Leaders in emergency medicine need to face up to the new demands our warming world is putting on them. “The heat wave was so far outside of what we thought would happen here,” says Hess, who is also the director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE) at the University of Washington. He worries that next time, scorching heat could hit concurrent with another exceptional disaster—like a “smoke event,” earthquake, or even a wildfire. “This is very much the canary in the coalmine. The health system needs to come together by region and think through these extreme events.”

As the planet we live on continues to change, the dangers to our health will increase. 

Among the many deleterious effects of climate change, the growing air quality disaster that wildfires represent is another urgent, burgeoning problem. Health care needs to ready itself. But most immediately—hospitals need to stop losing lives to the heat. 

Cecilia Sorensen, MD, is the director of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education at Columbia University and associate professor of Environmental Health Science at Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Irving Medical Center.

Maura Kelly, a health writer, is a special contributor to Annals of Emergency Medicine.