how to talk to your kids; how to build; what to grow; how to prepare a business; and how to prepare for flood, fire, drought, hurricane, heat waves, and tornadoes. Read an Excerpt
This excerpt is from Chapter 10, “Preparing for Heat Waves.”
Preparing for Heat Waves
You could fill an internet with examples of heat records being broken recently:
But these records are made—and guaranteed—to be broken, over and over again. Computer models predict that from 2050 to 2100, heat waves will triple in frequency.
Figure 10-1. The 0 line represents the 1901–2000 average worldwide temperature, as measured by both land-based and sea-surface sensors. The downward bars indicate below-average temperatures; the upward ones indicate above average.
Unfortunately, in most years, heat is the biggest killer of them all. In 2018, heat killed 50% more Americans than floods did, and three times as many people as hurricanes. In 2021, the Pacific Northwest heat wave killed over 700 people—and over a billion animals.
Figure 10-2. Of all the extreme-weather monsters, heat is the deadliest.
The bottom line: In the last 25 years, heat exposure has killed more people than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.
Figure 10-3. In the United States, the Northern and Western states have warmed the fastest since 1991—look at Alaska! The Southeastern states have heated up but not nearly as much. (Darker spots have heated up more.)
How Heat Affects Us
Heat dries us out, weakens us, impairs our thinking, makes us more argumentative. It also stresses our hearts, which might not be an immediately obvious side effect.
Ordinarily, a teaspoon’s worth of sweat, cumulatively evaporating from all over your body, can cool your bloodstream a full 2 degrees. (A liquid evaporating from any surface cools it down.)
But when it’s humid out, sweat doesn’t evaporate from your skin, because it has no place to evaporate to. The air around you doesn’t want it; it’s already saturated with water vapor. That’s why humidity magnifies the effects of heat waves.
The unfortunate payoff:
This is really bad news. Stop what you’re doing, start drinking water, get out of the heat, and seek medical treatment fast.
You get confused, dizzy, and mumbly, with a splitting headache. Sometimes, you feel nauseated, your skin is flushed, you’re breathing fast, and your heart goes nuts, beating fast to try to cool you down. Key symptom: Skin is hot and dry.
You might not even know what’s happening, because—unless you’ve been exercising—you’re not sweating. But unless you get emergency treatment fast, heatstroke can do damage to your brain (because it swells in your skull), heart, kidneys, and muscles.
If you suspect that someone is having heatstroke, Cool them down. Get them into shade or air-conditioning; take off as many of their clothes as possible; spray them with water; and put cold, wet towels on their neck, armpits, and groin.
The AC Problem
Air conditioners are power beasts and environmental disasters. They’re the costliest items on your electric bill, accounting for half of it in hot weather.
Another problem: Air conditioners work by pumping indoor hot air out of the building. The net effect of those thousands of air conditioners is, quite literally, to heat up the outdoors, by as much as 2 degrees. They contribute to the heat island effect, a measurable spike in temperature in densely populated areas.
Figure 10-4. This is London, viewed from space with an infrared camera. The darkest spots are 5 degrees warmer than the lightest ones, even though the weather is identical. That’s the heat-island effect.
Finally, all those air conditioners running simultaneously contributes to another common heat-wave side effect: Power blackouts.
In other words, you should know how to cool yourself even without power. Read on.
Indoors in the Heat Wave
Once the heat wave is upon you, eliminate as many heat sources as possible. Don’t run big appliances (washer, dryer, dishwasher, oven, stove) until it gets cool at night; they pump heat into your house.
Close the shades or curtains, especially on windows that face south and west. Instantly, you’ve created a midday temperature drop of an almost 20-degree difference. If you don’t have window coverings, hang some kind of improvised white drapes, or even fill the windows with reflectors made of foil-covered cardboard.
Meanwhile:
A fan makes you feel cooler by whisking away your perspiration, just the way nature intended, and also by pushing your own body heat away from you. It can easily feel 10 degrees cooler next to a fan.
If you have AC and a fan, you can raise your AC thermostat by 10 or 12 degrees and feel exactly as cool.
Here’s the catch, however: Feeling cooler is not the same as being cooler. When the temperature indoors is above 95°, a fan can’t prevent you from getting heat illnesses.
Some homes have big, whole-house units the size of air conditioners, but you can also buy a personal-sized, $25 swamp cooler about the size of a toaster.
Figure 10-8. An evaporative cooler, or swamp cooler, is like an inside-out dehumidifier. Instead of converting water vapor to liquid (and creating heat in the process), it converts water to vapor (and creating cooling).
You plug it in and fill it with water. A fan blows air across wet pads; as the water evaporates, it gets cooler.
In other words, this device is a mechanized version of sweat evaporating off your skin. What you feel near a swamp cooler is moving air that’s been cooled by water’s transformation into vapor.
These coolers are far less expensive than air conditioners. They work great in places like Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, where the air could, frankly, use a little humidifying.
Alas, these machines don’t produce cooling in humid places; the water simply doesn’t want to evaporate.
Sleeping in the Heat
Nights during a heat wave without AC can be truly miserable. Fortunately, the worlds of science and commerce are always available to help:
Once the Air Cools Outside
When the sun finally sets, and the air outside becomes cooler than it is inside, get all the hot air out. Open the windows, set up a cross breeze, and turn on the exhaust fans in your bathroom and kitchen.
Medicine and Heat
Your medicines aren’t little capsules of magic. They’re complex chemical mixtures, incredibly susceptible to temperature. Antibiotics, aspirin, hydrocortisone, test strips, hormone medicines (including thyroid meds and birth control pills), insulin, heart meds, and seizure drugs all lose potency or break down in the heat.
The only solution is to keep meds cool and dry. Never leave them in a parked car, especially not in the trunk.
If you must venture into the heat with insulin or antibiotics, buy cooling packs for them at the drugstore.
For any meds, if you’re leaving a cool home for the day, take with you only what you’ll need. Leave the original bottle at home where it’s cooler.
Outside in the Heat Wave
Heat poses the greatest danger to people who have to be outdoors in it, like road workers, farmers, utility repair technicians—and homeless people, who have very few resources to protect themselves.
Avoid exerting yourself outside, if you can help it. If you want to work out, for example, visit a gym or swim.
If your home isn’t cool, spend the hottest part of the day somewhere that has air-conditioning, like a movie, a library, or a friend’s house.
Working Outside
But what if you must be outside in the heat? What if it’s your job?
Drinking More Water
The more you sweat, the more water you lose. That’s why people get dehydrated so quickly on hot days.
The golden rule: Drink enough so that your pee comes out clear. If it’s yellow or, worse, orange, you’re dehydrated.
Even slight dehydration can bring you headaches, irritability, weakness at sports and work, and inability to concentrate. Dry eyes and blurry vision aren’t uncommon. If you’re very young or very old, dehydration can send you to the hospital.
And if you’re dehydrated often, you can get urinary tract infections, kidney failure, and kidney stones. (Kidney stones are a side effect of climate change that people don’t talk about, maybe because they’re terrified; the pain is beyond description. What’s the connection? Heat leads to dehydration, and dehydration contributes to kidney-stone formation.)
Of course, sweat isn’t just water. It also contains electrolytes—minerals like sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium—that your muscle and nerve cells need for everyday operation. Most of it is sodium, which is why sweat tastes salty.
Lose enough of electrolytes, and you get cramping, dizziness, and headaches.
If you find yourself drinking a lot of water in hot weather, find something to replenish your electrolytes. Gatorade will do it, but you can make your own facsimile by stirring half a teaspoon of salt and eight teaspoons of sugar into a quart of water.
Eating a salty snack and washing it down with water is a worthy Plan B.
Kids and Heat
Children are especially vulnerable to heat waves. They run around a lot, they produce more heat than adults, they don’t drink much, and their little bodies can’t get rid of that heat as well, because they don’t sweat as much.
When the going gets hot, therefore, you have a job to do, parents.
Car interiors get hot incredibly fast—20 degrees every ten minutes—thanks to, of all things, the greenhouse effect. The sun’s reflected heat is trapped, and the car gets really hot. It can easily reach over 200° if the car’s interior is dark colored. Sadly, once a kid’s internal temperature reaches 107°, that’s the end.
Here’s an idea: Whenever you put your kid in a car seat, put your wallet, purse, or phone back there, too. You’re a lot less likely to stride away and forget that you’ve left something valuable behind.
Pets and Heat
Dogs and cats, too, suffer in the heat. They have fur coats that they can’t remove, and they don’t sweat; their sole cooling mechanism is panting, which exchanges hot air from their lungs with cooler air outside.
The treatment: Cool-down techniques like air-conditioning; spraying with water; lowering into cool water (but not ice water, which would cool the animal too fast); providing water to drink (but not forcing him to drink); wet towels on the stomach, chest, groin, and paws. Then get the dog to a vet as fast as possible; that’s the only way to rule out invisible problems like shock, organ damage, and clotting.
As with humans, being old, sick, or overweight makes a pet more susceptible. Animals with flat faces—bulldogs, pugs, Persian cats—overheat more easily than other breeds, because it’s harder for them to pant.
Avoid the hottest hours of the day, keep walks short, and don’t run. Provide plenty of water, shade, and swimming opportunities, if your dog is into that sort of thing. A haircut can keep your dog cooler, but don’t shave; the last inch of fur protects her from sunburn. (Don’t cut or shave cats. They’re more efficient than dogs at regulating temperature, and their fur is part of the system.)
Tesla’s cars have a novel solution called Dog Mode. When you leave, the car maintains your temperature setting—70°, for example—and its screen says, in gigantic type, “My owner will be back soon. Don’t worry! The AC is on and it’s 70°F.”
Figure 10-6. On a Tesla, you’re far less likely to get your window smashed by a well-meaning dog lover.
People generally won’t alert authorities or smash your windows if they realize that the dog is comfortable.
You may not own a Tesla, but there’s nothing to stop you from making a sign of your own when you have to leave your dog inside—briefly, responsibly, with water at hand and AC on.
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Introduction 1 1 Acclimating to Climate Change 15 2 Where to Live 39 3 How to Build 89 4 What to Grow 139 5 Where to Invest 163 6 How to Insure 193 7 Protecting Your Children 221 8 Ready for Anything 247 9 Preparing for Flood 301 10 Preparing for Heat Waves 341 11 Preparing for Drought 373 12 Preparing for Hurricanes and Tornadoes 387 13 Preparing for Wildfires 415 14 Preparing for Mosquitoes and Ticks 447 15 Preparing for Social Breakdown 477 16 Preparing Your Business 495 17 Where to Find Hope 529 Acknowledgments 563 Notes 579 Illustration Credits 581 Index 585 Appendix: Emergency Card 613Table of Contents