I took my kid to Rome in June. It was hot as the mouth of a lion. We were there to celebrate the end of middle school, surely the worst years of anyone’s life. The trip marked his coming of age—sort of like a bar mitzvah, minus the Torah portion. Round-trip from New York City, our footprint was over six metric tons of heat-trapping CO₂. I felt guilty about that, but I also wanted to make up for the sucky pandemic years when we were trapped in our apartment without escape. Back then, aged eight, aged nine, the kid would spin his globe, studying the shapes and names of other nations while dreaming of travel, or longingly flip through his book on the wonders of the world. Now, aged 14, he’d finally made it across the ocean to the boot of Italy, a full head taller than I, his mama, who hadn’t planned for the extreme heat.

Unlike other heat waves that have scorched Europe in recent years, such as Charon and Cerebus (named for the ferryman and fearsome three-headed dog in Dante’s Inferno) and Lucifer before them, this one had no name. Some climate experts argue that christening heat waves and categorizing them according to levels of severity, as government agencies do with tropical storms and hurricanes, might help raise public awareness of the dangers of heat through branding and PR. The World Meteorological Association disagrees. Too sensational. Yet heat is a silent, invisible killer, claiming more lives than any other climate hazard. You can’t see it the way you can see a wildfire or a flood, which are secondary effects of planetary warming. Heat is the first order effect. You can’t photograph it directly. The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

Picture this. The open bowl of the Colosseum at high noon, 104°F, with nothing so much as a cloud to protect us from the broiling sun. Above us the jet stream was splitting apart, leading to high pressure zones. An anticyclone had compressed and shoved down the air, which sizzled as it reached the ground, trapping us and much of Europe in a heat dome. To be sure it grew hotter this summer in cities across the globe—ranging from Isesaki (107°F), Rio de Janeiro (111°F), Phoenix (118°F) and Kvormuj (127°F)—but to me the Roman Colosseum felt like the hottest spot on Earth. How many gallons of sweat did we, the tourists walking through the ruins of empire, perspire that day? We hired a tour guide who gamely recited the marvels of engineering, but I felt so dehydrated, exposed, and concerned about how such warming would warp my kid’s future that I only absorbed two facts about the Colosseum. Number one: it was built by the hard manual labor of some 100,000 slaves. Number two: in its heyday, the world’s largest amphitheater had a retractable roof made of canvas sails that bathed its spectators in enviable shade.

Emily Raboteau and her son in Rome, 2025.

Courtesy of the author

One wonders, what is the breaking point? For food production? For human, let alone nonhuman, life? My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, "a monument to human pride," and a warning. Somewhere between the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, we saw someone in a nearby tour group pass out from heatstroke. With fear on his face, the guide cut our tour short. For quite some time, guides have been agitating for extended hours at major attractions in Rome to allow for tours at cooler, less punishing, parts of the day. Two months after our visit, a guide showing another group around the Colosseum in the baking heat collapsed and died of a suspected heart attack on the job.

As for my son—who may at my age recall this summer as one of the coolest of his life rather than one of the warmest in recorded history—he retained almost everything we learned about the Colosseum. I could remark about shifting baselines and how my son is adapting to the new normal. But climate change is only part of his unfolding story. More remarkable to me than record-breaking temperatures, the death toll of this June’s particular heat dome (2,300) and the number of European heat deaths two summers prior (over 47,000) was that my baby’s voice had changed. How was it possible that he already needed to shave? On our crawl back to the pensione, my teenager stopped by a Madonnelle installed on a street corner overlooking one fountain or another to call his grandmother. 

She would appreciate the hundreds of shrines to the Madonna and child, he figured, since she was Catholic. It saddened him that she’d never been to Rome when he was enjoying it so much. The new pope was originally from Chicago, just like her. This was a jubilee year, when Catholics are invited every quarter century to renew their faith. The theme for 2025: “Pilgrims of Hope.” Was she planning to get here before she died? he asked. No, my mother answered from the other side of the warming ocean—he would have to be her eyes. He told her with delight about what went down at the sites we’d seen: the vestal virgins buried alive if found unchaste, the battles between gladiators, the crimes of the house of Borgia, the cruel methods of papal executioners, the technique of chiaroscuro mastered by Caravaggio, the artfully arranged bones in the crypt of the Capuchin monks including the tiny skulls of children. He told her dutifully about the Madonnelles, candlelit symbols of Marian devotion. How back before gas and electricity provided streetlight, the votives lit up the dark. He latched on to the sacred and the profane, I realized, alongside the concept of memento mori. What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be.

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Here are some mortifying heat index stats shared by Jeff Goodell in The Heat Will Kill You First. Almost twice as many people now die per year from extreme heat than from firearms. Owing to climate-driven heat and drought over the last 20 years, global agricultural production has dropped 21 percent. Land animals are migrating to cooler, higher latitudes at an average speed of one mile per year; malaria-carrying mosquitoes at 2.5 miles per year. 75 percent of urban trees are forecast to die from a combination of heat and drought by 2050. Today, 30 million people live in extreme heat. By 2070, the number of people likely to live in extreme heat is two billion. By 2100, half of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of humidity and heat.

We flew back to the Bronx. New York City, with its average 500-plus heat deaths a summer, was—I kid you not—even hotter than Rome. Much has been reported about the urban heat island effect, with our buildings, concrete, pavement, dark asphalt and roofs absorbing the sun’s heat and re-radiating it at night, worst of all in poor neighborhoods where there’s not enough green. We can be five degrees hotter than the leafy suburbs around us; 20 degrees hotter at night. “Heat like this can kill,” NYC Emergency Management warned on social media upon our return. Bad as it is now, by the 2050s, when my kid may have kids of his own, New York can expect our number of 90-degree days to double. Heatwaves could triple or quadruple.

With the heat index factoring for humidity, the weather forecast for my son’s graduation day was an ungodly high of 109℉. I wrestled with whether to invite my mother to the ceremony. What if her car broke down on the highway? Unlikely, but still. In the time it takes to hard boil an egg, the temperature inside a car can increase by 20 degrees or more. In 30 minutes, on a hot summer day, the inside of a car can reach up to 140℉, which is the temperature at which tap water can give you a third-degree burn. In the end, I left the decision up to her. She adjusted for the weather by rising before the sun to make the drive.

I felt grateful that my mother got to watch her grandson graduate. I felt alarmed when one of his classmates fainted in the heat before crossing the auditorium stage. The incident went unremarked by the school principal whose speech about the bright future of MS141’s class of 2025 sounded frankly like fiddling while Rome burns; disconnected from the actual level of risk we were all experiencing just by being there. You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony under an awning rigged with blue and yellow balloons. Not directly. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

With working papers in hand, the kid wanted a summer job. I had hoped he might spend July and August working with friends in the garden of the neighborhood community center, growing vegetables as part of a program that runs a farm stand and helps to feed local seniors my mother’s age. But it feels too dangerous now to work safely outdoors in the summer. The upper end of human adaptability to humid heat is a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees. Higher than that, hyperthermia can set in. An estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to heat stress at work. My son is privileged not to have to participate in the sweat economy. He wound up working instead through a hybrid youth employment program for city kids that met indoors twice a week, and remotely, online.

I take note of similar pivots to summer plans among friends with kids to avoid the heat or the smoke from wildfires, factoring for canceled camps and staying indoors with the AC running instead of taking trips to the lake, beach, or pool. We are able to recalibrate unlike more vulnerable folks delivering packages, picking crops, laying asphalt, patching potholes, fixing roofs, or doing any of the other low-wage outdoor jobs nobody else wants to do, made as dangerous by ICE raids targeting immigrant workers as by sweltering heat. We live in an air-conditioned bubble on an urban heat island. Yet I can’t help mourning the little losses adding up in the shadows of the bigger ones: the crop failures, foreclosed farms, disrupted food webs, concentrated casualties, metabolic stress, mass die-offs of marine life, the spread of invasive species, water scarcity, melting permafrost, rampant wildfires, global displacement, increased gun violence, ecological damage, and economic burn.

There’s only so much heat a body can take. The planet is approximately 1.8 to 2.3 degrees hotter now than it was in 1990 when I graduated from eighth grade. How much warmer it will be by the time my son reaches my age depends on how quickly industrialized nations act on their commitments to curb fossil fuel emissions. Scientists have long warned that 3.6 degrees of warming from the preindustrial era is the threshold for limiting the most severe impacts of climate change. It’s likely we’ve sailed past that target and are on track for six degrees of warming, or more, by century’s end. Given the thresholds we’ve already crossed, I ask myself daily: What acts do we owe these children graduating into a warming world?

Here is one answer, with its own extreme logic. On April 14, 2018, a 60-year-old civil rights lawyer turned environmental activist named David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in what has been described as the first self-immolation to protest climate change. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote in an email to news media before dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. Prior to his final act, he worked towards marriage equality for same-sex couples, then ran a community compost site. He told nobody about his plan—not his husband, nor the lesbian couple with whom they parented a college-aged daughter, nor the volunteers he worked with. He chose a remote area, out of sight. Unlike the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire on a busy street in Saigon to protest oppression in 1963, there is no photograph of Buckel’s death to evoke an emotional response. And although his act is not one that I would ever choose, I name it to amplify the final line of his suicide note. “Here is hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.”

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Here are some facts about the saving grace of trees, another answer with a similar hope. They are terrific combatants of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, filtering air pollution, exhaling oxygen, reducing water loss, managing erosion, and preserving biodiversity by supplying nectar, nuts, fruit and shelter to nonhuman life. In cities like ours, trees take the edge off heatwaves. They cool the air by sucking up water from the soil and sweating it out through their leaves via evapotranspiration, lessening our need for air conditioning and its greedy demand for energy. They offer us shade and solace, improving our mental and physical health.

For example, I need only lay my hand on the trunk of the enormous London plane tree growing streetside out our front door to calm my overwhelm. Maybe that’s why, among the many climate actions being made in cities around the world to adapt to rising heat—including putting up plexiglass awnings in open air markets to protect shoppers, renovating ancient aqueducts to irrigate parks with reclaimed water, painting streets white to make them more reflective, retrofitting old buildings with insulation and shutters to cool them down, agitating for a legal limit to indoor temperatures to reduce heat deaths, advocating for energy assistance programs to help the poor afford air conditioning, banning traffic to improve air quality, greening roofs to absorb heat and grow food, designating public cooling centers to help people cool off, extending the hours of public pools to offer reprieve, pushing for laws that would mandate rest and water breaks and heat protection standards for workers at outdoor sites, developing community centers with back-up power where residents can find refuge during blackouts or other disasters—the act I latch onto is expanding the tree canopy of the inner city.

New York is a city of roughly eight million people and seven million trees. There are more trees, of course, where the moneyed live. In poorer neighborhoods like ours with legacies of racially restrictive redlining, the canopy can’t compare. Trees in low-income communities of color are less likely to be maintained and replaced when they die. Even when cared for, urban trees have a tough life. They are crowded and pissed on by dogs, beset by drought, heat, and compacted soil. Through the urban forestry arm of the Department of Parks and Rec, the city aims to increase its tree canopy from 22 to 30 percent, equitably, by filling out some of the bald spots, selecting for climate resilient species and training folks to nurture them when they’re young so they can take root. The deadline proposed for reaching that goal is 2035, by which time, God willing, my kid will have graduated college and the saplings going in the ground now will have matured along with him. So far, workers and volunteers in the city have planted over a million trees. In our part of the Bronx, there are plans for sweet gum and swamp white oak to be planted on a narrow path alongside a brook in the process of being unburied to alleviate flooding.

Just as every 25 years the Catholic Church invites the faithful to come back into right relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation, every 10 years the NYC Parks Department invites New Yorkers to count trees. Trees Count 2025 will be the fourth such census to measure the location, species, and health of the city’s trees. Thousands of volunteers, myself among them, will contribute to a data-driven effort to manage and grow our urban forest. It’s not enough, but it’s something.

Another record-breaking summer is almost done. It’s September again. When I look back at the picture someone took of me and my son inside the Colosseum with a panoramic view of the ancient arena floor, I can’t see the heat. All I see is my kid at the threshold. The sweetness of him. His curiosity and potential. Despite its fame, the Colosseum was not his favorite part of our Italian holiday. He liked best of all the day trip we took to Naples by high-speed rail where we ate pizza and toured the underground tunnels of the ancient Roman aqueduct, repurposed as a bomb shelter during air raids in World War II. The underground was my favorite part, too, not only because that network of tunnels was cooler by several degrees than the city overhead, but because of the little tricycle someone had left down there during the war, now covered in dust. A mother had thought of that, I figured, so even in a hellscape, her kid had room to play. How else could she endure that scene, but to make it good for him?

At sunrise on his first day of high school, my kid rode the 1 train without me, down to Times Square, and walked three avenues west to his new school in Hell’s Kitchen. I was somewhat worried for his safety but trusted he'd survive. Meanwhile, I rode a Citi Bike to Starlight Park to count trees with other New Yorkers in the South Bronx. We learned to identify leaves by their shapes: football, spade, teardrop, hand. A young man had been fatally shot in the park the night before and the sun bore down with a vengeance. Adjacent to the crime scene, we faithfully measured and recorded the circumference of the trunks of some thirsty-looking trees on a bank of the Bronx River. The data set included a black locust, a pin oak, and an American elm. We determined their condition was fair. We added them to the inventory. This was a collective action with its own prayerful logic, like lighting candles in the dark. So many trees are still alive, and so many new ones on the way. ♦