Sparks: 'Thermal safety: Not just climate in action; it's biology & physiological capacity to cope & recover

The cooling centre mapped onto the urban grid reveals the same isothermal line that once divided the colonial plantation from the slave quarter - heat as both climate and class.

Those who survive the heatwave are not the fittest by design, but those whose bodies, by chance, carried the right variation for this particular furnace.

The panic at the cooling centre is not fear of the heat, but fear of the void where the body’s atoms, once arranged as flesh, begin to scatter like dust in sunlight.

If a man collapses in the shade while another sips ice water in the boardroom, the system is not broken - it was built this way.

‘Extreme weather events are being managed proactively’ - note the passive voice, the nominalization, the absence of who, exactly, is doing the managing.

Things that are unbearable: the hum of the fan that does not cool, the child’s handprint on the window where the glass is too hot to touch.