This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

As a second “heat storm” bears down on Southern Europe, millions of people across the continent are bracing another week of record-setting temperatures. 

“The bubble of hot air that has inflated over Southern Europe has turned Italy and surrounding countries into a giant pizza oven,” said Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England. “We haven’t even seen the highest temperatures yet.” 

Wide swaths of Europe are expected to see the mercury climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with the Italian weather news service Meteo.it forecasting temperatures as high as 46 degrees Celsius (115 Fahrenheit). The swelter comes as places across the globe are also being hit by extreme heat, flooding, and other climate-driven disasters.

“This is not normal,” a sunbather in Italy told Reuters. “I don’t remember such intense heat, especially at this time of year.”

The searing conditions are the result of back-to-back high-pressure systems, known as anticyclones, which have moved across the Mediterranean from Northern Africa. The first was popularly, though unofficially, called Cerberus, after the three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the underworld. The latest is named for the ferryman to the Greek underworld: Charon. 

“These heat waves are exactly in line with expectations under human-caused climate change,” said Ilan Kelman, a professor of disaster and death at University College London. Europe also experienced a stretch of record-setting heat earlier this year. ”As the rising temperatures drive worsening heat waves, including terrible humidity, we expect to see substantial increases in related deaths.”

A recent study published in Nature Medicine found that last year’s European heat waves led to 61,000 deaths. While the toll from this year’s blistering conditions remains unknown, at least one heat-related death has been reported: a 44-year old road worker who collapsed and died outside Milan. 

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As of Monday, the Italian health ministry had put more than a dozen cities under a red-alert heat advisory — the country’s highest level. Greek authorities have been keeping the Acropolis during peak heat hours and have similarly banned risky work during the afternoon. 

There is also a fear that the increasingly dry conditions could exacerbate wildfires, which are already burning “out of control” in Spain. Greece, which experienced devastating fires in 2021, lists multiple areas as at very high risk for wildfires. 

The brutal temperatures come just days after the hottest week in Earth’s recorded history, which saw unprecedented temperatures and heat indices in the American Southwest, India, and elsewhere. Other spots on the globe, such as the Northeast United States and South Korea, endured extreme rainfall and flooding. Cloke says this confluence of devastating events is becoming a new normal.

“Sea-level rise, melting ice, extreme heat waves, intense rainfall, wildfires, drought, and floods are cropping up in many parts of the world at the same time,” she said. “Today’s extremes of weather are increasingly throwing everything everywhere all at once.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Heat storms turn Southern Europe into ‘giant pizza oven’ on Jul 17, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

During a summer that has already shattered temperature records, the 340,000 drivers, dispatchers, and warehouse workers currently in contract negotiations with UPS — the United States’ largest unionized employer — have made climate change and extreme heat a headline labor issue. And if they don’t secure a contract by July 31, they are poised to initiate the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history.

On summer days, the back of a delivery truck can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When Viviana Gonzalez, a package delivery driver for United Postal Service in Los Angeles, pulls open the back of her truck, she often thinks: “Am I going to pass out back here? Will anybody find out that I’m here in the back of the truck?”

Gonzalez is all too aware of how dangerous her job can be. Since 2015, UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Last year, one of her co-workers, Esteban Chavez, died of heat stroke in his delivery truck after delivering his last parcel. “I’m a single mom,” said Gonzalez, “and being able to provide for my son means I have to suck it up.”

While climate change is making summers hotter and even more dangerous for delivery workers, Moe Nouhaili, a UPS driver in Las Vegas, told the Guardian that it’s the working conditions that make the heat so deadly. “It’s how they’re making us work, expecting us to meet these unrealistic productivity numbers even through the weather,” he said.

UPS often requires drivers and warehouse employees to work six days a week and more than 12 hours a day in the heat, and the company measures worker productivity by surveillance cameras and sensors inside trucks. Drivers say these tactics make it harder to take breaks. “The same amount of work that would be done in, say, 30 routes is now being forced to be done in 20 or 25,” said Nouhaili. “Less people get more work done.”

An increasing portion of the work is also done by part-time drivers who are paid less than full-time employees, as well as gig workers who often need to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet.

That’s why the UPS workers, who are part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, have tied their heat-safety demands to other key issues: higher wages for all workers; more full-time jobs with full benefits; an end to forced overtime, surveillance, and harassment from management; and elimination of a two-tier wage system that pays part-time workers and newer employees differently for the same work.

According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, many of these benefits and protections form the basis of climate justice at work and can better protect workers from the heat.

“Workers who are fighting for better health care benefits are going to be more physically able to deal with excessive heat, because they can address other underlying health problems,” she said. “An increase in pay might mean workers can spend time at home without having to take on a second job to support their family, eat healthy food, or afford to get an air conditioner in their house and really cool down and recover from the heat during their off-hours.”

She also argues that part-time employment, piece-wage and contract pay structures, and low-grade wage tiers can affect workers on the margins to a greater extent than others.

“These workers, who are overwhelmingly Black workers, immigrant workers, and women, literally can’t afford to take breaks or lose time to take care of their health,” she explained. By pushing for more full-time direct employees and fewer contractors, Christman said, workers build solidarity and make sure that certain job classes don’t disproportionately face environmental harms like extreme heat.

UPS workers negotiate a new contract once every five years, and the strike authorization in June was the result of a yearlong campaign on behalf of the union to build leverage at the bargaining table. The strategy appears to be working: In the last month, with the strike threat looming, UPS agreed to install air-conditioning systems in each of their delivery trucks, end the secondary wage tier that allows them to pay newer drivers less, and do away with mandatory overtime.

“UPS Teamsters have strategically navigated this process for maximum leverage against this multibillion-dollar corporation,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. “At every step, we are forcing them to do what they don’t want to do, which is give our members more money and better protections at work.”

While air-conditioning will indeed offer welcome relief to UPS drivers in the heat, experts argue that at a global scale, energy-intensive cooling systems pale as a long-term climate-justice solution. Air-conditioning units burn more fossil fuels, increase ambient temperatures in cities, and are inaccessible to most outdoor workers — and most of the global population.

On its own, the company’s concession also doesn’t address the growing issues of pay, contracting, and worker productivity that drive workers to heat exhaustion.

So despite the gains, UPS workers are still not satisfied. The biggest remaining issue is pay: They are looking to raise the starting hourly wage for part-time workers from $15.50 to $20. And they have repeatedly said that if UPS does not meet their baseline wage demands, they will be forced to strike to win them.

In recent years, restaurant workers at Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon; a McDonalds in Detroit; a Jack in the Box in Sacramento; and a Hooters location in Houston have collectively walked off the job to protect themselves from extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is in the process of developing a federal workplace heat standard, has acknowledged that taking collective action can help workers stay safe on the job and has developed a legal framework “to obtain the best possible relief for employees” when they choose to do so.

“The suggestion box sitting in the break room is not really the place to address the dangers of systemic heat exposure,” said Christman, the National Employment Law Project analyst. “When workers come together, they build power to really make changes at the workplace.”

The Teamsters union has plainly stated that this campaign will be an example for workers across the country. “What we do in these negotiations,” said O’Brien, “is going to set the tone for the entire country, the entire labor movement, moving forward. The UPS fight today may be your fight tomorrow.”

“It’s time for UPS to feel the heat,” said Rick Jordan, another delivery driver in Southern California. “We feel it all the time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 340,000 UPS drivers poised to strike over extreme heat, safe working conditions on Jul 17, 2023.

A young girl, home alone, wakes up in the middle of the night and walks over to her neighbor’s house. She opens the front door and encounters a horrific scene: a zombified grandma committing an act of cannibalism. Instead of teeth in the woman’s mouth, it’s long tendrils of fungus. 

That’s one of the first scenes in The Last of Us, the HBO show about a global fungal pandemic that gripped viewers this past winter. The premise is pure fiction. The fungus depicted in the show, cordyceps, is harmless to humans. But the world’s susceptibility to fungal pathogens is genuine. When the real fungal pandemic comes, it won’t look like anything you’ve seen on screen.  

In her new book Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, author, professor, and researcher Emily Monosson unravels the expansive and unsettling history of fungal invasions across the globe and how they have shaped our lives in both visible and invisible ways. A fungus called batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, has wiped out more than 200 species of frogs and other amphibians. White-nose syndrome, a fungal illness in bats, has killed millions of the winged critters across North America. A fungal pathogen wiped out the world’s most popular banana, the Gros Michel, in the first half of the 20th century. Fungi are now coming for the Cavendish, the banana we bred to replace the bananas we lost. 

And, of course, fungi threaten humans, too — not just by decimating the biodiversity of the world around us, but also by infiltrating our bodies and causing new illnesses. Candida auris, a drug-resistant yeast, emerged in 2009 on three continents simultaneously. The disease, Monosson writes in her book, “seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.” C. auris quickly started claiming lives, particularly in hospital settings, where it preys on the immunocompromised. The pathogen kills roughly one-third of hospitalized patients, according to an analysis of hospital data collected between 2017 and 2022, and that’s likely an underestimate. 

Some researchers theorize that C. auris has always lived among us, unable to survive inside the human body due to our species’ high internal temperature. But as global temperatures have risen over the decades, the fungus may have evolved to adapt to a warmer climate. Climate change, the theory goes, has trained C. auris how to infiltrate our bodies. And global warming could help other fungal pathogens spread, too.

“Over the past century fungal infections have caused catastrophic losses in other species, but so far we have been lucky,” Monosson writes. “Our luck may be running out.” She calls for better prevention measures — regulations on the import of foreign flora and fauna, better testing technologies for plants and animals that cross borders, and more funding for conservation work that protects wild species in their existing habitats. Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic is available this week in bookstores and libraries. 

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Q.Readers might pick up your book and assume it is entirely focused on the impact of fungal disease on human health. But Blight is about so much more. Can you speak to your approach here? What overarching story were you trying to tell? 

A.The thing that got me started thinking about the book was a paper that was written years ago by a group of different scientists across disciplines. They were in medicine, ecology, agriculture, and a few others. That’s kind of unusual, to see a review written by so many different scientists. The focus of the paper was fungi, and they were trying to get people more aware. They felt that people didn’t really appreciate the potential consequences of large fungal infections.

For a lot of us, once in a while in the news we’ll hear, “Oh, we’re not going to have our bananas anymore,” or “The frogs are dying,” or “The bats are dying.” But you hear those warnings and then it goes out of the news cycle and seems like, oh, OK that was a weird thing.  

If you talk to somebody who’s in any of these fields, you’ll see that it’s not so odd that this is happening, because fungal pathogens can be really catastrophic when they strike. So the purpose of the book was to put all of this together, to say that these aren’t just one-offs. We need to think about the potential of fungal pathogens and the breadth of impact that they have across species.

Q.Blight is about fungi, yes, but it’s also about facets of modern life that researchers have been worried about for quite some time — globalization, biosecurity, climate change. How are all of these things connected?

A.The first epidemics and pandemics that I write about, the decline of the chestnut and pine blister rust in forests, started about 100 years ago. And for forever before that there were fungal pathogens in agriculture —- probably ever since humans started doing agriculture. But most of the book focuses on the past 100 years. And that’s because there’s been an increase in fungal pandemics or epidemics across species in the last 100 years. That’s because we have been moving plants and animals around, and ourselves around, at a rate that is really unprecedented in our long history on Earth.

Every time you move something around, there’s all sorts of other things on them. And when we take them to another place, they have the opportunity to find a new host. And if that host is susceptible, then you’ve got a problem. So between trade, travel, and the changing climate that you mentioned, there’s potential for fungi to adapt to changes in crops and agriculture, and adapt to warmer temperatures and drought conditions faster than, say, a crop can. Fungi are adaptable. And there’s a pretty good chance that fungi will be able to adapt to a changing temperature or changing climate.

Q.This book is publishing at a moment when a lot of people are thinking about pathogenic fungi thanks to recent news reports about Candida auris and the success of The Last of Us. Cordyceps is a harmless fungus, but there are very real fungal threats out there. Can you talk about Candida auris and why you chose to feature it in the beginning of your book?

A.To be honest, I hoped that Candida auris might draw readers in and then they’d read about all the other problems across other species. But it is also one of the newest emergent fungal diseases. It was kind of unknown until 2009 or 2010, and then the CDC issued its first warning about Candida auris in 2016. So it’s really pretty new, and we don’t often get a really new emergence, except for something like COVID. But COVID is viral — that’s almost to be expected. To have a newly emergent fungal pathogen was something different. 

What was most interesting about Candida auris, and I think what was most frightening to public health workers and doctors, is that it emerged in many different places at once, within a couple of years. And when it emerged, it was different strains of the fungus, which means that it wasn’t like COVID where it could be traced back to one patient zero. So that was something odd, and I don’t think anyone really knows why. 

One thought is maybe climate change: Maybe this fungus was just out living in the environment, as many do, and not bothering us. And it couldn’t really survive in our warmer bodies. It didn’t tolerate our internal temperature. But with warmer and warmer days over time, that fungus eventually evolved to be able to tolerate our temperature and could live in us. And when it did, it became a problem. 

I should qualify that humans are pretty well protected against fungal pathogens. We have our temperature, for one, but we also have a pretty robust immune system that can fend off most fungi. We’re all breathing spores right now. And for most of us, it’s not a problem. But if you’re immunocompromised, and there are a growing number of people who are immunocompromised, then the threat of a fungal pathogen is more important.

Q.You’ve written books on a number of topics, including chemicals, genes, and germs. Why did you choose to focus on fungi this time?

A.It was a personal experience of having a fungus-like organism kill my tomatoes. Just seeing that happen, I got interested in it. So I thought I’d write a little article about it. And that’s around the same time that paper I mentioned came out. It was curiosity at first, because I didn’t really think about fungal pathogens back then. 

I started this in 2019, before COVID. When it was clear that COVID was something really big and bad, I actually emailed my editor and I was like, “Should I keep writing this? Because who is going to want to read about a pandemic after we get through this pandemic?”

Q.But you kept going. Is that because there’s light at the end of the tunnel?

A.I think the hopeful thing is there’s a lot of really passionate scientists working on these problems. We should support them, the policies that may come out of the science, the conservation organizations that are trying to do prevention work. Really the goal here is prevention, and that involves all of us. 

We need to take responsibility for our actions. I know that’s trite. But maybe if we are even a little more thoughtful about how we do things, what we think we “need” in our lives, and how that impacts the world around us — we might do less harm to the natural world and to other humans. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The author of ‘Blight’ explains how humans supercharged fungal pathogens on Jul 17, 2023.