Drought While It Rains

Pero lo que cambió después, al menos en parte, fue el reconocimiento político de que el calor mata.

But what changed afterward, at least in part, was the political recognition that heat kills.

Eso parece obvio, pero durante décadas no figuró en ningún plan de emergencias sanitarias como amenaza prioritaria.

That seems obvious, but for decades it didn't appear in any public health emergency plans as a priority threat.

Which brings me back to what NOAA published this week.

This isn't just a weather story.

It's a public health story dressed up as a climate bulletin.

Completamente.

Completely.

Y hay algo más que conviene señalar: la sequía no solo afecta al agua que bebes.

And there's something else worth noting: drought doesn't just affect the water you drink.

Cuando la tierra está seca y agrietada, el viento levanta partículas de polvo microscópicas, algunas de ellas cargadas de microorganismos o contaminantes.

When the soil is dry and cracked, the wind picks up microscopic dust particles, some of them carrying microorganisms or contaminants.

En el suroeste de Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, hay un hongo del suelo que causa la coccidioidomicosis, una enfermedad pulmonar seria, y su área de distribución se está expandiendo hacia el norte a medida que el suelo se seca.

In the American Southwest, for example, there's a soil fungus that causes coccidioidomycosis, a serious lung disease, and its range is expanding northward as soil dries out.

Valley fever.

It's been climbing for years and it almost never gets mentioned in the mainstream coverage of climate and health.

Es el tipo de enfermedad que ilustra perfectamente el problema.

It's the kind of disease that perfectly illustrates the problem.

No es espectacular, no produce pánico mediático, pero afecta a cientos de miles de personas al año y sus consecuencias pueden ser devastadoras para quienes tienen el sistema inmunitario comprometido.

It's not dramatic, it doesn't cause media panic, but it affects hundreds of thousands of people a year and its consequences can be devastating for those with compromised immune systems.

Y la sequía es literalmente el vector de transmisión: sin tierra seca y viento, el hongo no viaja.

And drought is literally the transmission vector: without dry soil and wind, the fungus doesn't travel.

And then there's the other vector problem, which is mosquitoes.

Warmer springs, more standing water from flash floods on hard ground, you get breeding conditions earlier in the year.

Así es.

Exactly.

El dengue era prácticamente desconocido en territorio continental estadounidense hace veinte años.

Dengue was practically unknown in the continental United States twenty years ago.

Ahora hay casos autóctonos en Florida y Texas.

Now there are locally acquired cases in Florida and Texas.

El Aedes aegypti, el mosquito transmisor, ha ido colonizando latitudes más altas a medida que las temperaturas suben.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito has been colonizing higher latitudes as temperatures rise.

No es que vengan de fuera, es que el hábitat que antes les resultaba inhóspito ahora les resulta perfectamente habitable.

It's not that they're coming from outside, it's that the habitat that used to be inhospitable for them is now perfectly livable.

I want to talk about who bears the health burden here, because it's not distributed evenly.

And I think this is the part of the story that gets lost in the aggregate numbers.

No, en absoluto.

No, not at all.

Los grupos más vulnerables al calor extremo son siempre los mismos: ancianos que viven solos, personas sin hogar, trabajadores agrícolas y de la construcción que no pueden elegir quedarse en interiores, y comunidades de bajos ingresos que no tienen acceso a aire acondicionado o que viven en vecindarios con muy poco arbolado y mucho asfalto.

The groups most vulnerable to extreme heat are always the same: elderly people living alone, homeless people, agricultural and construction workers who can't choose to stay indoors, and low-income communities with no access to air conditioning or who live in neighborhoods with very little tree cover and a lot of asphalt.

Las llamadas islas de calor urbanas.

The so-called urban heat islands.

Austin, where I live, has a serious urban heat island problem.

The difference in temperature between a wealthy neighborhood with mature trees and a low-income neighborhood with none can be eight, ten degrees.

Same city, same day.

Y eso no es solo incomodidad.

And that's not just discomfort.

Eso es mortalidad diferencial.

That's differential mortality.

En los estudios que se han hecho tras grandes olas de calor, cuando se mapea quién murió y dónde vivía, la correlación con la renta y con la cobertura vegetal del barrio es casi perfecta.

In studies done after major heat waves, when you map who died and where they lived, the correlation with income and with neighborhood tree cover is almost perfect.

Es geografía convertida en destino.

It's geography turned into fate.

Geography turned into fate.

That's a sharp way of putting it.

Lo que me parece más grave de este informe de la NOAA es que, a estas alturas, ya no estamos hablando de proyecciones ni de modelos.

What seems most serious to me about this NOAA report is that, at this point, we're no longer talking about projections or models.

Estamos hablando de datos reales, de récords medidos, de efectos sobre la salud que ya están ocurriendo.

We're talking about real data, measured records, health effects that are already happening.

El debate ha dejado de ser si esto va a pasar y ha pasado a ser qué hacemos ahora que ya está pasando.

The debate has shifted from whether this will happen to what we do now that it's already happening.

And the health infrastructure in the United States, frankly, is not designed for this.

The emergency system was built around acute events, a hurricane, a mass casualty incident.

Heat is a slow, distributed killer.

It doesn't generate the same political urgency.

Eso es fundamental.

That's fundamental.

El calor no tiene imagen.

Heat has no image.

Un huracán tiene imagen: casas destrozadas, coches flotando.

A hurricane has an image: destroyed houses, floating cars.

El calor tiene...

Heat has...

a un anciano en su apartamento que nadie va a visitar.

an elderly man in his apartment that no one will visit.

La tragedia es invisible hasta que alguien revisa las estadísticas de mortalidad semanas después.

The tragedy is invisible until someone checks the mortality statistics weeks later.

That's the thing about excess mortality as a concept.

You only see it in the rearview mirror.

You're comparing this July to the average of the last ten Julys and going, wait, there are forty thousand more deaths than expected.

Where did they come from?

Y cuando llegas a esa conclusión, ya no puedes hacer nada por las personas que murieron.

And by the time you reach that conclusion, you can no longer do anything for the people who died.

Lo cual plantea una pregunta política muy concreta: si sabes, con datos sólidos, que la segunda primavera más calurosa de la historia va a traducirse en un verano de alto riesgo para las poblaciones vulnerables, ¿qué decisiones tomas ahora, en junio, para mitigar ese daño?

Which raises a very concrete political question: if you know, with solid data, that the second warmest spring in history will translate into a high-risk summer for vulnerable populations, what decisions do you make now, in June, to mitigate that damage?

And the drought dimension adds another layer.

Because drought stress on agriculture means food prices go up, which means the people who were already most vulnerable to heat are also more likely to be nutritionally stressed, which makes them less resilient to heat.

These things compound.

Y hay otro efecto que poca gente menciona: el impacto del calor extremo en la salud mental.

And there's another effect that few people mention: the impact of extreme heat on mental health.

No me refiero solo al estrés por el contexto climático general, sino a efectos fisiológicos directos.

I'm not only talking about stress from the general climate context, but direct physiological effects.

Hay estudios que muestran correlaciones entre temperaturas nocturnas elevadas y aumentos en las tasas de suicidio, de violencia doméstica, de ingresos psiquiátricos urgentes.

There are studies showing correlations between elevated nighttime temperatures and increases in suicide rates, domestic violence, emergency psychiatric admissions.

El calor altera la química cerebral de maneras que todavía no entendemos del todo.

Heat alters brain chemistry in ways we still don't fully understand.

The nighttime temperature point is critical and I'm glad you raised it.

If nights don't cool down, the body never recovers.

A hot day you can survive.

Three hot nights in a row with no cooling interval, that's when organ systems start to fail in people who are already stressed.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y las noches tropicales, como las llamamos, aquellas en las que la temperatura no baja de los veinticinco grados, son cada vez más frecuentes en ciudades que antes las contaban con los dedos de una mano al año.

And tropical nights, as we call them, those in which the temperature doesn't drop below twenty-five degrees, are becoming increasingly frequent in cities that used to count them on one hand per year.

Eso no es solo un dato climatológico;

That's not just a climatological data point;

es un dato de salud pública que debería estar en la portada de todos los periódicos.

it's a public health data point that should be on the front page of every newspaper.

Let me ask you something slightly uncomfortable.

Spain has been through its share of brutal heat waves.

Does the public there actually grasp heat as a medical emergency in a way that Americans don't, or has the response been mostly bureaucratic, ticking boxes after 2003?

Honestamente, las dos cosas.

Honestly, both.

Ha habido mejoras reales: hay planes de contingencia, hay sistemas de alerta temprana, los hospitales tienen protocolos.

There have been real improvements: contingency plans exist, early warning systems exist, hospitals have protocols.

Pero la conciencia social sigue siendo parcial.

But social awareness is still partial.

Si le preguntas a alguien en Madrid si el calor puede matarte, la mayoría dirá que sí, claro, el golpe de calor.

If you ask someone in Madrid whether heat can kill you, most will say yes, of course, heatstroke.

Pero pocos conectan eso con algo tan cotidiano como no tener ventilación en el piso o no poder permitirte la factura de la electricidad para poner el aire.

But few connect that with something as everyday as not having ventilation in your apartment or not being able to afford the electricity bill to run the air conditioning.

Energy poverty as a heat mortality factor.

That's a thread I keep pulling on.

Because in the US debate, the conversation about air conditioning and health gets completely tangled up in the conversation about energy costs, who pays for electricity, whether utilities can cut off service in summer.

Fíjate en la paradoja: la solución individual más eficaz contra el calor, el aire acondicionado, es también uno de los principales impulsores del calentamiento global.

Notice the paradox: the most effective individual solution against heat, air conditioning, is also one of the main drivers of global warming.

Cuanto más calor hace, más aire acondicionado se usa, más electricidad se consume, más emisiones se producen.

The hotter it gets, the more air conditioning is used, the more electricity is consumed, the more emissions are produced.

Es un bucle del que resulta muy difícil salir sin una transformación estructural del sistema energético.

It's a loop that's very hard to escape without a structural transformation of the energy system.

We're cooling ourselves into a hotter world.

That's the kind of sentence that keeps you up at night.

Y sin embargo, la alternativa de no enfriar a las personas vulnerables mientras resolvemos el problema sistémico es inaceptable éticamente.

And yet, the alternative of not cooling vulnerable people while we solve the systemic problem is ethically unacceptable.

Hay que manejar las dos escalas de tiempo a la vez: la inmediata, que es proteger vidas este verano, y la estructural, que es evitar que dentro de treinta años este tipo de primaveras sea la norma y no la excepción.

You have to manage both time scales simultaneously: the immediate one, which is protecting lives this summer, and the structural one, which is preventing this kind of spring from becoming the norm rather than the exception thirty years from now.

And that requires a kind of institutional patience that democratic systems are genuinely bad at.

You're asking politicians to spend money today on a problem whose worst consequences land in a future electoral cycle.

Eso es lo que hace que el informe de la NOAA de esta semana sea, para mí, algo más que una estadística.

That's what makes this week's NOAA report something more than a statistic, for me.

Es una señal de que el margen de actuación se está reduciendo.

It's a signal that the window for action is narrowing.

Cada récord que se bate no es solo un número;

Every record that's broken isn't just a number;

es un umbral que se cruza y desde el que ciertas consecuencias empiezan a ser inevitables si no hay respuesta.

it's a threshold crossed, beyond which certain consequences become inevitable in the absence of a response.

Hold on, I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago, because I caught a construction I've been trying to nail down.

You said 'a medida que las temperaturas suben,' which I know means 'as temperatures rise,' but I always want to reach for 'cuando' there and you never use 'cuando' in that context.

Buena observación.

Good observation.

'Cuando' y 'a medida que' no son intercambiables.

'Cuando' and 'a medida que' are not interchangeable.

'Cuando' marca un momento puntual: 'cuando llegó el verano, cerré la terraza.' 'A medida que' describe un proceso gradual y paralelo: 'a medida que suben las temperaturas, aumenta el riesgo.' Si dices 'cuando suben las temperaturas' suena como si ocurriera de golpe, como un interruptor.

'Cuando' marks a specific moment: 'when summer arrived, I closed the terrace.' 'A medida que' describes a gradual, parallel process: 'as temperatures rise, risk increases.' If you say 'cuando suben las temperaturas' it sounds like it happens all at once, like a switch.

'A medida que' transmite la progresión.

'A medida que' conveys the progression.

So it's not just temporal, it's about whether the two things move together, in sync.

The English 'as' does the same job, actually.

'When it rained, she left' versus 'as the rain fell, she walked away.' One is a trigger, the other is a duration.

Exacto, la lógica es la misma.

Exactly, the logic is the same.

Y hay otra expresión parecida que vale la pena conocer: 'conforme.' 'Conforme avanza el verano, los depósitos de agua van bajando.' Es más formal que 'a medida que', casi literario, pero la encontrarás en artículos de opinión y en textos científicos.

And there's another similar expression worth knowing: 'conforme.' 'Conforme avanza el verano, los depósitos de agua van bajando.' It's more formal than 'a medida que', almost literary, but you'll find it in opinion pieces and scientific texts.

Los tres, 'cuando', 'a medida que', y 'conforme', parecen sinónimos y no lo son.

All three, 'cuando', 'a medida que', and 'conforme', seem like synonyms and they're not.

Right, so if I wanted to sound like someone who actually reads Spanish rather than someone who passed a grammar exam, I'd reach for 'a medida que' or 'conforme' when the process is ongoing.

Whereas if I say 'cuando,' I'm signaling a discrete event.

Eso es.

Exactly.

Y el contexto de hoy es perfecto para practicarlo, porque toda la conversación sobre clima y salud está llena de procesos graduales.

And today's context is perfect for practicing it, because the entire conversation about climate and health is full of gradual processes.

'A medida que el planeta se calienta.' 'Conforme los glaciares retroceden.' 'A medida que la sequía se extiende.' Son frases que vas a necesitar si quieres hablar de esto con alguien en español sin sonar como un boletín meteorológico mal traducido.

'As the planet warms.' 'As glaciers retreat.' 'As the drought spreads.' These are sentences you're going to need if you want to discuss this in Spanish without sounding like a badly translated weather bulletin.