The story of a heat death
How our brains process stories better than numbers.
On 13 July 2022, David Azevedo, a 50-year-old construction worker, went to work in the midst of a heatwave in France. By the end of the day, he was dead. Doctors determined that he died of a heart attack caused by severe heatstroke. In a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, I told the story of what happened to David, and the devastating impact it has had on his close-knit family.
David was working outside in the sun, with limited shade, and for long hours. He was not elderly, he did not have any underlying health conditions: his death was caused by exposure to heat. In western countries - certainly in the UK, where I live - we can still have a tendency to think of climate change as something that is happening far away, or as something that will endanger us in the future. But as extreme heat becomes an annual occurence, so too do soaring death tolls. This is happening now, and nowhere is adapting fast enough.
While I was reporting this story, one point came up again and again: the difficulty of clearly establishing which deaths are directly caused by heat. Elderly people, or those with heart conditions, die because of the extra cardiovascular strain caused by high temperatures: it takes time to work out which deaths were hastened by the weather. As I wrote in the piece: “The human body’s reaction to heat is complex: there is no set temperature at which heat is dangerous to human life; no specific limit to the time that can be safely spent outside. This is why one person might collapse and die in the heat, while another working alongside them might emerge unscathed.”
This posed a reporting challenge - I had been asked to tell the story of a single heat death, and it took a long time to get beyond the statistics to find a family who knew their loved one had died because of extreme temperatures (and who wanted to speak out about it - in some countries, where heat deaths at work are becoming more common, companies pay compensation to families and ask them not to speak to the press). More seriously, this complexity makes it time-consuming for public health bodies to establish exact death tolls from heat waves, and difficult to communicate the danger. As one researcher told me:
“Unlike other disasters, which are happening in real time, we only really know the true impacts of extreme heat weeks or months after the event itself – it comes from analysing death records, for instance,” says Julie Arrighi, associate director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre. “This is challenging from a risk communication perspective. With extreme heat, you end up talking about population-level statistics, which are harder to connect with.”
I suppose the main purpose of a story like this, which singles out one particular case, is to humanise statistics which otherwise feel abstract. This is true even when the statistics are terrifying: one study looking at excess mortality data across 16 European countries estimated that 70,000 people died due to heat in the summer of 2022.
Psychologists use the term “compassion fade” to describe the idea that our capacity to feel compassion diminishes as our exposure to suffering increases, and the term “psychic numbing” to refer to the tendency for individuals or societies to withdraw attention from traumatic past experiences or overwhelming future threats. The American psychologist Paul Slovic has researched this, finding - perhaps unsurprisingly - that we’re more likely to be moved by personal stories than by the suffering of groups of people or whole nations. He’s written: “Large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling)”, while “we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need”.
Climate change is almost the definition of an issue so overwhelming and massive in its implications that it is difficult to look at head on. So it follows that the individual story of one death is almost more shocking - or at least, easier to relate to and understand - than a huge headline figure. I certainly found that while I was reporting on David’s death. I had heard the statistics each year about death tolls from heat in Europe, but it was talking to a devastated family that really made it hit home to me what those numbers mean.
The full story is available at the Guardian website; please do read it.
Reading/listening
I love Tortoise’s podcasts, and am riveted by their new one, Dangerous Memories, which tells the story of a dodgy healer who erroneously convinced affluent young women they had been abused.
This Guardian Long Read story about Britain’s last court reporters is a delight from start to finish. (Regular readers of this newsletter might recall I recently wrote about some of the challenges of UK court reporting!)
Fascinating New Yorker story about an “audio investigator” who investigates crimes that are heard but not seen.
My recent work
For the Observer, I went out on the campaign trail with Jess Phillips in Birmingham before the election, and spoke to young Tories about the future of the party in the aftermath of their party’s historic defeat.
For Hyphen, I wrote an op-ed about intimidation of female candidates and how the problem pre-dates the recent crop of pro-Palestine activism.
Thanks so much for reading! As always, if you found this interesting, do post it on social media, or forward to a friend - it all helps. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.