This summer, the UN announced the era of global boiling has begun, but the damage of extreme heat can be hard to grasp.

So the aftermath of a hurricane, you can see that there's thousands of homes that have been destroyed, but heat is more difficult, right?

It's the deadliest climate disaster by a wide margin, but the deaths tend to happen out of the public view.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's an old saying that journalism is the first draft of history, but when the historical record is too sparse to serve us, fiction steps in.

If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place, the picture of it, stays, and not just in my memory, but out there in the world.

Plus, a historian of slavery reckons with the gaps in the archives.

We could just throw our hands up and say, we can't fly what we need, so we can't tell these stories.

But that would be an additional injustice on top of the historical injustices.

It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Across the globe, this summer has been unusually unseasonably and scarily hot.

This summer feels like a page torn from the book of Revelation.

Here in the United States, 170 million people are under heat alert.

The world has entered the age of global boiling.

Climate scientists say it's virtually certain. July 2023, we Earth's hottest month on record.

This heat wave would have been virtually impossible if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.

Which means this summer will not be a one-off.

And yet the danger of extreme heat can be hard to grasp until we're burned by it.

In Arizona, the temperature soared to 110 degrees for 31 days straight,

transforming normal sidewalks into massive stove tops.

The pavement and sidewalk can heat up to 150-plus degrees,

...