At present, heatwaves are the topic du jour, and exactly because the heatwaves continue from day to day, and now week to week, and across a third of America’s population, as well as far too many other areas of the world. The once abnormally high heat has been persisting long enough that now the news is more often mentioning climate change in their reports on the heatwaves, something that has long been underreported and is still too-often missing from news coverage.

In fact, just days before I had another “Snips of Passing Interests” post on this subject, “Covering the Climate Crisis Like War, Not,” that commented on this very critique in an article in Heated.

And now, there’s a great piece in Grist, by staff writer Zoya Teirstein, published on June 27, 2023, titled “Extreme heat will cost the US $1 billion in health care costs—this summer alone” The article’s deck makes the content of the piece clear: “High temperatures could lead to 235,000 ER visits and 56,000 hospital admissions for heat-related conditions annually.”

First, though, a mention about Grist itself, by its own hand:

Climate. Justice. Solutions.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Our goal is to use the power of storytelling to illuminate the way toward a better world, inspire millions of people to walk that path with us, and show that the time for action is now.

Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of the most existential threat we face. Now that three-quarters of Americans recognize that climate change is happening, we’ve shifted our focus to show that a just and sustainable future is within reach.

I first came across Grist because the publication sometimes has articles reprinted in Literary Hub and I read Literary Hub’s daily newsletter and I use this resource as one of several tools for tracking climate fiction.

Well, back to the subject at hand, which is the concept of heatwave death counts (in my book Kill Well, out this September and part of a four book series called The Steep Climes Quartet, there is an upper Mid-West heat wave oppressing Chicago and Detroit and other such areas, and at one point when a character is passing through Chicago, she finds herself looking at a local television’s news and a running count of deaths caused by the extreme weather system. This recent Grist article makes me wonder how many people and costs of such a heat wave would go unreported in this fictional (but, unfortunately, realistic) scenario.

Teirstein is certainly right in her argument that there is an underappreciation of costs. Her article references the following:

A new report from the public policy research group Center for American Progress estimates extreme heat will create $1 billion in health care-related costs in the United States this summer. The analysis, provided exclusively to Grist, projects that excessive heat will spur nearly 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions for conditions related to increased body temperature across the country this summer.

The undercount of heatwave-related deaths is no doubt a big issue, and mainly because those most likely to die in long-running heatwaves are those with the fewest resources, and this category includes, of course, many homeless and other economically disadvantaged people and kids.

I don’t expect (thank goodness) that American heatwaves will result in the shocking Indian Sub-Continent die-off that starts off Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a climate fiction where wet-bulb temperatures continue for far too long while relief for millions disappears with power grid collapse, but then again, what was the death count in the Texas freeze storm of 2021, when a large part of the state’s power grid went down for quite a while? We are reliant on our power grids, and increasingly so as climate change presents more extreme weather events.

We need reliable tracking of costs and deaths associated with extreme weather events, and if that doesn’t make you aware of the seriousness of our climate crisis, you’re just too damn cool for school.