“I’d like to sup with my baby tonight,
Refill the cup with my baby tonight.
But I ain’t up to my baby tonight
‘Cause it’s too darn hot.”
— “Too Darn Hot”
Written by Cole Porter in 1948 and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald in 1956
From my office window it does not look so bad. Bright, full sun casts everything in warm, desaturated hues. Shadows grow, and then shrink, and then grow again as the day wears on. The vision borders on romantic. It beckons like a siren: “Come outside. Bring your work. Bring a book. Maybe even a snack.”
But the grass is dead, scorched from the lack of rain. The leaves on the trees have curled. The flowers and plants have wilted, their weighty limbs drooping toward the ground. Insects and lizards — anything that needs water, really — search for shelter and try to make their way into my little blue house.
This heat is confrontational. It gets in your face and stares at you nose-to-nose, daring you to unleash all the worst parts of yourself: your aggression, your irritability, your impatience and frustration. A bubbling pot of water simmers on the stove inside my chest. It threatens to become a rolling boil at the first perceived slight or sign of inconvenience.
This is July in Texas. It is my third summer in the Lone Star State, and it is on track to be the hottest on record in the city, in the state, in the country, and quite possibly, the world. The daily high temperature in Austin has remained above 100 degrees since July 8, and there is no reprieve in sight.
Last July was similar: oppressive, unyielding, irate. It was depressing. Once, as I lamented the sense of despair and ennui that accompanies the languid months between April and October, my friend Claire informed me that, actually, it is still possible to suffer from seasonal depression even if the weather is not cold or dark.
Beneath the surface lies more than sadness, the specter of something darker. It is a deep, collective sense of discomfort and displeasure.
The interminable hot is an unwelcome lodger that cannot be evicted. Burdened with the weight of triple-digit temperatures and slicked in humidity, something sinister within us stirs. Tempers flare. And like long-dormant volcanoes waking from a slumber, pressure mounts. Sometimes there is an unpredictable eruption.
For decades, researchers have charted the relationship between warmer temperatures and increased levels of interpersonal violence. One such study, conducted by public health researchers at Drexel University, examined a decade of crime data in Philadelphia. Its findings revealed a strong, positive linear relationship between the heat index and rates of violent crime and disorderly conduct, backing up ages of anecdotal evidence from police departments (which are, admittedly, not always the most trustworthy source).
Crime rates were highest in the warmest months of the year (May through September) and highest on the hottest days. More specifically, there was a 9-percent jump in rates of violent crime on days where the heat index hit 98 degrees compared to days where the index was 57 degrees.
“[A]s temperatures become more comfortable, more people are outdoors, which presents greater opportunity for crime,” the 2017 study says.
Well, duh. (Said with apologies to the researchers.)
Reaction aside, the study confirms previous research on the topic — a theory dating back to a 1990 study on weather and crime referred to as “routine activity theory.” The idea and accompanying research posit that changes in ambient temperature can alter the typical course of our days, as well as the people we encounter.
For example, we may spend more time outdoors or socializing. The increased social contact and fairer weather conditions thereby increase the possibility for interpersonal conflict and crime, according to the theory.
The conclusion of a separate 2020 study appears to be in line with this idea, too. A survey of 436 U.S. counties, the study concluded that for each 10-degree Celsius (or 50-degree Fahrenheit) increase in daily temperature, the risk of violent crime increased 11.92 percent. Risk of non-violent crime increased only about 6 percent.
While attributing increases in crime to weather-inspired changes in our routine does make sense, there is a second, more disturbing scientific idea to consider: “Temperature aggression theory.”
“[H]ot weather induces interpersonal violence by increasing discomfort, frustration, impulsivity, and aggression,” explains a 2021 article in peer-reviewed science journal The Lancet.
Although most of us accept the assertion that weather affects our moods, emotions, and behavior, we must now confront another frightening possibility. Extreme, sustained, record-shattering heat could create a more violent and unpredictable world.
It wasn’t even 1 p.m. but the grocery store was slammed. We did not need much — something simple for lunch and maybe some more oat milk. Cars heading every which way choked the flow of traffic in the parking lot, turning what was supposed to be a quick in-and-out trip into a safari for a single empty parking space.
My husband had grown impatient with indecisive drivers. He was ready to complete our shopping, to “get on with it,” as he often says. A determined look painted his face. With both hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas, he hauled our black Subaru Outback around the idling Honda Civic before us and zoomed down the lane of already-full parking spots.
Our search dragged. We drove up one row and down another, and then we did it again. Matthew was ready to call it quits and drive across the river to a different grocery store, an idea I endorsed. But another vehicle blocked our exit: the Honda Civic.
We sat still, engaged in an awkward game of chicken while the other driver flailed his arms like a fool, yelling words we could neither hear nor read on his lips. I would have liked to call him an “idiot stick” (a phrase I once heard my grandmother Mary use upon encountering an incompetent driver). But Matthew just shrugged, disinclined to escalate the interaction. I mimicked him.
The man did not like that. He exited the Civic with a hearty door-slam, still running his mouth, still blocking our car, and still facing the wrong direction (“up”) for this specific row of parking spaces (“down”).
“Do not get out of the car,” Matthew advises me. I know to stay in my seat, but I appreciate the reminder nonetheless.
In my mind’s eye, Matthew stomps the gas pedal to the floor, rocketing the Outback forward and into the angry man. He flies up on the hood. Matthew stomps the brake. He rolls onto the ground. Fuck around and find out, I think, imagining myself as some sort of 21st-century, post-modern cowboy.
Instead we remain in our seats while I calm my vengeful imagination. I wonder if the man has a gun. This is Texas, where the threat of violence remains omnipresent, burned into the state’s “stand your ground” ethos with the permanence of a cattle brand.
Nothing happens.
The altercation — if you can call it that — lasts less than two minutes, but it feels like an eternity before an armed security guard stationed at one of the grocery store’s entrances approaches the man and instructs him to return to his car. The Honda Civic grows smaller and smaller, and then the shouting fool with his flailing arms and unreadable lips is gone.
“Yeah, you shouldn’t have engaged,” the grocery store security guard says to Matthew a moment later. The remark is more infuriating to me than the angry Civic driver’s behavior. We both roll our eyes. No self-respecting person wants to be admonished by a grocery store security guard, a job whose very necessity makes even the most sane people question what the actual fuck is going on in this world.
Later, at the grocery store across the river, Matthew and I place our lunch items and our oat milk into a red-and-black plastic basket. I attribute the Civic driver’s parking lot hissy fit to the post-Covid erosion of relative social order. It does, as it has for a while, seem like most people have lost whatever modicum of common sense they might have once possessed.
A year after the whole ordeal, I wonder if maybe what I witnessed was a real-life example of “temperature aggression theory.” The average high temperature last July was 101 degrees with high temperatures above 100 degrees for 24 of the month’s 31 days. Perhaps that day in the H-E-B parking lot was just a prelude.
The alarm bells of climate change ring loud but fall on deaf ears. Experts have warned us for decades of rising sea levels, more frequent intense weather events, and other disastrous consequences.
Politicians and civic leaders bicker and balk at the proposition of drastic measures that would avert catastrophe and mitigate damage. Bad faith actors undermine clear-throated scientific conclusions. Business executives and lobbyists deploy smoke and mirrors to feign regulatory compliance (Volkswagen) and meaningful action (carbon offsets). Everyday people sort recyclable waste into bins and purchase reusable shopping bags, thinking they have done their part — all while massive corporations continue to account for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change will claim some of our lives not with raging wildfires and hurricanes that top the Saffir-Simpson scale. It will instead come for us with a firearm or a knife or some other weapon in the hands of someone driven to the brink by hotter and hotter temperatures.
At least that was the finding of a troubling 2012 research paper by Matthew Ranson, then a PhD candidate in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School who analyzed 50 years of crime and temperature data spanning 49 continental U.S. States.
Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 prediction that average global temperatures are likely to rise by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (or 2.8 degree Celsius) by 2099, Ranson asserted the U.S. will experience the following:
35,000 additional murders
216,000 additional cases of rape
2.4 million additional simple assaults
409,000 additional robberies
3.1 million additional burglaries
3.8 million additional cases of larceny
1.4 million additional cases of vehicle theft
Those figures are startling.
And the most recent IPCC report, published in 2022, contained an even starker prediction. It warned that average global temperatures are likely to rise by at least 2.7 degrees in the next 20 years unless immediate and massive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are made. The head of the United Nations called it “code red for humanity.” (The IPCC is a body of the UN.)
That acceleration could then render the aforementioned crime estimates a woeful underestimation. Ranson acknowledges in his paper a dearth of evidence on how weather affects patterns of criminal behavior over longer time scales.
Just as concerning, researchers and experts admit they are not sure how we could address the possibility of increasing violent crime.
“One potential suggestion is the use of heat-warning systems to alert law enforcement agencies of the high temperature and potential increase in violence, but this would need to be evaluated in future studies,” says The Lancet. “Public safety awareness programmes, help lines, gun control policies, and controls on alcohol use could be used as levers to reduce violent crimes.”
Wishful thinking.
Impactful gun control policy and restraints on alcohol at the federal level are largely non-starters given the country’s divided political reality. That relegates the legislative responsibility to municipal and state governments, which face similar divisions — not to mention the threat of courts striking down legislation, or at least tying it up in a protracted battle.
Meanwhile, substantive dialogues about the future of policing and law enforcement appear to have ground to a halt. What progress has been made is slow, hard-won, and to the credit of grassroots-level organizers. The once-promising momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement — now a decade old but mired in dysfunction and controversy — seems to have transformed into a slogan for bumper stickers and yard signs. “Defund The Police,” still suffering as a result of its oft-inflammatory misnomer, has made few strides in achieving its goal of shifting police department funding toward social services and developing additional levers for police accountability.
Discussions have become diluted as the pre-ordained positions (“for” and “against”) become more polarized, retreating into online echo chambers where the loudest voices in the room win the most attention. Hopes of compromise and action dwindle as time passes, and the disenfranchised communities who stand to benefit are left to languish. Many experts agree the vulnerable people in these communities are most likely to experience the more immediate onslaught of horrifying climate change consequences.
On the radio, the top story is the “heat dome” encasing the southern United States from California to Florida. Half the country is cooking beneath a fast-food warming lamp. We are a big, greasy cheeseburger wrapped in smudged foil, ready to be shoved into a brown paper bag with a stack of napkins and handed off through a drive-through window.
It is barely 9 o’clock on this particular Friday morning. Austin is already a sweltering, humid blast furnace. Charlie Brown and I drive toward Zilker Park, trying to squeeze in a bit of playtime before the temperature turns from “plain ol’ hot” to “absolutely miserable.” The air conditioner of the 2004 Lexus SUV exhales at its coldest and loudest setting. Still, the dog pants so hard the car shakes at stoplights. I wonder whether he understands it is worse outside the car.
We barrel westward down Riverside Avenue, one of Austin’s many congested, nightmarish thoroughfares. I tap my wedding band against the faux-wood grain of the Lexus’s steering wheel, shifting my gaze every few seconds in an attempt to gauge the city’s attitude. My head is on a hyper-vigilant swivel. Recalling last summer in the grocery store parking lot, my eyes dart from left to right and right to left, looking for signs something is amiss.
I find courtesy and an attitude of kindness. A driver waves to me after I let her merge at the last minute. No one weaves through traffic or speeds or runs a red light. Relief crashes over me — a reminder that everything will be alright, or at the very least a sign that my anti-anxiety medication has kicked in.
Thursday night had been a different story, a shit-show of impatience and palpable belligerence.
The high temperature was 107 degrees. Pedestrians appeared like mirages, hallucinations confined to the sidewalks. Drivers swerved in and out of traffic, prompting me on more than one occasion to squash my brake pedal with the full weight of my right side. In one especially selfish act, the driver of a white Porsche Cayenne nearly runs me off the road only to be at a stand-still in heavy traffic half a mile later.
But now it is Friday morning. The mood on the roads is more light-hearted, even if the news is not.
“One in three Americans is under some type of heat advisory or warning,” Korva Coleman reads in her newscast. She dives into a litany of facts and figures, each alarming in its own unique way.
None of this is difficult to believe, but my eyes widen nonetheless. My feigned surprise annoys me. My annoyance annoys me. Everything annoys me. It is just too damn hot outside.
The summer I know — the summer I love — is a balm for souls still shaking off winter’s glum caress. Slow-fading daylight promises freedom and spontaneity, impromptu meetings with friends. Late afternoon thunderstorms — the kind I grew up with in North Carolina and in Washington, D.C. — wash everything clean, gifting us the opportunity for reinvention and renewal. We spend hours at the pool, aimless and content and kissed with Vitamin D. The stakes are lower. At least that’s what every colleague’s out-of-office email response implies.
That is Old Summer.
New Summer, like a team of consultants hired by a private equity firm to “optimize things,” has stolen what I once loved about the season and made everything about 20 percent worse.
“It’s summer like you’ve never known her,” one of the leeches might say over a PowerPoint presentation to executives in an over-air-conditioned boardroom. “She’s hotter than ever before.”
In New Summer, the fridge cannot make enough ice to keep the water (or the gin) cold.
In New Summer, the pool has turned to bathwater and lost any semblance of refreshment.
In New Summer, my phone overheats even in a car with its air conditioner running at full blast.
In New Summer, I am angry and sad — and equally upset that I am angry and sad.
Still, in New Summer, I search for joy and contentment.
Later, the radio will talk about the temperature in Death Valley, California. It could reach 128 degrees, the host says. That’s 33 degrees higher than the human body is built to withstand for a prolonged amount of time.
I want to know what 128 degrees feels like just for a moment. I want to know whether 128 degrees in California dredges up the same brand of frustration and impatience and anger as 105 degrees in Texas. I want to know whether it forces the simmering pot on the stove to boil over.
For now, the pot remains at its typical ignorable simmer, a dull hum that fades into the chorus of the season’s crickets. I check on it once in a while: on a Friday night, eating a hamburger and french fries; on the bread aisle of the store, trying to get past a woman and her three kids with my cart; on the couch in my therapist’s office; on the drive home from Zilker Park with Charlie Brown, when a young woman makes an unexpected left turn and causes our cars to collide in an anti-climactic “thud.”
“Oh, you stupid bitch,” I mutter as we pull our cars to the side of the road to inspect the damage. Charlie Brown is still panting, and I let out a sigh. Closing my eyes, I turn down the stove in my chest, declining to indulge my own emotional volatility.
I open the car door and step once again into the cruel heat of New Summer.