1400 Die From Heat

Christopher McHale
2 min readJun 20, 2024
Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

Hindsight is different for every family. Some are haunted by ghosts, and some dwell in a feather bed of memory.

Mine splits the middle. I was raised by good parents and sent into the world infused with love. The kids I created had a different experience. A thorny madness infected my life and at the end of it I was broke and broken.

But still, I had that family dream and eventually my daughter married and began raising my granddaughter. Grandkids are magic. They hold the future in their eyes. But I’ve lived too long and seen humanity through jaded eyes and now I’m surrounded by a siren wailing in the night, an alarm — the heat is rising.

Over the weekend in Mecca, 1400 people dropped dead from the heat. In Arizona, the land is baked dry in scorching 100° heat, day after day. The entire Midwest and Northeast is caught under a heat dome. It’s still Spring.

Climate scientists say they are shocked by the accelerating climate crisis. It’s happening fast. Data now indicates in twenty-years huge parts of the earth will be uninhabitable by humans.

I’m not singing a lament. We did this to ourselves. Our hyper-focus on our technology — nfts, crypto, internet, artificial intelligence has contributed mightily to the quickly rising curve of heat.

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Christopher McHale

Writer | Composer | Producer | Human | Christopher writes about creativity, culture, technology, music, writing. www.christophermchale.com