"Summer now has a darker side – or rather a too-brightly burning and dangerously hot side. And that side is making summer the most dangerous season of the year.
This month’s bookshelf focuses on two summer dangers: heat waves and wildfires.
According to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the fourth week of July saw the “four hottest days ever observed,” and levels of carbon dioxide, the main driver of the global average temperature, keep rising.
The consequence, in specific regions and locales, is sustained summer heat waves that can kill, as the bestseller by Jeff Goodell, now out in paperback, vividly documents.
But higher temperatures can have less direct, more insidious physiological, psychological, and sociological effects; these are the subjects of the two new titles by journalist Clayton Page Aldern and social scientist R. Jisung Park.
These effects have begun to be felt in sports. Reporter Madeleine Orr makes the broader case for how climate change is changing sports. In “Rings of Fire II,” two organizations promoting sustainability in sports joined forces with the climate information network Climate Central to apply that thinking to this summer’s Olympics in Paris."
Michael Svoboda reports for Yale Climate Connections August 14, 2024.
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