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Raúl de Nieves, Tega Brain, and Sam Lavigne

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It’s Climate Week, and we’re sharing dispatches from a world on fire. Featuring Lucy Sante, Bill McKibben, Emily Raboteau, and Janna Levin, 

is considering heat as sensation, symbol, and scientific reality. We present 

—a gathering of artists, writers, and thinkers reflecting on life at the boiling point.

I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

I’ve been lucky enough to live my life in the mountains, where even on the hottest days you can generally find a breeze, and where the temperature drops at night. Happily, I’ve never needed AC; I like my air unconditioned. But this also means that I have a profound appreciation for shade; on a hot day it’s a screened porch or under a sugar maple for me. I’m a shade connoisseur; I know from long experience how the shadows are going to move while I nap, and I’m perfectly willing to turn my baseball cap sideways when demanded. 

I also know that most people lack these luxuries. They’re not in the mountains, they’re in cities. And cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—

—hell. Our first job, obviously, is to reverse that descent, and I’ve spent my life fighting for climate action. But in the meantime, as temperatures continue to rise, we have to do what we can to stay cool. Which means, among other things, shade, as a matter of survival and as a matter of justice.

How important is it? Let me tell you a story. In the 1930s, a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlies what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to chronic disinvestment in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes. Almost a century later, the results of that racism can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods that were graded A in the 1930s now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer,” according to the 

. Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a 13-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town.

 set out to quantify the difference in its home city a few years ago. At noon one hot August day, with the aid of an infrared thermometer, reporters found that on the “tree-canopied block of West 94th Street near Central Park in Manhattan, the sidewalk temperature was 84. Just across town, at a treeless lot for sanitation trucks on First Avenue in East Harlem, the blacktop registered at 115 degrees, a full 31 degrees hotter.” As the reporter, John Leland, noted: “Plants and trees cool a neighborhood by providing shade, but also by a process called transpiration: as water evaporates from the leaves, its transformation into vapor consumes heat from the atmosphere.” A tree is a cooling machine.

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. 

This is not an isolated phenomenon, of course. A recent 

, which looked at 530 locations in 51 countries, found that 30 percent more shade could reduce mortality in our new killer heatwaves by remarkable numbers—that would have cut mortality by more than a million human souls so far this century. How do people die from heat? So many ways. Just to give you an example that may not have occurred to you offhand: “Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

If you think it's bad here, imagine what it’s like in truly hot places: a couple of years ago a 

 that a third of the people in the kidney transplant center in Kathmandu were young Nepali men who had worked overseas, mostly in the Gulf. It described, for instance, a young man named Suraj who journeyed to Kuwait in order to send money back to his impoverished family, and to build up enough of a nest egg to someday get married. He “found himself on construction sites where he installed massive, one-ton window frames on skyscrapers rising from the Kuwait desert. Because elevators were not operational, he recounted, he had to walk several stories to access water. But with work schedules so pressing, most workers gathered around the water tank only during their one-hour break. On many days, the water would be gone before the break ended. Often, Suraj didn’t drink anything all day.” When the temperature is well into the triple digits, that’s a bad idea; now he’s back home, living with his sister who wheels him a few times a week to the hospital. “To pay for his kidney transplant and the tests, they’ll sell Suraj’s half-built house with the propane stove. They’ll squeeze back into Panmaya’s mud-and-bamboo hut and cook on the ground with open fire. His dream of getting married was now ‘in ashes,’ Suraj admitted.”

In the ideal world, you’d figure out some ways to provide shade at the same time as you were doing something about the causes of all that heat in the first place. Which, as it turns out, is entirely possible. You’ve seen a solar panel; we’re used to looking at its top, and thinking about the way it faces the sun, turning photons into usable electricity, in the great miracle of our time. Its rapid spread—solar energy is now growing faster than any energy source at any point in human history—is the one scalable hope we have for actually reducing the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air. 

Cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—well, go in the direction of—hell. 

But solar panels have an underside, and that underside is, by definition, shady. If, say, you built solar panels over California’s irrigation canals, they would cut evaporation in those crucial arteries by 63 billion gallons of water a year.

And on land? A recent survey found that 72 percent of German farmers are considering deploying agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant Total recently set up a “Center for Expertise” in the art of growing food next to PV panels. And no wonder a 2024 study found that solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops, some shade and extra humidity are a blessing, especially as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. “The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.

Researchers have found much the same in Africa—test plots in Tanzania and Kenya, for instance, revealed that corn, Swiss chard, and beans were thriving under panels. “We created a microclimate that helped certain crops produce more, but they were also better able to survive heat waves and the shade helped conserve water, which is crucial in a region threatened by climate change,” the study’s lead author explained. In Phoenix, which is surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air—that’s because the crust of the desert’s soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust” seems to be naturally re-growing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as “beach umbrellas.” Indeed, they’re now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; “crustivoltaics,” they’re calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the country’s north for decades, they’re finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial diversity than the surrounding desert.

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. Thanks to human foolishness, this source of life has become the curse of our age: every tenth of a degree increase in the global temperature now moves another 100 million people out of comfortable climate zones. But now it’s going to have to be our salvation—harnessing the sun is our one way out. And that means luxuriating in the shadows that our planet-saving technology can cast. Some of that technology is coniferous, some of it is deciduous, and some of it is photovoltaic. All of it is delicious. ♦

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is also co-founder of Third Act, which mobilizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice.

Precious Shadows

Our existence is predicated on a delicate balance of hot bodies. The human body maintains, on average, 98.6℉. We are unable to survive a fluctuation in our core temperature of even a few degrees. The Sun is a hot body, whose surface atmospheric temperature is a sweltering 10,000℉, climbing to a molten 1,000,000℉ in the corona. Despite the impression that we bask in the warmth of the solar rays, at nearly a million miles from the Sun, the Earth would be a frozen, ice-covered planet were it not for the natural greenhouse effect which maintains our atmosphere at a temperate 60℉, warm enough to thaw oceans. While extremophiles might evolve on a frozen planet, we know from Neptune-like giants and icy moons in our own solar system that a frozen Earth would not experience the fecundity we celebrate at the comfortably habitable 60℉. We also may not survive thermal fluctuations on Earth. Climate scientists implore the industrialized world to contain escalations in the global average temperature to below +2℉. Which is all to repeat: our existence is predicated on a delicate balance of hot bodies.

You might imagine that the Sun and the biosphere and your physique operate according to vastly different and rather complex processes. The Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, the Earth is a big rock, and you are a living organism with curious networks such as a limbic system. The characterization of all three as hot bodies might seem more than a little bit reductive. And yet, in a demonstration of the almost unfathomable power of foundational physical principles, there is a universal description of all hot bodies: Planck’s law, an equation of such fundamental and revolutionary significance as to secure a place in the top five list of greatest equations of all time, alongside Newton’s laws and E=mc

Planck’s law, proposed in 1900 by the revered German physicist Max Planck, requires only a single input: temperature. Temperature itself is a subtle concept, emerging from the collective behavior of immense assemblages of particles. The temperature of air is the average energy of motion—the kinetic energy—of all the molecules comprising the air moving every which way, scattering about. The room feels hotter when air particles move faster, colder when they move slower. The same is true of the molecules in the Sun’s atmosphere. And, maybe surprisingly, the same is true of the molecules in your flesh. They may not be free to fly around the room, but they jiggle in their locales and that jiggling is also a form of motion with a corresponding kinetic energy. More energetic feels hotter, less energetic feels colder.

I cannot see you glowing in the dark because our eyes cannot effectively collect light that cold, but I can see you with the aid of thermal goggles. I can see your Planck spectrum.

Vibrating, scattering, dashing, jiggling molecules emit light. The Sun is the great giver of light, unrivaled in our planetary system. Our entire visual system—with the eye as detector, the nerves as wiring, and the brain as central computing—evolved just to detect light from the Sun. Our eyes’ peak sensitivity is attuned with the Sun’s peak emission, unsurprisingly, and is limited to a very narrow range of energies, detecting less than one octave of the Sun’s multi-octave spectrum. Our consciousness experiences light of different energies as color. High-energy, hot light is perceived as blue, whereas low-energy, cool light is red. It might surprise you that the Sun is green, or at least greenish. I spent most my life thinking the Sun was yellow and we do historically refer to the Sun as a yellow star, but this impression is largely due to our eyes’ simultaneous collection of light across a spectrum of colors. Our ocular organs really detect a spectrum of 

. How our brains convert a range of light into a hallucination of a spectrum of colors is a whole other story that keeps neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness awake at night.

All of this is rather familiar: a spectrum of light, a spectrum of colors. Planck’s law tells you, on the basis of that one input—the temperature of the body—exactly the intensity of the light that will be emitted at a given color. The equation is depicted in the simple figure here, and all you need to consider for our purposes is that glorious peak, the top of that hill, the rapid ascent from the left and the subsequent descent to the right. This is Planck’s spectrum. All ideal, hot bodies emit a spectrum of light precisely as depicted in this picture. The numbers on the axes might change, but the characteristic shape of that upsweep, the ascent from the left and the descent to the right is universal. 

Burning embers, hot stellar nebulae, and incandescent bulbs all exhibit this spectrum.

You tell Planck’s law how hot the body is, and the equation returns, with no other information required, the intensity of the light emitted across the spectrum. The notion of a spectrum is much broader than just the colors our eyes perceive and stretches across the entire known range, from the lowest-energy radio and microwave radiation, up through the infrared, into the visible, past the ultraviolet, through X-rays and gamma-rays.

You are a hot body at around 98.6℉. You emit a spectrum of light just as depicted in the picture above with that sweeping peak landing squarely in the infrared. I cannot see you glowing in the dark because our eyes cannot effectively collect light that cold, but I can see you with the aid of thermal goggles. I can see your Planck spectrum.

Not all bodies are ideal hot bodies, perfect absorbers and emitters. Historically, ideal hot bodies have been called blackbodies to indicate zero light reflection. Real things are imperfect. The Earth reflects 30 percent of sunlight and so is more of a gray body. Fire is another example of a messy blackbody as a result of the chemical reactions of tinder and air. Still Planck’s spectrum fares brilliantly at predicting the luminosity of virtually every warm thing, from stars to ovens.

Even the universe glows as a hot body at a mere −454.7°F. The primordial light left over from the big bang is extremely cold, the hottest event in history having chilled over the course of a cosmic lifetime to that minute temperature, barely above absolute zero. But −454.7°F is still a temperature. When the data measuring the spectrum of the primordial radiation was revealed in 1981 and every point from every measurement landed 

—I find myself at a loss for a more emphatic phrasing—on that simple Planck curve, a conference hall of cosmologists leapt up in applause. The experimenters won the Nobel Prize in physics.

You would radiate blindingly in X-rays, decimated. The universe itself would be hysterically unstable. 

For the law he discovered, Planck also won the Nobel Prize in physics. The citation read, “in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta.” Not only did Planck deduce a law of sweeping universal power, he initiated a paradigm shift of tectonic proportions.

Prior to Planck’s discovery, guiding principles suggested that the intensity of hot bodies grew without bound at higher and higher energies. There was no peak in the spectrum. No downturn. Instead there was a nonsensical prediction of a runaway emission dubbed an “ultraviolet catastrophe.” If there were truly no downturn, the Sun would instantly radiate infinite energy with nothing left for the eons. You would radiate blindingly in X-rays, decimated. The universe itself would be hysterically unstable.

To neutralize the theoretical catastrophe, Planck hypothesized that light came in discrete units, 

, of discrete energies. The ultraviolet catastrophe is averted because the emission of quanta of higher energies becomes increasingly harder, increasingly more expensive energetically. Imagine adding weight plates in discrete increments of 50 pounds to a barbell. You’d manage fewer and fewer reps with each additional weight plate until you could no longer bench press the barbell. Similarly, the intensity of emission mellows at higher energies where the hot body can’t muster enough muscle to emit such hot radiation. The peak energy of the radiant light is naturally commensurate with the energy—the temperature—of the hot body. Planck’s universal law is a stunning consequence of the quantum nature of reality, and his discovery is credited with provoking the quantum revolution.

Our current climate crisis is caused by an unstable interplay of hot bodies, each a vibrating quantum system radiating beautifully at a peak color, as though emanating an aura. We are warned of enduring, unbearable heat waves and inhospitable shifts in rising temperatures. Our immediate future will depend on rebalancing that delicate interplay. In the far future, the ultimate climate catastrophe will be cold. In a few billion years, the Sun will bloat and distend, vaporizing the inner planets, then cooling, red and giant. After trillions of trillions of years, the remaining debris will be so cold that there will not be enough energy to emit the merest quantum of light. Our solar system will go dark except for the diffuse, hopeful rays of other, distant stars. ♦

Janna Levin is the Founding Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works and the co-editor-in-chief of

. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her most recent book is Black Hole Survival Guide.

HEAT WEEK