A new kind of heat, at least in how we’re responding to it

It’s been hot before. To tell the truth, that glowering heat dome which has oppressed much of the country is only now getting to us here in Georgia.

So we would be getting ahead of ourselves to say this summer has brought a new kind of heat. But in large ways and small, we are seeing what happens when humans are forced to adjust to conditions they’ve not experienced before.

Last week, the Union of Southern Service Workers held a rally in front of an Atlanta Popeyes with fast-food restaurant employees from across the metro area. They weren’t demanding that their employers pay them more money but that they fix the broken air conditioners in their stores and give them more water breaks. The union also wants managers to be better trained about heat illnesses, and it wants to play a role in the development of future policies for dealing with heat.

Climate change is incremental, and with every heat wave and hurricane these days comes a debate about whether it’s climate change or just the weather. When unions start organizing around the issue of air conditioning, that’s a pretty convincing sign the climate is changing.

The demonstration in Atlanta was a long way from the disaster unfolding last week during the Hajj in Mecca. Both stories are about how class divisions are defining the way in which climate change is experienced.

Over the long history of the Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the desert city, which is the seat of their religion, there have been many catastrophes, with deaths in the thousands. This year, the deaths were not due to stampeding or hostile attacks but the heat.

This story was a reminder that there are still parts of the world beyond the media’s easy reach. 

For days, estimates of the death toll bounced around in stories published in the United States, with only fuzzy details about what was happening. At week’s end the Saudi government announced an official toll of 1,301.

The Hajj was attended this year by more than 1.8 million people, many of them elderly Muslims who have saved all their lives to make the trip. The Saudi government has attempted to control the size of the event, limiting attendance to those with a special visa, which is apportioned to Muslims throughout the world through a lottery system. But making the pilgrimage is, after all, a central tenet of the religion, so it’s hardly surprising that an underground industry of travel companies has sprung up that offers unauthorized access to the restricted site.

The visa system, which was intended to make this enormous event manageable instead, resulted this year in a Hajj in which registered pilgrims escaped the 125-degree heat in air-conditioned tents and buses while unregistered pilgrims walked for miles in the desert without access to water or shade. The Saudi government said that 83 percent of those who died were unregistered pilgrims.

The date for the Hajj goes backward on our calendar about 11 days every year, which is in line with the lunar calendar, so it may be a few more decades before temperatures during the Hajj are this hot again. But by then, according to a study published five years ago, rising temperatures in the Middle East will have reached levels that “exceed extreme danger” for human health.

The high in Atlanta is forecast to be 92 when President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump meet to debate Thursday night, down from 99 on Wednesday. Whether the presidential contenders will talk about climate change depends on their CNN interrogators. In any case, it won’t stand out as sharply to most voters as abortion or immigration.

The message of this summer, however, is that some things have changed for good and that without vigorous effort, the divisions between haves and have-nots, rich and poor, registered and unregistered, are only going to grow wider as temperatures climb.