What’s The Deal With These Heat Waves?

What is a heat wave? On this explainer, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore the massive heat waves that have been sweeping the world with Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I think it's about time we talked about Heat Waves.

• 0:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, I mean...

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, wasn't that a disco group in the 70s?

• 0:25Chuck Nice?

  It was. Heat Wave was the name of a group, yes, yes.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They did the soundtrack to, what's that movie, to Car Wash. I think their song is "I Want to Get Next to You."

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  No, that's Rolls Royce.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Rolls Royce, oh, damn.

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes, yes.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, don't out-1970s me. How you do that?

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I believe it or not, my daughter listens to that music.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow, so just thought we'd talk about Heat Waves. And I have, other than being familiar with the group that I didn't properly identify from the 70s, I have no expertise in this, but we are in New York City.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And right up the block from the American Museum of Natural History is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. One of 10 NASA centers scattered across the country. And we have the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  Head honcho?

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The man about town himself.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gavin Schmidt. Gavin, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:32Gavin Schmidt?

  Hi Neil, how are you? Nice to be back.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. And what many people don't know is what that NASA center specializes in. Just give me like the one-sentence sort of specialty case for it.

• 1:46Gavin Schmidt?

  Climate. Climate change, climate feedbacks, climate responses, climate observations, climate impacts, the whole kit and...

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of all planets?

• 1:55Gavin Schmidt?

  Well, mostly this planet, but also exoplanets. And also the climate of Mars, the climate of Venus back, you know, 3 billion years ago. We've been working on all of those things.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm glad we made it on your list, Gavin. That Earth is on the list.

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm happy to see that Earth is in the running there.

• 2:14Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah, well, people don't think that NASA really cares about Earth, but actually, you know, we spend more than $2 billion a year looking at the Earth and trying to understand what's going on. And so we actually are one of the lead agencies around the world trying to work out what is happening and why.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, and by the way, and Gavin, you don't have to comment on this, but during one of my tours of duty in Washington, there was, there were forces operating to prevent NASA from studying Earth, saying NASA should just worry about space. And I had, I was on a commission to, to, to deal with this. And I said, you can't claim to understand Earth unless we know how it fits in the context of other planets and in the space environment. And so I think I won that fight, uh, cause Gavin still has a job, talking about with NASA.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  That's, I mean, you were eloquent in your, in your defense. However, uh, it's a much simpler answer. I'm not sure if you know this, but Earth is in space.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Earth is in space, completely in space. But that was an early push to remove the government from its efforts to aid and abet the data that was discovering climate change.

• 3:24Chuck Nice?

  And who did it? Exxon.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's, let's get back to this. So Gavin, what is a heat wave? Just, I mean, I think we know. A heat wave, well, in New York City, a heat wave is some number of days where the high goes above 90. All right, we're on Fahrenheit world here. And of course, I lived in Texas for a while and

• 3:49Gavin Schmidt?

  That's every day.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's every day, right? So a heat wave was like over something else. So, so heat wave seems to be very locally defined. And does that have any meaning to you as a climate professional?

• 4:00Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah, so it's an interesting thing. So a lot of why we care about heat waves is not because of the absolute temperature, but because of the difference from what we're prepared for, right? And actually, that fits in with the whole, you know, why do we care about climate change, right? You know, it's the difference from what we expect. And so heat waves in Phoenix are going to be different from heat waves in New York, which are going to be different than heat waves in London, or in Paris, or in Moscow.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because Phoenix has been astronomically determined to be three quarters of a mile from the surface of the sun.

• 4:38Gavin Schmidt?

  That makes sense. Yes, that was science.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was that science discovered that.

• 4:43Gavin Schmidt?

  Yes. And so, you know, people in Phoenix are learning to become nocturnal, and we haven't quite reached that point in New York. But, you know, it's, we didn't used to have that many 90-plus days, and we're having more and more. And so when we have, you know, a whole big, long string of these things, we can, we can keep track of that. And that's a, an indication of, of extreme, of an extreme event associated with heat. At the, kind of, mid-July, we had some, some very dramatic heat events in Europe, in the UK. And, you

• 5:24Gavin Schmidt?

  know, so the UK was still cooler than Spain, but Spain was really, really, really, very hot. And, and the UK, you know, got up to about 105 degrees Fahrenheit, which was totally unprecedented for them. And you're, and you're talking about a situation there where almost nobody has air conditioning. You know, there's no air conditioning in the subway, there's no air conditioning in, in most homes. And so, you know...

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, there they call the subway the tube, just to be clear. Them a subway is the walkway under a street to get to the other side, just to get to...

• 5:59Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah, I was translating for you.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you, thank you. Okay. There I am translating back, and I shouldn't be.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  By the way, neither one of those places have air conditioning, though.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the point.

• 6:09Gavin Schmidt?

  That was, that was, that was the point.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the point.

• 6:13Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allow me to remind you, people, if they don't already know, that the British Isles sits farther north than the northernmost point of Maine.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're cracking, if you're raking in a hundred and five degree Fahrenheit temperatures, oh my gosh.

• 6:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's pretty clear how nobody's prepared for that. So like you said, it's a, it's a difference between what you're used to and what nature hands you. And that could wreak havoc on your, on, on, on your culture, on your even civilization.

• 6:43Gavin Schmidt?

  Well, I mean, on your, on your infrastructure. I mean, they had situations where they had to stop flights out of some airports because the runway, the runway was melting.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Melting.

• 6:52Gavin Schmidt?

  They couldn't, they couldn't run the trains because the rails were buckling. Uh, you know, like when, when, when you, when you exceed the design specifications uh, for anything you build, you get into trouble.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the lady down the track say, um, you know, you, we should do this to a hundred and ten degrees. Why? What, how, what's, how's that gonna happen? Why?

• 7:16Gavin Schmidt?

  That's never happened before. Why would it happen again?

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Gavin Schmidt?

  So, so that this is, this is, this is the issue, you know? We're seeing more of these heat waves. They're becoming more intense and that's because of, of climate change. You know, we, we have warmed up the planet uh, by about two degrees Fahrenheit in the last uh, century or so, but that is juicing these extremes. And so the number of times you're exceeding ninety degrees Fahrenheit, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit is going up, uh, not, not just like a little bit, but it's going up four, five, seven times, ten times uh, more than it was before.

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  And in addition, in addition to that, what, what's also seemed to be happening, and I don't know if there's a science behind this Gavin, but these weather systems seem to sit. They don't, you know, like, so we used to see some extreme heat uh, uh, events, but they would pass over. Now they seem to park and stay like, oh, you know what? I'm a chill, this is nice. I like this here and they don't go anywhere. So is there a science behind that? Or is that just, is that anecdotal?

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, plus we have to change the word. If they sit, if they're 105 degree hot spot, they can't say I'm chilling here.

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So Gavin, yeah, what's up with that?

• 8:38Gavin Schmidt?

  Right. So, so what's associated with these extreme heaters is a wave event in the, in the, in the atmosphere, in the jet stream. Um, and, and you can see this on the weather maps, right? You know, you can see this, this wave kind of coming across, you know, each, each load with a wave is a couple of thousand miles across. And, and there are some patterns that happen, particularly when you have five of these waves going around the world. And, and it turns out that that's, that's a pattern that, that, uh, it kind of resonates a little bit. And so, uh, it wants to move this way. The jet stream is pushing it this way.

• 9:21Gavin Schmidt?

  And so the wave looks like it becomes a standing wave, right? So you've got, it wants to go this way, but the jet stream is pushing it this way. And so it kind of like-

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, for people who listen only in audio, you use the word this going to your left and to your right. So could you choose a different word as you're doing the disco wave with your arms?

• 9:39Gavin Schmidt?

  Yes, I totally can. So, so imagine, imagine a wavy sinuous like thing, uh, moving, uh, from kind of Europe towards the, towards the US. Uh, meanwhile, the jet stream is pushing the other way. And so when the wave and the stream intersect, uh, you can get sometimes when they don't appear to move very much. It's like you, you, you have a, a standing wave, um, that can, um, just keep things in place, uh, for longer than you might imagine. And, uh, some people call this a blocking pattern. Um, and, uh, and we, and we've been looking at these kinds of events for many, many decades.

• 10:23Gavin Schmidt?

  Um, and there's some indication that they may be kind of changing a little bit, um, with, with climate change. But I think, I would say that that was very much, uh, at the cutting edge of what we understand and what we don't.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Gavin, you got London here, and I know a lot of people live in London, and it is Europe and everything, but, you know, Africa is five times the size of Europe. So, a few cities in Europe get a high temperature, Earth is way bigger than Europe. Why doesn't anyone give a rat's ass, I mean, I don't mean to make light of it, but what I want to say is, why make global proclamations about what's happening in a couple of places in Europe, just because they're complaining louder?

• 11:12Chuck Nice?

  Because the Queen is there, and she's very fragile when it comes to high heat.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you, Chuck.

• 11:18Gavin Schmidt?

  I think she probably has air conditioning.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if not, if not, there are people waving fern leaves at her.

• 11:29Chuck Nice?

  Big palm fronds.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Palm leaves are waved at her, yes, okay.

• 11:34Gavin Schmidt?

  Oh yeah, I couldn't speak to that. But, you know, you raise a good point, you know, why do we pay attention to some events and not others? Well, one of the reasons is that in the mid-latitudes, so kind of, you know, yeah, north of the Mediterranean, north of the Mexican border, we see a lot more summer variability, right? We see a lot more of these waves coming by that could move you into colder or warmer conditions. And in the tropics, you don't get that so much. Tropical climate is much more stable.

• 12:15Gavin Schmidt?

  You know, the temperatures don't vary that much, you get a wet and a dry season, which makes a difference depending on what side of the equator you're on. But the temperatures during the summertime, not that that really makes that much difference, are pretty stable. And so, you don't get these kinds of extreme events happening. You see them, you know, in India, we've seen some tremendous heatwaves in India and Pakistan and the rest of South Asia, and in China as well, and in Australia, like going the other way, in South Africa.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the heatwaves feed these fires that we've all been hearing about?

• 13:01Gavin Schmidt?

  Right, so heat, heat leads to a lot of different things, right? So you, first of all, you dry out, right? So your soil moisture evaporates, right? So, so everything gets drier. Um, as things get drier, they become more flammable. Um, and so we see situations where, you know, grass that would normally never burn suddenly is flammable. Um, and we're seeing lots of cases where, you know, seemingly, you know, inadvertent sparks uh, or, or accidents are now, uh, instead of just like dying out and being put out, uh, are leading to large configurations. And so, you know, uh, London, for instance, um, uh, had, after, after the, the day after the maximum heat,

• 13:46Gavin Schmidt?

  had its, um, had its biggest fire day since, since the Second World War. Uh, and, and those are obviously two different causes.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I would, I would hope so, yes.

• 13:58Gavin Schmidt?

  But, uh, you know, they, they had, they had, uh, large scale fires, like taking out, you know, city blocks, uh, that, uh, that, that people had just never seen before.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if, try to, try, help me out here because I'm sure people are thinking this. You're telling me we've increased two degrees in the last century or so, basically, the era of the modern industrial revolution. And yet, London is not two degrees warmer than its average. It's way higher than its average. So how does two degrees warmer on earth translate into ten, twenty, thirty degrees higher than average, uh, uh, temperatures anywhere on earth?

• 14:42Gavin Schmidt?

  Okay, so let's, let's break that down a little bit. So the two degrees that people talk about that I just mentioned, uh, is the global average change, right? Um, uh, but you have to remember that the globe is not warming evenly. It's warming more on land than in the ocean. It's warming more in the north than in the south. And it's warming most of all in places like the Arctic. Uh, so the changes, uh, in, in New York or in London or in Paris, uh, are more than the two degrees Fahrenheit that we're talking about in the global mean. So, so they're about, you know, maybe, maybe one and a half, two times that. So, so maybe four degrees Fahrenheit, five degrees Fahrenheit.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so maybe, so wait, so maybe you should change the messaging. It's not what the average over the whole world is, if that, it, because if it's a huge range. In the manifestation, if that average is an average over a wide range of data, a wide range of values, then why not give the average increase at this latitude? We're at the same latitude as Madrid, or right through, we, sorry, we, New York City, there, and what the change is at Maine and in the Arctic? Why not give those numbers?

• 15:51Gavin Schmidt?

  So we do, right? So the Arctic is...

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you don't. I've not heard you give that.

• 15:55Gavin Schmidt?

  Okay, I'm gonna give it to you.

• 16:00Gavin Schmidt?

  The average change in the Arctic is about four times the global mean.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But no, now, how did Chuck?

• 16:06Chuck Nice?

  So now, listen, here's the problem.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you heard anybody say that, Chuck?

• 16:09Chuck Nice?

  No, I'll tell you, here's the problem, Gavin. So as a scientist, when you look at incremental change, you're able to understand that. People are not. If you tell me it's two degrees warmer in this room than it is in the other room, that means nothing to me.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It means you don't give a rat's ass.

• 16:27Chuck Nice?

  I don't care. What you need is a...

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not adjusting the thermostat for that.

• 16:30Chuck Nice?

  Right, I'm not. What you guys need is a scale that registers in the human psyche. So in one part of the world, it's, oh, my God, hot, okay? And if we keep going, if we keep going, it gets to, god damn, right?

• 16:53Gavin Schmidt?

  Okay. Well, let me bring out this scale that I prepared earlier.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's trying to stop you there, Chuck, because there's no coming back from that.

• 17:01Chuck Nice?

  Because you know where it's going. You know where it's going from there.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gavin.

• 17:06Gavin Schmidt?

  So you're absolutely right. No, we're talking about numbers that really don't mean very much to people in their everyday lives. And so, quite frankly, I don't like talking about these numbers. I don't like talking about two degrees, 1.4 degrees, like four degrees. They are very hard to conceptualize because people's experience of temperature in their local environments during a day, over a season, is very different to the planet's experience of temperature. And so one of the things that I like to bring up is, what kind of temperatures has the planet seen over its history?

• 17:46Gavin Schmidt?

  And one great example is about 20,000 years ago, we were in the middle of the Ice Age. And you know where where you guys are sitting now was was under was underneath the hundreds of meters of ice, the glaciers extended from the Arctic Ocean to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They covered almost all of of North America. There's something similar happening in in the UK. There was enough.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way Gavin, as a as a kid, I remember we we took a tour of Central Park, right in the middle of Manhattan.

• 18:18Gavin Schmidt?

  That's right.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there were rock escarpments that were identified as having glacial scarring.

• 18:25Gavin Schmidt?

  Striations.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, striations, right. And I'm I'm a kid, right? I'm like glacier, what's a glacier doing here? What glacier?

• 18:31Gavin Schmidt?

  It was there.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, I remember the the the mental adjustments I had to make to embrace what what was going on. But go on.

• 18:38Gavin Schmidt?

  So so the Ice Age was a was a radically different climate, right? So you know where we have forests and trees and that, it was it was ice. And then for hundreds of miles further south, it was tundra. The fauna is different. The ecosphere is different. And do you know what the global temperature change was?

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between then and now?

• 18:58Gavin Schmidt?

  Between then and say the pre-industrial.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, pre-industrial. Okay, how much?

• 19:02Gavin Schmidt?

  It was about eight or nine degrees Fahrenheit.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:06Gavin Schmidt?

  Right?

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's helpful. I can use that. I can use that.

• 19:11Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah. So what so what I like to do is let's call that an Ice Age unit, right? So that's that's that's a big change for the planet.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 19:19Gavin Schmidt?

  And if and if you go from where we were to the Ice Age, that's one Ice Age unit. And now what we've done since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is we've gone up about a quarter to a fifth of an Ice Age unit. And where we might be heading could be a whole Ice Age unit in the other direction.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 19:41Gavin Schmidt?

  And so we think, oh, these are small numbers, but they're not small to the planet.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to the earth.

• 19:47Gavin Schmidt?

  The planet notices these things. The planet feels these changes in the ecosystems, in the ice, in the temperature, and in the extremes.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay Gavin, this is very helpful.

• 19:59Gavin Schmidt?

  That's where we come back to what's happening now. We're seeing the impacts of these things in the extremes because.

• 20:08Gavin Schmidt?

  If you can imagine, you know, a bell curve, right?

• 20:14Gavin Schmidt?

  And we're moving the middle of that bell curve a little bit to the warmer conditions by, you know, a couple of degrees. But the things that are changing the most are out of the ends, are out at the very warmest temperatures or at the very coldest temperatures.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're in the middle of the bell curve, you don't notice it. But on the extremes, oh my gosh, it's the extreme. Right, right.

• 20:38Gavin Schmidt?

  And it's the extremes that make the impact, right? Nobody cares if a mediocre day is two degrees, four degrees, five degrees warmer than the previous mediocre day. But when you get to a hundred degrees plus, every additional degree makes a difference. It makes a difference to how much the rails are going to buckle. It makes a difference to how much the airport is going to melt. It makes a difference to how much.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't land because the airport melted.

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, I know we got to wrap up, but I got to ask you this, Gavin, because so the things that you're talking about are infrastructure and that's a big deal because that costs people a lot of money, costs governments a lot of money and resources. But it still doesn't affect people's psyche because they look at it like, well, that's why I pay taxes and that's what the government is for. So what I want to know is, when does it get to a place where we see, we exact a personal cost, like where your health is really in danger? Like there is a heat limit when you look at humidity versus temperature that human beings cannot exist?

• 21:55Gavin Schmidt?

  Uh, yeah, no, there is. I mean, for places like the UK, we're quite a ways from that. Places like Dubai and India, we're a little bit closer. Uh, and in fact, we're going to see. Places kind of hitting those limits, mostly in the tropics, not in these kind of heatwave situations in the mid-latitudes. Uh, mainly because the humidity is higher in the tropics. Um, but we're, but we, we already feel the impact, the, the health impacts of, of heat. Every time there's an event like this in the UK, they're anticipating, uh, perhaps a thousand excess deaths because of the, uh, the two-day heatwave. Uh, we see it, um, in, uh, when, when we have, uh, heatwaves in, in the US.

• 22:37Gavin Schmidt?

  Um, there's, there's a big increase in, in mortality. Uh, you know, most unfortunately, mostly, uh, elderly, uh, people, um.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, they lived a good life.

• 22:47Gavin Schmidt?

  And it's, it's, it's.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 22:50Gavin Schmidt?

  Or, or, or small children being, being trapped in cars.

• 22:53Chuck Nice?

  Right. You know, uh. You're right. I read a, I read a great, uh, article just yesterday. Believe it or not, people, heat-related events kill more people in the United States than any other, um, weather event. You take all the other weather events and heat is the one that does it.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heat's the one. Okay. All right.

• 23:12Gavin Schmidt?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, guys, we gotta, we gotta.

• 23:14Gavin Schmidt?

  We're already seeing those impacts.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta land this plane on our melting airport. So, so Gavin, thanks for on short notice coming in to do this because we, we've just been seeing these reports of heatwaves all around the world. And we wanted to get some climate change perspective on it, which you duly provided. So I know you're on holiday right now. Thanks for dialing into this. And it's always good to have you in arms reach or we feel privileged that you're there for us. Chuck, I know you're a climate enthusiast.

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  Big time.

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and, and, uh, fundraisers that you do.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and you host and it's a great to know that you're, you're, you're walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Uh, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep looking up.