Heat Islands
Human Health & the Environment
Class Meetings
Dates: 2026-09-22T16:00:00, 2026-09-24T16:00:00
Heat Islands - Infrastructure & Health Printable PDF
Videos or Films Watched
What Does Extreme Heat Do to the Body
PBS, 09 03, 2026
Video (9:59)
Description
Watch more of this series: https://to.pbs.org/4wkQIAG
The climate crisis isn’t a distant threat — it’s already here, and it’s deadly. But keeping people cool is surprisingly complicated.
In Sydney, Australia, physiologist Ollie Jay is tackling the problem by studying how the human body responds to extreme heat. The ultimate goal is to create low-cost cooling strategies for people without access to air conditioning — those most at risk from extreme heat. Science journalist Miles O’Brien puts himself in the hot seat — literally — to find out what it feels like when the body’s cooling system starts to fail.
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Resolve to Solve with Miles O’Brien
Miles O’Brien travels the globe searching for solutions to climate, water, and health crises. From building sea curtains in Antarctica to restoring wildlife in Argentina, the answers are closer than we think thanks to people with a “Resolve to Solve.”
Transcript
0:01 · MILES O’BRIEN: At the iconic Sydney Opera House, I met a scientist looking for an answer.
0:06 · Ollie Jay runs the Heat and Health Research Center at the University of Sydney.
0:13 · Lay the context for us a little bit on Australia, its climate, and the heat impacts you deal with here.
0:21 · We have an increased prevalence of heat waves.
0:23 · They’re greater intensity, the maximum temperature records are being beaten regularly.
0:28 · Among, uh, high income countries, we’re actually the most susceptible to the impacts of extreme heat on human health and well-being.
0:35 · For a researcher such as yourself, trying to find solutions, ways to adapt, this is the perfect laboratory, isn’t it?
0:41 · JAY: Absolutely.
0:42 · We take time to understand the nature of the problem before we start trying to develop solutions, because we don’t want to go down that route that a lot of academics do of finding solutions to problems that don’t exist.
0:52 · O’BRIEN: Ollie and his team are looking for smarter, more efficient ways to keep people safe and cool as the global thermostat rises.
1:01 · ♪ ♪ That was on his mind when I met him on a steamy Saturday at the University of Sydney Cricket Club Oval.
1:11 · (bat cracks) A match like this can last two long days, six to eight hours each.
1:19 · That was big!
1:20 · (cheers and applause) On the sidelines, Ollie Jay and his team were setting up a curious contraption they call the EMU.
1:30 · It’s a flightless Australian bird, but also something called the Environmental Measurement Unit.
1:35 · O’BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
1:36 · Like MaRTy in Phoenix, EMU measures four key parameters: air temperature, humidity, radiant temperature and wind speed.
1:47 · We measure temperature in this device right here.
1:50 · We can move air in a certain way across that temperature sensor to get a very accurate read on what the temperature of the air is in the shade.
1:57 · O’BRIEN: Humidity is measured in that same white chamber.
2:01 · Above it is a copper sphere that is painted matte black.
2:07 · It measures radiation that comes directly from the sun and bounces off the various surfaces surrounding an athlete.
2:15 · JAY: And then using all of this information, we can model how hot someone’s going to get, and therefore what their rate of dehydration might be.
2:21 · And, you know, potentially how much water they need to drink in order to maintain hydration.
2:29 · O’BRIEN: A short walk away from the cricket oval is Ollie’s lab.
2:33 · And that’s where he’s built another novel tool to better understand how heat affects the human body.
2:39 · It’s a climate chamber.
2:42 · Think of it as a science oven, and I’m on the menu.
2:47 · JAY: Just be careful of the step there.
2:49 · Here we go, Miles.
2:50 · O’BRIEN: You’re not messing around.
2:52 · JAY: No, we’re not messing around. O’BRIEN: All right.
2:54 · Reporting for scientific duty.
2:55 · I was finally going to find out what it’s like to be an order of French fries, waiting under the heat lamp on a short-order shelf.
3:05 · Before I got this far, I swallowed a horse pill.
3:08 · Right down the gullet there.
3:10 · A thermometer with a tiny transmitter inside that tracked my core temperature.
3:15 · I’m hot stuff.
3:16 · They took my blood pressure.
3:18 · Applied a strap to track my heart rate and a mask that measured the amount of oxygen I was consuming, to help estimate how much heat my body was generating on its own.
3:30 · JAMES SMALLCOMBE: If you can just blow out for me.
3:31 · (blows) Yep, that’s tight enough, that’s perfect.
3:34 · Your cardiovascular system seems to be in pretty good nick, uh, Miles, we’ve got, you know, great blood pressure and your resting heart rate’s nice and, uh, nice and low, so.
3:43 · Objective evidence demonstrating your very good health.
3:46 · O’BRIEN: He put it to the test by simulating one of the worst weather disasters in modern U.S. history: the heat wave in Chicago in 1995.
3:57 · More than 700 people died.
3:59 · Researchers concluded a working air conditioner would have prevented half the fatalities.
4:05 · And living alone doubled the risk of death.
4:07 · It became a stark lesson in how vulnerability and isolation can turn extreme heat into a mass-casualty disaster.
4:17 · Almost for the first time, it placed extreme heat on the radar of public health officials and actually seeing that it is responsible for excess death and morbidity.
4:27 · O’BRIEN: The tragedy exposed something deeper than weather.
4:31 · It was about inequality, and neglect.
4:35 · That summer, Chicago made it painfully clear heat doesn’t strike evenly, and it kills quietly.
4:44 · We’re doing this from the perspective of trying to understand the settings that the most vulnerable are going to be in, and then developing solutions that are fit for purpose in those settings.
4:54 · O’BRIEN: Here in the chamber, the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity between 50% and 60%.
5:03 · It was pretty miserable.
5:06 · I feel like a cheeseburger just off the grill.
5:08 · The human body cools itself by sweating, but that only works if the sweat can evaporate.
5:14 · At this temperature and humidity, it can’t.
5:19 · The air is nearly saturated.
5:21 · The sweat just sits there, and the body keeps heating up.
5:27 · It’s a huge challenge for human survival.
5:30 · What we know is that the people who are most vulnerable won’t have access to air conditioning.
5:34 · They most likely won’t have access to things like cooling shelters as well.
5:38 · They’ll be sheltering at home in place.
5:40 · So the question is, what type of activities, what type of risk reduction cooling strategies can these people use that is most effective at blunting that physiological heat strain that generates inside the body that we know is harmful to human health?
5:53 · O’BRIEN: He’s exploring cooling strategies for people who can’t afford to live in air-conditioned comfort.
6:00 · Practical, low-cost ways to survive the heat.
6:04 · Things like immersing your feet in water so they act like radiators.
6:09 · And using fans which, under the right conditions, can significantly reduce the effects of heat stress.
6:16 · These are the kinds of things that can help the most vulnerable among us, during a heat wave like Chicago in 1995.
6:26 · With the proper prior planning on that, could those deaths have been preventable?
6:31 · Most of them?
6:32 · There’s a, there’s a saying, um, in the heat health space that every heat-related death is preventable.
6:40 · O’BRIEN: Globally, heat kills about a half-a-million people every year.
6:45 · And in the U.S., the fatalities are growing at an alarming rate.
6:50 · In 2023, more than 2,300 died from heat in the U.S.
6:55 · About three times more than a decade ago.
6:58 · Far greater than the average toll for hurricanes and wildfires.
7:03 · They grab the headlines, but heat has always been the most lethal consequence of climate change, by far.
7:11 · Outside this window in Sydney, intense heat is everywhere– quiet, invisible and relentless.
7:20 · Ah.
7:22 · (sighs) Sheesh.
7:23 · After I’d mopped myself up, Ollie and I went from the frying pan to the fire.
7:31 · He took me on a walking tour of the University of Sydney campus.
7:35 · Born and raised in Wales, with a stop in Canada along the way, Ollie actually earned his PhD studying cold temperatures.
7:45 · But in 2014, Sydney beckoned.
7:48 · Suddenly, he was on the opposite end of the earth and the thermometer.
7:53 · Australia being a hot place, and it is a hot place, I figure that if, Australian-based researchers, if we can’t get a handle on these problems, and we can’t find a solution, then there’s very little chance that anyone else will.
8:06 · O’BRIEN: Plenty of scientists study the climate and the relentless rise of temperatures.
8:10 · But far fewer connect the dots to the impact on human health.
8:15 · How heat affects real bodies, in real time, in a warming world.
8:20 · It’s a mistake to overlook human physiology as you try to come up with some answers here, right?
8:25 · If you think about it from a health perspective, obviously, the hot weather is a problem.
8:29 · But the real problem is the hot person in the hot environment.
8:32 · ♪ ♪ O’BRIEN: It was time for us to solve that problem.
8:36 · We met up with his partner Allison and their adorable, precocious daughter Lottie.
8:41 · ALLISON: Ready to go to the beach?
8:43 · O’BRIEN: They took me to Coogee Beach, a short walk from their home in Sydney.
8:49 · Becoming a parent has changed the way he thinks about his work.
8:54 · It’s sharpened his focus and redoubled his resolve to solve.
9:00 · There are lots of solutions, but I think what we’ve got to do is focus on not just climate change mitigation, ensuring that the choices that we make don’t aggravate the problem in the future, but also got to face that we’ve got to adapt to a warmer world.
9:13 · We need to do both of them at the same time.
9:15 · It would be bad if all of that back and forth led to inertia and apathy. JAY: Well, it’s exactly right.
9:21 · People need to have hope in order to act.
9:22 · Otherwise, we just bury our head in the sand and try to pretend it’s not happening when it is.
9:26 · O’BRIEN: In the sand. JAY: Here we are.
9:28 · O’BRIEN: I see what you’re doing there, man.
9:30 · Nicely done, nicely done. (Ollie laughing) ♪ ♪
How Urban Heat Impacts Communities of Color
Did You See This?, 07 21, 2021
Video (7:14)
Description
The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon affecting more than 100 cities across the U.S. — here’s how it works and why it disproportionately impacts communities of color.
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Transcript
Heatwave What is the urban heat island effect
Sky News, 07 15, 2022
Video (2:40)
Description
Extreme heat is going to be felt across the country, but it’s our cities that will be worst hit, as a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect drives temperatures even higher.
There are solutions but it takes time and investment. Sky’s Science Correspondent Thomas Moore reports.
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Transcript
0:00 · our towns and cities just weren’t built to be this hot baked by the sun with little shade urban living can be stifling at mossborne parkside academy in east london the children are well drilled the school is victorian and keeping the classrooms cool is a challenge
0:18 · all our windows are open and as much as possible before and after school and during the day we have blackout blinds so we actually have them closed when the children aren’t learning and just to try and keep those classrooms as cool as possible temperatures could top 40 degrees in parts of england early next week but in the cauldron of the concrete jungle the heat is intensified still further studies have shown the centers of london and manchester can be 10 degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas it’s an effect called the urban
0:47 · heat island and with a thermal imaging camera you can see it in action the brick the concrete the asphalt is all glowing red hot as it absorbs the sun’s radiation and stores it as heat but look at the contrast of a tree it’s not just the shade beneath which is a cooler blue but the leaves themselves are kind of in between on that color spectrum as they’re absorbing some of the sun’s energy but evaporating water
1:13 · keeping them cool and the surrounding air data given to sky news shows how that makes a difference even in a relatively small town sensors dotted around guildford in surrey show the heat rising on monday morning by early afternoon the temperature in the built-up area was seven degrees higher than a nearby park
1:33 · and it took longer to cool still three degrees warmer at midnight you will not feel comfortable you know the thermal comfort is an issue but if you are an elderly or having any pre-existing you know the the conditions so you are higher at risk for the heat stroke or cardiovascular or the respiratory you know the impact and that can be fatal that
1:55 · can be fatal 90 of the uk population is expected to live in an urban area by 2050. the charity trees for cities is planting shade for the future but warns it can’t do it fast enough there’s never been more focus and funding for trees in general which is fantastic we should recognize that but a lot of that funding historically has been focused on on the the royal
2:17 · environment on the countryside and we believe that we need to shift that balance in order to invest much more into our cities the government says it wants to plant 150 000 trees in urban areas but the money for this year has already run out the sooner they go in the ground the greater the shade and the even more intense heat waves of the future thomas more sky news
A New Inferno
Jonathan Pickett, 09-13-2026
Documentary Film (00:15:42)
Description
Filmed during the hottest days of Phoenix, Arizona’s summer heatwave, A NEW INFERNO follows paramedics as they race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment: ice immersion therapy. As featured on the NY Times Op Docs — We Are Living in a New Inferno World Premiere SXSW Film Festival, 2026 Featuring Jason Smith, Jake West, Roy Lewis, & Colter Fosdick Directed & Produced by Nita Blum-Reddick & Jonathan Pickett Executive Producers Sam Osborn, Alejandra Vasquez, & Jesse Ray Sheps Cinematographer Ryan Dent Editor Jonathan Pickett Composer Jack Gillette Production Sound Mixer Daniel Reddick Grips Stephane Strande & Brian Osback Sound Design & Mix Hansdale Hsu Colorist Keyhan Bayegan Production Assistant Camden Smith Title & Poster Designer Jason Cryer Weather Consultant Jorge Torres Advisors Dr. Charles Finch, Medical Director, Phoenix Fire Department & Maki Lloyd, Deputy Chief, Phoenix Fire Department For The New York Times Op-Docs: Associate Producers Ingrid Homquist & Rebecca Shaid Producer Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo Senior Producer Andrew Blackwell Executive Producer Alexandra Garcia Please consider supporting the ongoing work of Circle the City: www.circlethecity.org Festivals: • Tribeca x NYT Op-Docs • Mountainfilm • Rooftop Films • Palm Springs International ShortFest • Indy Shorts Film Festival • HollyShorts Film Festival • Nashville Film Festival • Bend Film Festival • Mill Valley Film Festival • Sidewalk Film Festival • deadCenter Film Festival • Ouray International Film Festival • Cinema Columbus • AfterImage Film Festival • Coast Film Festival
Transcript
Assigned Background
Climate - Fighting Extreme Heat In 2026
Duration: 00:43:17
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
Extreme heat isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a growing public health threat.More than 40 million people across the U.S. have remained under heat alerts this month. Heat remains the deadliest extreme weather event in the United States. At least 44 people have died as a result of July heatwaves. And in Europe, heatwaves killed more than 10,000 people in June, according to health data published this month.Climate change is making heatwaves hotter and more frequent. And high temps aren’t just being reported in daytime. Nighttime temperatures are higher than ever. And scientists say that’s raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heatstroke – and taking away crucial time for you and the planet to recover.What do you need to know about the effects of heat on your health? And how you can stay safe?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
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Speaker: 000:00:07
This is one a. I’m Naila Budu in for Jen White. Extreme heat isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a growing public health threat. More than forty million people across The US have remained under heat alerts this month. Heat remains the deadliest extreme weather event in The United States. And in Europe, heat waves killed more than ten thousand people in June. That’s according to just published health data published from 27 countries. Climate change is making heat waves hotter and more frequent, and high temps aren’t just being reported in the daytime. Nighttime temperatures are higher than ever. And scientists say that’s raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke and taking away crucial time for you and the planet to recover. Today, what do you need to know about the effects of heat on your health and how you can stay safe, and what are cities and states doing to fight the heat? We’ll get into all of that, but first, let’s start in one county that is focusing on fighting extreme heat from the top. Joining us now is mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, home to almost 3,000,000 people. Mayor Levine Cava, welcome to one a.
Speaker: 100:01:16
Thank you so much, Nyla.
Speaker: 000:01:17
Let’s start with a chief heat officer role that you created a few years ago. How did that position come to be? Why did you see a need for this? It’s the first one ever created.
Speaker: 100:01:29
I have to give credit to Adrienne Arish, who is a philanthropist and very involved in climate change issues, and she actually brought it to our attention. And we said, absolutely, we need to do that because after all, we are the heat capital in so many ways. So we did appoint the first in the world and we have been a national leader and an international leader since then. I co chair the Climate Mayor’s Extreme Heat Cohort. We’ve created an Extreme Heat Action Plan that has made incredible progress and is modeled across the the city and and the the country and the world. And, we are are moving forward and making great progress in reducing heat related related effects.
Speaker: 000:02:15
So I know that position was launched in 2021. Although it doesn’t exist anymore, it was eliminated as part of budget cuts last year. How is that work being done now?
Speaker: 100:02:26
Yeah. So in actual fact, our chief resilience officer is also our chief chief heat officer. So we haven’t eliminated it, but the founder, Jane Gilbert, did retire. She, again, global leader. And we also, have a dedicated staff person who is our coordinator and who is maintaining our focus,
Speaker: 000:02:49
on this work. What does it mean from a government spending level in Miami Dade County to focus on heat resistance? What does that look like?
Speaker: 100:02:58
Yeah. So we are doing so many things. We created a heat season. We, have cooling centers 60 around the county, so we leave buildings open, during the heat season. We, give our staff access to not just water and breaks and shade, but those who are exposed, we give them electrolytes, so that they can maintain their body healthy while working outdoors. So all of those things do cost money. We, also, have the staffing, as has been described, and we reduce our energy through all kinds of resilience measures. We’ve done so much to make our buildings more efficient, and that is is good for the environment, and it’s good for the budget as well.
Speaker: 000:03:49
We’re talking to mayor Danielle Lavigne Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, Florida. Mayor, I wanted to play this voice mail we got from Alex.
Speaker: 200:03:57
I believe trees are some of the best ways we can adapt cities to climate change and mitigate the negative effects of heat. My concern is as we try to make more room for trees, we’re still competing with cars that seem to dominate our cities and have ample parking. I would like to see cities reduce parking and narrow streets to allow more connected green space while reducing the pervious pavement that hold heat well into the night.
Speaker: 000:04:20
Mayor Lubinkaba, I wonder how you would respond to Alex’s message there. I would say as a native Miami, and I know how much people love cars across the city. Like, how are you thinking about city infrastructure when it comes to fighting heat in Miami Dade?
Speaker: 100:04:34
Well, first, let’s talk about trees because trees absolutely are essential. They can reduce ambient temperature by as much as 10 degrees. So we have been very aggressively planting trees. Last year alone, we gave away 25,000 trees, so we had regular tree giveaways and particularly in the neighborhoods with lower tree canopy. So, that is a critical part of it. We also, of course, are pushing transit. Transit is much more efficient. It has lower emissions, so it’s overall helping climate as well as traffic.
Speaker: 000:05:11
So those are a few of the the ways that we’re addressing it. I mentioned nearly 3,000,000 people live across the county. We’ve all probably heard of the idea of extreme heat islands. Can you explain how in Miami, some neighborhoods are more unequal than others when it comes to how people are experiencing extreme heat?
Speaker: 100:05:29
Yeah. As I said, you’ve got lower income communities, sadly, are often those with the lower tree canopy. So we’ve been targeting our tree giveaway and our tree maintenance in those neighborhoods and actually providing support for how to take care of those trees. Also, removal of large trees is very much discouraged, and we’ve also started relocating large trees. If infrastructure projects require their removal, we are working hard and have been working with some fantastic vendors to move them so that we do not lose, the overall benefit of that. We also have done a lot to bring more cooling to those neighborhoods. So the cooling centers, I mentioned 60, that are across the county. We also, for example, in our public housing installed 1,700 high efficiency cooling units, through dollars from the infrastructure bill in the previous administration. So we also have shaded now, bus stops. That’s critically important. We want people to use transit, but they’re exposed to the elements, including heat, so we have launched an aggressive campaign to provide shade for for those who have to, wait in in the elements for their buses.
Speaker: 000:06:51
Mary, you mentioned the previous administration. Are you getting the support from the federal government, as well as from Tallahassee and state government for, these different implementations that you would like to have across this the county?
Speaker: 100:07:06
Well, I will say, sadly, the state legislature preempted us from heat standards standards for workers other than our own county employees who we do protect. But fortunately, we’ve been able to raise awareness with our public education campaigns, and we have hundreds of companies that have come to us for training and education and utilizing our tools, how to protect their workers with shade, water, and rest.
Speaker: 000:07:34
We got this text message. I work outdoors at parks in Miami Dade County. Some parks have put out big barrels of cool water with cups for the attendees. Other hosts have made sure lots of coolers full of bottles of water were available. In the past few years, I’ve been at events, and patrons have passed out. EMS has to be called. I passed out once at home. I believe I was experiencing dehydration. I’ve now made a simple concoction of water, a tablespoon of lemon juice, and orange juice, and salt, and sip on that throughout the event. Mayor Lavinkava, when you think about, the culture, particularly around workers and what employers need to do, you mentioned that you have tried to set a standard with county workers. What else have you, what other conversations do you have with major employers, especially as people are working outside to protect them?
Speaker: 100:08:24
Yeah. So definitely, we’ve been very successful with a lot of our employers adopting voluntarily because we’re preempted from mandating the kinds of protections that, this this person has mentioned. But as well, we’re very aggressive with our hydration stations. So water is life is our theme for our water and sewer department. We go with, dispensers of of water from the tap. Right? We’re avoiding water bottles. We don’t need those. We want people to to bring their own containers and, of course, if they’re using bottles to recycle. But I’ll give you an example. World Cup, we just had seven games. And during that time, most of the games were on days of extreme heat. In fact, the first extreme heat day was on the first day of World Cup, June 15. We have been so successful in preventing serious illness from heat, we distributed about enough water in cups to about twenty percent of the game attendees across, the the games, the the whole season, and that, unfortunately, they were not allowed to bring more than a small water bottle, and, of course, it costs money at those stadiums to to purchase. So we were very pleased. We had cooling stations, and people availed themselves of that, and we were able to greatly reduce any injury both at the games and at our fan fest. You know, when you think about South Florida, I think,
Speaker: 000:09:50
hurricanes are sort of the natural disaster that gets encoded into people’s DNA. Tropical storm Bertha is making its way across The Gulf as we speak. How do you think about heat waves as part of your overall natural disaster strategy, and how are you trying to help people recognize this can be a serious problem?
Speaker: 100:10:08
Yeah. We added heat to our trifecta, hurricanes, floods, and heat. So what used to be our annual hurricane season is now all three. And we use that for public education, awareness, prevention, just as you say. We also worked with the National Weather Service to signal extreme heat at a lower temperature given the extreme humid conditions in our environment. So all of this is designed around increasing awareness. Look, when we started this with the first heat officer, people laughed. They thought it was a joke, but they’re not laughing anymore.
Speaker: 000:10:47
That was Daniella Levine Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, Florida. Mayor Levine Cava, thank you for being with us. We appreciate it. Thank you. We got this from another listener in Florida. I plant native trees and bushes here in South Florida, and my property stays about 15 degrees cooler most days. I find it pleasant to garden any time of day. If people did not remove trees and did not let developers remove trees, then the land will take care of itself. You can keep the comments coming by emailing 1a@wamu.org. Coming up, the effects of heat on your health, what do you need to know, and how can you stay safe? I’m Nyla Budu. This is one a from WAMU and NPR. I’m Naila Budu. This is one a. We’re talking about extreme heat. Let’s turn to the effects of extreme heat on our bodies and what you can do to stay safe. Joining us now is Amrita Nourisarma. She’s an environmental epidemiologist studying climate change and health, an and assistant professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Amrita, welcome. Thank you for having me. And Jiva Lang is also with us. She’s a staff writer at Heatmap News. Jiva, it’s nice to have you as well. Hi. Excited to be here. And we wanna hear from you listening. How are you responding to the heat and staying cool this summer? We just heard from Miami Dade County. What are your city officials doing? Share your tips and experiences. You can email us 1a@wamu.org. Jeva, I was just mentioning we just spoke with the mayor of Miami Dade County. I just wondered your thoughts about what she said about cities, climate resilience, the idea of having someone actually at the county level focusing on this.
Speaker: 400:12:58
Yeah. I think this is really important work, and Miami is such a leader in this area. And, I think there’s other cities too that are doing great work in this area as well. The two that come to mind are, Spokane and Portland, have been pursuing, temperature maximums for renters. Renters tend to have the lowest AC, access of, compared to homeowners, and that’s been a really exciting, method of pursuit for those cities to protect people from the extreme heat. But I think the the big takeaway here is just that we need to be taking heat more seriously, whether that’s protections for people at home or protections, like you were discussing, the heat can or the urban heat effect
Speaker: 000:13:50
and the tree canopy is, protecting people in that way. And, Risha, do we know yet, as we see cities taking more action, if there’s a way to determine if that is leading to fewer heat related emergency room visits?
Speaker: 300:14:04
Yeah. This is a great question. And I think that it’s a little bit challenging because there’s obviously some lag between when the heat wave happens and when we get back information. So we might have to wait for a couple of weeks to know whether or not the strategies were effective, but we are starting to get information quicker and quicker, regarding emergency department visits and hospitalizations associated with heat. We’re also starting to see signals in some of the more nontraditional health outcomes that are associated with extreme heat. So, you might think of heat stress or heat stroke as some of the more obvious directly related pathways, but we’re starting to see things like dehydration illnesses, renal insufficiency. We’re seeing some patterns in terms of changes in the ways that people respond for those health outcomes as well. So I think looking beyond just the traditional health outcomes is a good way that we can start to see those signals sooner as well.
Speaker: 000:14:59
Jeva, it’s been a few weeks since the July 4 weekend, which we saw record breaking heat waves throughout the country. More than 20 cities broke heat records this month. We know temperatures are rising year after year as a result of climate change. What factors are behind this summer’s extreme heat that we need to know about?
Speaker: 400:15:19
Yeah. Great question. June 2026 was the second warmest globally, and it was the hottest ever for Western Europe. I think when you look at the headline number for The United States, it’s the eighteenth warmest June in the Contiguous United States. It just doesn’t sound very extreme. But what we’re seeing is these prolonged severe heat domes. So those highs are really, really high. Like you were saying, there were, I think, 1,300 heat records matched or broken over that fourth of July weekend. And that’s just, again, because the because of greenhouse gas emissions and also, likely a strong El Nino. We’re still figuring out exactly what mechanism is at play for the heat here, but
Speaker: 000:15:58
the greenhouse gas emissions make the entire atmosphere warmer. That means we’re starting at a warmer baseline. So these highs can get really, really high as a as a result of that. Jeva, we should I wonder if you can just help us understand. We’ve used the term extreme heat a few times now. Can you define that for us precisely in how it’s categorized?
Speaker: 400:16:16
Yeah. It’s a it’s a hard question to answer because extreme heat, is so contextual. Extreme heat for people in the South is very different than extreme heat for people in, say, the Pacific Northwest or people in Northern Europe, these places that haven’t seen extreme temperatures before. So there isn’t really, like, a number or a threshold that you have to break in order to be have extreme heat or not. It’s really about, how
Speaker: 000:16:40
how much does this diverge from the historic norms in this area. So, Amrita, you talked about heat related emergency room visits. Around 120,000 were recorded across The US in 2023. That’s according to the CDC. At what temperature and under what temperature conditions with the heat index, does the heat become particularly dangerous for our bodies? And I imagine, of course, there are caveats to people who are much more vulnerable than others.
Speaker: 300:17:10
Yeah. That’s a really good question. And I think, going back to one of the things that Jeeva was saying a few minutes ago, it’s so contextual because extreme heat, it means something different if you’re in the Northern Part of US compared with the Southern Part of US. Some of that is also about adaptation that’s already been implemented in different communities. So, you know, homes in the Southern United States might have air conditioning, for example. So the ambient temperatures might have a less of an impact until the temperature gets much more extreme. But generally speaking, once we see a combination of heat and humidity, that’s above about the ninety fifth percentile of whatever is normal for that area. That’s when we start to see these really sharp increases. And we think of that as a more extreme heat period. And we start to look at comparing increases in some of those severe cases of heat related illness around that threshold. What does the ninety fifth percentile mean? Again, it means something different if you’re in the Southern US compared with New York or Boston, for example.
Speaker: 000:18:15
What are some signs people should look out for that might signal heat exhaustion or heat stroke, and what’s the difference between those two, Amrita?
Speaker: 300:18:24
Yeah. So heat exhaustion is, maybe I could call it a little bit of a less extreme version of heat related illness. It’s where people start to feel tired. Your body is no longer able to sweat, which is one of the primary ways that we kind of cool off when it’s very hot outside. By comparison, heat stroke looks very similar to a regular stroke. It’s dizziness. It’s, kind of loss of speech patterns. It’s, you know, changes in your ability to speak. It’s changes in your ability in your cognitive function. And it is generally something that requires more severe treatment. So, if you have heat exhaustion, you can generally treat that at home with hydration. One of the things that the mayor was mentioning earlier is that water is life. That’s very important. If you’re having a heat stroke, that should be you know, you should be looking out for some of those more severe symptoms, and that should be a good reason to visit an emergency room or an urgent care facility to get your core body temperature cooled down.
Speaker: 000:19:32
Jeva, there are as many as twelve thousand recorded heat deaths in The US each year. How does that how do we account for that? How do we know that people have died because of extreme heat?
Speaker: 400:19:42
It’s a complicated question. There’s about three different ways you can calculate excess or, heat deaths. One is direct and indirect. These are two different categories of looking at deaths. So direct deaths from heat, there’s a diagnostic code. It’s x 30. It’s a medical classification for a death due to excessive natural heat. This is distinct from excessive unnatural heat, such as a tanning bed death, a little bit of morbid trivia through the morning. But the direct deaths are exactly what we’re talking about in terms of heat exhaustion or heat stroke. The the classic what you think of as somebody dying from heat. Then there are excess dust or indirect dust from heat. That’s cardiovascular events, stroke, complications from diabetes, respiratory illness, all the other ways that heat can kill you that’s maybe a little bit more invisible. So if somebody comes into a hospital with a heart attack, the physicians are treating that heart attack. They’re not sitting there being like, is this heart attack from the heat outside right now? So it might not be coded as a direct heat death, but it’s still somebody who died from the heat. And there’s two different ways you can count these excess heat deaths. So one is to look at how many more people died compared to what you would have expected for that period of time. And then for so for an example of this is, in France, there were, twenty one thousand six hundred all cause deaths between June 17 and July 2. That was their heat wave in Europe. Statistical modeling would have expected about fifteen thousand nine hundred and ten deaths based on the previous year, so that gives us an excess of about seven or, five thousand seven hundred. And then the third way of doing this is basically a predictive model. So saying we know when the temperature rises by x amount, this number of people will die and kind of using that model to fit with, the temperatures that were recorded. So there’s a bunch of different ways to record excess deaths, a bunch of different models that need to be peer reviewed. And so this this work is still ongoing for heat events, both in Europe and in North America. But this is why you can see many different numbers for how many people died in a given heat wave.
Speaker: 000:21:50
That’s Jiva Lang, a staff writer at Heatmap News. We’re also talking to Amrita Nourasarmi Nuri Sarma. She’s a environmental epidemiologist studying climate change and health. We’re getting texts and emails from you all. We got this text from one of you. I am medically unable to deal well with heat. Anytime the temps start hitting the upper eighties, I am strictly inside or headed for another air conditioned space. Of course, that means I miss out on all the nice outdoor activities, including the beach. Amrita, can I ask you we also got this text? Is there any data on how COVID is impacting people’s heat tolerances or exacerbating heat effects? I’ve been getting more frequent migraines from the heat. Friends of mine with high blood pressure are reporting suffering. It seems like I’m less able to tolerate it now than I was a couple of years ago.
Speaker: 300:22:40
Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that there are potentially two things that are happening here. The first one is that, obviously, COVID changed a lot of people’s, ability to be in public spaces. And I think for a long time, people were kind of isolating and staying indoors, avoiding close contact with other people. And as a result, I think there have been some long term impacts on, immune systems across the board. And so I think people have definitely suffered from that long lack of exposure to the outdoors and to other people. And I think that has some, immunological implications for the long term. I think the other thing is that people who have experienced COVID illness, and at this point, we’ve gone through multiple waves of COVID, that might also have an individual level impact, as this person mentioned in their note. So people who have experienced maybe some of the symptoms of long COVID, we do talk about often how one of the most vulnerable groups, to extreme heat is people with preexisting medical conditions. So we do know that people who have underlying, for example, cardiovascular diseases or illnesses, people who have respiratory illnesses, people who have pre existing mental health conditions may be particularly susceptible when it’s very hot outside. And I would say the same is likely true for people who are experiencing the symptoms of long COVID. There might be some individual level vulnerability because of the long term medical impacts that you’re facing after having a period of COVID infection as well.
Speaker: 000:24:16
I wanted to, Jeeva, talk to you about wildfire smoke. This year, along with the heat, we’ve seen wildfire smoke from Canada blanketing the Midwest and East Coast affecting a hundred and fifteen million Americans. What’s the relationship between extreme heat and wildfires? What’s made this year’s wildfire smoke especially bad?
Speaker: 400:24:35
Yeah. So there’s, it’s there there’s a lot of relationships between wildfire smoke and heat. In particular, this year, the the smoke was directed over the most populated areas of The United States by the heat dome, which was raising all of those temperatures. So the temperatures got really hot in, Northern Minnesota and Ontario. There were lightning fires, and, that smoke then rotated around this heat dome that was making extreme temperatures, and blew the smoke into some of the most populated areas of the country. And this is, when we talk about, like, compounding climate crises, this is kind of the classic example of you wanna run your air conditioning, you wanna have your windows open because it’s so hot out, but at the same time, you need to protect yourself from the wildfire smoke. So these two crises really go hand in hand and make a kind of a perfect storm of, like, terrible conditions that you want to avoid.
Speaker: 000:25:34
Yeah. Emerta, a study published in February by the journal Scientific Advance shows that wildfire smoke inhalation caused twenty four thousand deaths each year from 2006 to 2020. What effect does wildfire smoke have on our bodies?
Speaker: 300:25:53
Well, we know that there are a lot of impacts from just overall air pollution exposure. There’s a pretty direct relationship between how much particulate matter you’re inhaling, especially the finer particulate matter that’s smaller in size, which can descend deeper into the lungs and cross the blood brain barrier and lead to a whole host of different health outcomes. And we know that that happens even at very low levels. So once we get into particulate matter that’s much of much higher in concentration, such as the, PM that we see from wildfires, we can see a lot of different health impacts from that. We see respiratory illnesses. We see cardiovascular illnesses. We see increases in stroke. There are a lot of different health impacts from, exposure to that high level of particulate matter. The other thing that I think is really important is, you know, in addition to people not being used to those very high levels, you know, in The United States, because PM 2.5 has historically since the Clean Air Act, been pretty heavily regulated, we’ve seen, pretty low concentrations on a regular basis of particulate matter. But when we have a wildfire where trees are burning or maybe urban areas are burning, we’ll see these huge spikes in the levels of PM 2.5, and people just aren’t used to it. People are experiencing these extreme levels, that that they haven’t been experiencing historically at baseline.
Speaker: 000:27:18
Jeva, in a headline this month, heat map calls wildfire smoke the East Coast’s new forever problem. Are there federal guidelines that exist around wildfire smoke the way we’ve been talking about cities trying to deal with extreme heat? From a policy standpoint, are we doing enough to deal with this persistent problem?
Speaker: 400:27:38
I don’t think so. This is such a new problem in parts of the country that there aren’t really standards for dealing with it. I think a really good example of this actually is that heat and air quality alerts are not typically considered together. These are two separate metrics and two separate alert systems. And, really, they should not be triggered independently. They should be considered together. Again, as you were talking about, they go hand in hand. And I think we’re just seeing the way that cities are kind of on their back foot with dealing with wildfire smoke when it comes to everything from deciding at what point we should cancel sporting events or outdoor events. There’s not really an AQI threshold that people talk about yet. And I think, yeah, it’s just an area that there’s a lot of opportunity to make decisions now before it gets worse.
Speaker: 000:28:30
That’s Jiva Lang, a staff writer with Heatmap News. We’re discussing street extreme heat as well with Amruta Nuri Sarma. She’s an assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at Harvard. Still to come, what are the long term effects of heat exposure on your health, and what responsibility do local and national governments have to protect you? And you can join the conversation. We got this text. I live in Dallas, and the temperature yesterday went up to 111 degrees. I make sure I have lots of water, leave my car windows open when I park, and I park my car in the shade. I’m trying to stay in shaded areas as much as possible. We’re gonna be talking about shade coming up. You can keep the questions or comments coming to 1a@wamu.org. I’m Nyla Voodoo. This is one a. Let’s get back to our conversation on extreme heat with Amruta Nuri Sarma. She’s an assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at Harvard, and Jeeva Lang, a staff writer at Heatmap News. Jiva, I wanted to go back to Europe for a moment. We’ve talked about the fifty seven hundred heat related deaths in June that France recorded, thirty six percent more than the average year. That’s the most since February heat wave. Jiva, I hear from my family in Europe a lot about how different it is compared to America experiencing heat waves. You were in Europe in June. What was it like?
Speaker: 400:30:30
Yeah. I was in Europe in June, and I was there specifically with my nine month old baby and my father who both fall into these vulnerable populations, a very young person and older person. And it was really scary. I mean, we were privileged enough to be on vacation. We were staying hotels that had great AC, but I really feel for people who didn’t have that ability to get out of the heat very easily. One of our kind of scary experiences was actually in Paris the first day of the heat wave where we were out with our baby in a backpack, and she got way too hot. She was slumped over. We actually were trying to find a place that had AC to get her to cool down. And it was very difficult to find AC. It’s just not as widely available as it is in The United States. So I think both culturally, there’s not the same, emphasis on putting an AC unit in your building as there is in The United States. And then also just these aren’t places that have historically had to deal with extreme heat. And as a result, the buildings, the airflows, all of the infrastructure there is just not set up for,
Speaker: 000:31:34
these triple digit temperatures that they’re seeing now. We got this text from James. I spend most of my day in my living room because it’s the only air conditioned room in my 100 year old home. Having just returned from The UK, I appreciate the amount of air conditioning we have in The US. I’ve also been taking cold showers to cool off. As for others in my area, I know in the past that the city has used the old train Depot as a cooling center as we do have a significant number of unhoused people. Jiva, when we talk about air conditioning, that’s 90% of American households who have it. In Europe, that’s about 20% to what you’re discussing. I wanted to ask you, there’s a pilot program in New York City that’s giving renters power banks to try to alleviate the strain on the power grid for their, air conditionings from everyone turning on their AC at once. It’s just a small program right now, but giving away renter friendly generators. The company that’s giving away these renter friendly generators hopes to roll it out in other cities. How important is air conditioning to this conversation, especially as we factor in the electrical grid as well as the fossil fuel consumption that happens as we’re using AC?
Speaker: 400:32:47
Yeah. AC is life giving at this moment in The United States. We really rely on it. And I think that there is a danger in over relying on air conditioning. There are scenarios that have been run specifically looking at what would happen in Phoenix if there was a heat wave, and the numbers up there are pretty scary. I think it’s like a third of the city could end up hospitalized if there was a multi day heat wave where there was a blackout at the same time. And so while AC is important and critical and especially access to AC, again, this is also an affordability issue, of course, or people who can’t afford to run their AC all summer. We need to be finding other ways to keep our cities cool as well.
Speaker: 000:33:31
We got this text from Diane. Houston is hot, muggy, and feels like temperatures of a 105 and up. It’s best to stay inside and only go outside if necessary. Even dog walking has to be curtailed and shifted off sidewalks and roads to shaded area. My biggest fear is that the electrical grid can’t handle the load and power outages result. Dheeva, how have we seen the grid handling things this summer? Pretty well, it seems.
Speaker: 400:33:55
Yeah. So far, it’s been okay. And I think that’s a relief. We’ve also seen these record pulls on the grid, especially in the New York City area, I believe. And so it’s holding up okay. But, again, this is always a thing that operators are worried about in the summer is the potential for because the heat doesn’t just stress people’s bodies. It stresses the infrastructure too, the electrical grid’s infrastructure. So, at the same time, our bodies are getting exhausted. The infrastructure is getting exhausted.
Speaker: 000:34:27
Emerta, do we need to be considering AC as a public health matter, access to air conditioning?
Speaker: 300:34:34
Absolutely. And it’s one of the strategies that I think has been mentioned consistently throughout the last, you know, few minutes of the conversation, you know, opening up cooling centers as a public health intervention, air conditioned spaces for public access. And I think that, you know, we need to, as you said, balance the pros and cons of additional reliance on, air conditioning, especially as we start to see more and more number of days where we’re hitting these extreme temperatures and longer and longer periods where we need those types of interventions or some sort of alternative
Speaker: 000:35:08
for public health. Can I ask you about Diane’s text, Ruta, where she says that it’s best to stay inside and only go outside? Dog walking even has to be curtailed. What are we seeing with extreme heat? I know it’s really affected my exercise routine this summer. As someone who likes to exercise outdoors, how how are we seeing extreme heat affecting people’s health in that way?
Speaker: 300:35:31
Yeah. I think it makes it more challenging to do some of those outdoor activities that you might enjoy. I think that, you know, one of the things we could do is we could ask people to shift the timings when they’re going outside for their activities or for their exercise. So instead of, you know, going in the middle of the day, maybe focusing on early morning periods where the temperatures might be slightly cooler, of course, that only works when we don’t see the extended periods of extreme heat that lasts into the night. And there might be other options such as, you know, trying to work out in an air conditioned space or in a gym or something along those lines. But I do think it does have impacts for people who usually prefer to exercise outdoors.
Speaker: 000:36:10
Let’s talk about air conditioning, cooling centers. I wanted to play a little bit of New York City mayor Zoran Mondami before the fourth of July holiday earlier this month talking about mitigating the effects of heat exposure.
Speaker: 500:36:23
These are extremely dangerous conditions, and they will affect every part of our city. To prepare, I have activated the city’s heat emergency plan. Since last week, our city agencies have been proactively coordinating to keep New Yorkers and tourists safe. We will also issue targeted alerts through our city’s advanced warning system to protect our most vulnerable neighbors, like older New Yorkers and those with chronic illnesses. Beginning tomorrow, the city will open hundreds of cooling centers across the five boroughs.
Speaker: 000:36:57
Amruta, aside from cooling centers and vans that the New York City mayor announced, what else is important to be, you can do to stay cool in record heat, especially if you’re not able to access those facilities?
Speaker: 300:37:12
Yeah. We’ve done a lot of work, especially in the Greater Boston area to try and understand what the, factors are that encourage people to use public spaces for cooling activities and also what some of the barriers might be. I think a couple of things that are really important is that people who would use those facilities want active cooling or active opportunities to become cooler in places that they’re already going. So I think one of the things that the mayor mentioned earlier was providing drinking water in those high important component, rather than having another place that people have to go to get protection from the heat. Other things are looking for other types of cooling. So public splash pads, public pools, places where people could use water based activities. We know that those are really protective during extreme heat waves as well. And then finally making drinking water widely available, shaded spaces widely available. Maybe those aren’t as effective as air conditioned spaces, but in an opportunity to have shade versus direct sunlight, I think the shade will often be preferable,
Speaker: 000:38:28
to reduce some of those health impacts as well. I do wanna talk about shade, but first, can I just ask you about the water breaks, especially for outdoor workers? We heard Miami Dade mayor Danielle LaVine Cava talk about the fact that they tried to pass legislation in Miami that was overturned, by the governor. The same and the similar things we’ve seen in Texas in 2023. Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott approved a law eliminating ten minute water breaks for construction workers arguing that it bogs down businesses. As we’re seeing some states move to take away these protections from different municipalities, what can people who work outdoors or have to be outdoors for prolonged periods of time do to stay safe?
Speaker: 300:39:13
It’s a good question. And I think, you know, carrying water on their person so that they can continue to take sips of water throughout the day, it’s really important to stay hydrated. That’s the only way that we’re going to see, you know, less of these extreme health outcomes. And one of the things that I would argue from a public health perspective is that, yes, it could be disruptive to have a ten minute water break, but it would also be disruptive to have a worker who experiences heat stress or heat exhaustion or heat stroke and has to have a more severe medical intervention as a result. So I think it’s important for businesses to take those different trade offs into consideration. Do I give my workers a ten minute water breaks in order to ensure that I’m not they’re not experiencing a larger health event down the line? So, you know, I think I think it’s really important to make sure that people can have access to hydration, access to breaks, access to shaded spaces if they’re working outdoors.
Speaker: 000:40:08
As we’re talking about shade, last summer during another heat wave in Europe, we spent an hour talking about the value of shade and staying cool and why most cities in The US don’t have enough of it. Here’s V. Kelly Turner, a professor of planning at UCLA.
Speaker: 300:40:23
Shade fundamentally changes the equation about how much energy your body needs to expend when it’s hot. All else equal, a person standing in the shade can be up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than someone just a few feet away standing in the sunlight.
Speaker: 000:40:40
You can find that conversation online at the 1a.org. Emerita, this morning, I will say it was a wonderful, amazing 68 degrees in DC. I was so excited. I had a wonderful few minutes outside before I came into the station. I feel like I’ve been trapped inside for so long. As someone who’s researched the effects of heat on mental health as well, what do we need to know about that?
Speaker: 300:41:02
Yeah. We know that heat has really severe impacts on people’s physical health and what’s starting to become more apparent is that people’s mental health is really impacted as well. We’ve seen in some recent work that my team has done looking at emergency department visits associated with all different types of mental health causes, increases in emergency department visits as summertime temperatures increase. So this is for things like substance use disorders, schizophrenia, self harm, mood disorders, anxiety, stress disorders. There are a whole host of different mental illnesses that present and get exacerbated
Speaker: 000:41:36
during periods of extreme heat. We got this email from Jordan. Amrita, I wonder if you can just answer it quickly. Jordan says, I’ve heard that those who take SSRI medications for anxiety or depression have a more difficult time regulating body temperature and wind up suffering a bit more in excessive heat. Is there any truth to this?
Speaker: 300:41:55
Yes. This is actually, a documented pathway. SSRIs can cause heat intolerance because they interfere with the hypothalamus, which is the temperature regulator in the brain. This also, can increase the risk of things like dehydration, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. I think SSRIs also have been shown to, interfere with sweat production as well. So, you know, taking SSRIs can impair your body’s cooling ability. They can also disrupt the thirst mechanism. So they can make it harder to know when your body is actually getting thirsty, which is a signal that starts the pathway of dehydration. So again, all of the same things that we’ve been talking about previously, just making sure that you’re staying hydrated, important for folks who have underlying medical conditions that require treatment with SSRIs.
Speaker: 000:42:45
Jibo, I just wanna shift the conversation back to the idea of federal policy, federal funding. The Trump administration is proposing a $1,700,000,000 or about 27% cut to NOAA as part of the 2027 fiscal splint spending plan. How will these cuts affect forecasting, if at all?
Speaker: 400:43:04
Yeah. This is a really important point, and there’s a lot of things that worry me about this, but the most relevant to our conversation is that staff cuts would mean things like weather balloon launches and sensor maintenance are no longer happening. Weather balloon launches, happen regularly. They help us measure wind, temperature, humidity, pressure, and make those severe weather forecasts. And the administration has said that they want to pivot to AI, that they think that this is a way forward in forecasting, but artificial intelligence is only as strong as the data that’s being input. And if we’re not getting that robust data from the field, which takes takes boots on the ground, takes people out there launching the balloons themselves or fixing sensors at sea, then we’re just not the quality of our forecast is going to be severely degraded.
Speaker: 000:43:51
We just have about a minute or two left. I just wanna ask you, Amrutha, if we talk about climate change making it hotter each year and this is our new normal, what should we be thinking about or doing as individuals or at the community level?
Speaker: 300:44:04
We we have a lot of, individual level protective factors. One of the ones that I like to mention is, social networks, reliance on social networks to help us to stay safe during times of extreme weather, including extreme heat. You know, David mentioned earlier, some of the vulnerable populations, including the elderly, making sure that friends are checking in on friends, neighbors are checking in on neighbors or if you know that your loved one has a medication that they’re taking that they might, that might impact their ability to regulate during heat waves, that they have access to the resources that they need. I think there are a lot of other resources that are available, that we’ve been talking about over the course of the last little bit. And, one of the best ways that we can make sure that especially those folks who are vulnerable know about the resources that are available within your community is also through those social networks as well.
Speaker: 000:44:59
That was Emerita Nuri Sarma. She’s an environmental epidemiologist and assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. I wanna thank Jeeva Lang as well for joining us, a staff writer at Heatmap News. Remember, the one a podcast is a great way to catch up on anything you might have missed. It’s where you’ll find our best guests and stories every day. Today’s producers were Arfy Geddie and Thomas Lu. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I’m Nyla Budou in for Jen White. Jen’s out for a few weeks. Join me tomorrow for the Friday news roundup. This is one a.
How The Current Heat Dome Can Affect Human Health
Duration: 00:10:58
Released: 2024
Series: Short Wave
Right now, there’s a “heat dome” lingering over the southwestern U.S. – a high pressure system that pushes hot air down and traps it, raising the temperature. Heat is becoming increasingly lethal as climate change causes more extreme heat. So in today’s encore episode, we’re exploring heat. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer talks with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber about how the human body copes with extended extreme heat and how today’s heat warning systems could better protect the public. With scientists predicting a very hot summer, if you can, stay cool out there, dear Short Wavers.What science story do you want to hear next on Short Wave? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
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Released: 2018
Series: Better Off
In this week’s podcast we’ll explore how America’s streets can be redesigned to benefit bicyclists and pedestrians—and we’ll explain why doing so may even help mitigate the effects of climate change. A new study from Anne Lusk, research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzed how bicyclists and pedestrians responded to various placements of trees along cycle tracks—barrier-protected bicycle-exclusive paths between the road and the sidewalk. The research shows that the placement of these trees can play an important role in how people walking and biking perceive traffic, pollution, heat, and even safety. But the benefits extend beyond just those using the street—and could even be a factor in mitigating the effects of climate change. These trees may make it more likely that people will bike—helping to reduce pollution. And increased greenery can also help cool cities, which often suffer from a heat island effect, which means they’re significantly warmer than more rural areas. Lusk says all of this highlights the need to re-think how we’re designing streets to encourage more people to walk and bike instead of drive.
Climate - Fighting Extreme Heat In 2026
Duration: 00:43:17
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
Extreme heat isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a growing public health threat.More than 40 million people across the U.S. have remained under heat alerts this month. Heat remains the deadliest extreme weather event in the United States. At least 44 people have died as a result of July heatwaves. And in Europe, heatwaves killed more than 10,000 people in June, according to health data published this month.Climate change is making heatwaves hotter and more frequent. And high temps aren’t just being reported in daytime. Nighttime temperatures are higher than ever. And scientists say that’s raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heatstroke – and taking away crucial time for you and the planet to recover.What do you need to know about the effects of heat on your health? And how you can stay safe?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
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Speaker: 000:00:07
This is one a. I’m Naila Budu in for Jen White. Extreme heat isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a growing public health threat. More than forty million people across The US have remained under heat alerts this month. Heat remains the deadliest extreme weather event in The United States. And in Europe, heat waves killed more than ten thousand people in June. That’s according to just published health data published from 27 countries. Climate change is making heat waves hotter and more frequent, and high temps aren’t just being reported in the daytime. Nighttime temperatures are higher than ever. And scientists say that’s raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke and taking away crucial time for you and the planet to recover. Today, what do you need to know about the effects of heat on your health and how you can stay safe, and what are cities and states doing to fight the heat? We’ll get into all of that, but first, let’s start in one county that is focusing on fighting extreme heat from the top. Joining us now is mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, home to almost 3,000,000 people. Mayor Levine Cava, welcome to one a.
Speaker: 100:01:16
Thank you so much, Nyla.
Speaker: 000:01:17
Let’s start with a chief heat officer role that you created a few years ago. How did that position come to be? Why did you see a need for this? It’s the first one ever created.
Speaker: 100:01:29
I have to give credit to Adrienne Arish, who is a philanthropist and very involved in climate change issues, and she actually brought it to our attention. And we said, absolutely, we need to do that because after all, we are the heat capital in so many ways. So we did appoint the first in the world and we have been a national leader and an international leader since then. I co chair the Climate Mayor’s Extreme Heat Cohort. We’ve created an Extreme Heat Action Plan that has made incredible progress and is modeled across the the city and and the the country and the world. And, we are are moving forward and making great progress in reducing heat related related effects.
Speaker: 000:02:15
So I know that position was launched in 2021. Although it doesn’t exist anymore, it was eliminated as part of budget cuts last year. How is that work being done now?
Speaker: 100:02:26
Yeah. So in actual fact, our chief resilience officer is also our chief chief heat officer. So we haven’t eliminated it, but the founder, Jane Gilbert, did retire. She, again, global leader. And we also, have a dedicated staff person who is our coordinator and who is maintaining our focus,
Speaker: 000:02:49
on this work. What does it mean from a government spending level in Miami Dade County to focus on heat resistance? What does that look like?
Speaker: 100:02:58
Yeah. So we are doing so many things. We created a heat season. We, have cooling centers 60 around the county, so we leave buildings open, during the heat season. We, give our staff access to not just water and breaks and shade, but those who are exposed, we give them electrolytes, so that they can maintain their body healthy while working outdoors. So all of those things do cost money. We, also, have the staffing, as has been described, and we reduce our energy through all kinds of resilience measures. We’ve done so much to make our buildings more efficient, and that is is good for the environment, and it’s good for the budget as well.
Speaker: 000:03:49
We’re talking to mayor Danielle Lavigne Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, Florida. Mayor, I wanted to play this voice mail we got from Alex.
Speaker: 200:03:57
I believe trees are some of the best ways we can adapt cities to climate change and mitigate the negative effects of heat. My concern is as we try to make more room for trees, we’re still competing with cars that seem to dominate our cities and have ample parking. I would like to see cities reduce parking and narrow streets to allow more connected green space while reducing the pervious pavement that hold heat well into the night.
Speaker: 000:04:20
Mayor Lubinkaba, I wonder how you would respond to Alex’s message there. I would say as a native Miami, and I know how much people love cars across the city. Like, how are you thinking about city infrastructure when it comes to fighting heat in Miami Dade?
Speaker: 100:04:34
Well, first, let’s talk about trees because trees absolutely are essential. They can reduce ambient temperature by as much as 10 degrees. So we have been very aggressively planting trees. Last year alone, we gave away 25,000 trees, so we had regular tree giveaways and particularly in the neighborhoods with lower tree canopy. So, that is a critical part of it. We also, of course, are pushing transit. Transit is much more efficient. It has lower emissions, so it’s overall helping climate as well as traffic.
Speaker: 000:05:11
So those are a few of the the ways that we’re addressing it. I mentioned nearly 3,000,000 people live across the county. We’ve all probably heard of the idea of extreme heat islands. Can you explain how in Miami, some neighborhoods are more unequal than others when it comes to how people are experiencing extreme heat?
Speaker: 100:05:29
Yeah. As I said, you’ve got lower income communities, sadly, are often those with the lower tree canopy. So we’ve been targeting our tree giveaway and our tree maintenance in those neighborhoods and actually providing support for how to take care of those trees. Also, removal of large trees is very much discouraged, and we’ve also started relocating large trees. If infrastructure projects require their removal, we are working hard and have been working with some fantastic vendors to move them so that we do not lose, the overall benefit of that. We also have done a lot to bring more cooling to those neighborhoods. So the cooling centers, I mentioned 60, that are across the county. We also, for example, in our public housing installed 1,700 high efficiency cooling units, through dollars from the infrastructure bill in the previous administration. So we also have shaded now, bus stops. That’s critically important. We want people to use transit, but they’re exposed to the elements, including heat, so we have launched an aggressive campaign to provide shade for for those who have to, wait in in the elements for their buses.
Speaker: 000:06:51
Mary, you mentioned the previous administration. Are you getting the support from the federal government, as well as from Tallahassee and state government for, these different implementations that you would like to have across this the county?
Speaker: 100:07:06
Well, I will say, sadly, the state legislature preempted us from heat standards standards for workers other than our own county employees who we do protect. But fortunately, we’ve been able to raise awareness with our public education campaigns, and we have hundreds of companies that have come to us for training and education and utilizing our tools, how to protect their workers with shade, water, and rest.
Speaker: 000:07:34
We got this text message. I work outdoors at parks in Miami Dade County. Some parks have put out big barrels of cool water with cups for the attendees. Other hosts have made sure lots of coolers full of bottles of water were available. In the past few years, I’ve been at events, and patrons have passed out. EMS has to be called. I passed out once at home. I believe I was experiencing dehydration. I’ve now made a simple concoction of water, a tablespoon of lemon juice, and orange juice, and salt, and sip on that throughout the event. Mayor Lavinkava, when you think about, the culture, particularly around workers and what employers need to do, you mentioned that you have tried to set a standard with county workers. What else have you, what other conversations do you have with major employers, especially as people are working outside to protect them?
Speaker: 100:08:24
Yeah. So definitely, we’ve been very successful with a lot of our employers adopting voluntarily because we’re preempted from mandating the kinds of protections that, this this person has mentioned. But as well, we’re very aggressive with our hydration stations. So water is life is our theme for our water and sewer department. We go with, dispensers of of water from the tap. Right? We’re avoiding water bottles. We don’t need those. We want people to to bring their own containers and, of course, if they’re using bottles to recycle. But I’ll give you an example. World Cup, we just had seven games. And during that time, most of the games were on days of extreme heat. In fact, the first extreme heat day was on the first day of World Cup, June 15. We have been so successful in preventing serious illness from heat, we distributed about enough water in cups to about twenty percent of the game attendees across, the the games, the the whole season, and that, unfortunately, they were not allowed to bring more than a small water bottle, and, of course, it costs money at those stadiums to to purchase. So we were very pleased. We had cooling stations, and people availed themselves of that, and we were able to greatly reduce any injury both at the games and at our fan fest. You know, when you think about South Florida, I think,
Speaker: 000:09:50
hurricanes are sort of the natural disaster that gets encoded into people’s DNA. Tropical storm Bertha is making its way across The Gulf as we speak. How do you think about heat waves as part of your overall natural disaster strategy, and how are you trying to help people recognize this can be a serious problem?
Speaker: 100:10:08
Yeah. We added heat to our trifecta, hurricanes, floods, and heat. So what used to be our annual hurricane season is now all three. And we use that for public education, awareness, prevention, just as you say. We also worked with the National Weather Service to signal extreme heat at a lower temperature given the extreme humid conditions in our environment. So all of this is designed around increasing awareness. Look, when we started this with the first heat officer, people laughed. They thought it was a joke, but they’re not laughing anymore.
Speaker: 000:10:47
That was Daniella Levine Cava, Democratic mayor of Miami Dade County, Florida. Mayor Levine Cava, thank you for being with us. We appreciate it. Thank you. We got this from another listener in Florida. I plant native trees and bushes here in South Florida, and my property stays about 15 degrees cooler most days. I find it pleasant to garden any time of day. If people did not remove trees and did not let developers remove trees, then the land will take care of itself. You can keep the comments coming by emailing 1a@wamu.org. Coming up, the effects of heat on your health, what do you need to know, and how can you stay safe? I’m Nyla Budu. This is one a from WAMU and NPR. I’m Naila Budu. This is one a. We’re talking about extreme heat. Let’s turn to the effects of extreme heat on our bodies and what you can do to stay safe. Joining us now is Amrita Nourisarma. She’s an environmental epidemiologist studying climate change and health, an and assistant professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Amrita, welcome. Thank you for having me. And Jiva Lang is also with us. She’s a staff writer at Heatmap News. Jiva, it’s nice to have you as well. Hi. Excited to be here. And we wanna hear from you listening. How are you responding to the heat and staying cool this summer? We just heard from Miami Dade County. What are your city officials doing? Share your tips and experiences. You can email us 1a@wamu.org. Jeva, I was just mentioning we just spoke with the mayor of Miami Dade County. I just wondered your thoughts about what she said about cities, climate resilience, the idea of having someone actually at the county level focusing on this.
Speaker: 400:12:58
Yeah. I think this is really important work, and Miami is such a leader in this area. And, I think there’s other cities too that are doing great work in this area as well. The two that come to mind are, Spokane and Portland, have been pursuing, temperature maximums for renters. Renters tend to have the lowest AC, access of, compared to homeowners, and that’s been a really exciting, method of pursuit for those cities to protect people from the extreme heat. But I think the the big takeaway here is just that we need to be taking heat more seriously, whether that’s protections for people at home or protections, like you were discussing, the heat can or the urban heat effect
Speaker: 000:13:50
and the tree canopy is, protecting people in that way. And, Risha, do we know yet, as we see cities taking more action, if there’s a way to determine if that is leading to fewer heat related emergency room visits?
Speaker: 300:14:04
Yeah. This is a great question. And I think that it’s a little bit challenging because there’s obviously some lag between when the heat wave happens and when we get back information. So we might have to wait for a couple of weeks to know whether or not the strategies were effective, but we are starting to get information quicker and quicker, regarding emergency department visits and hospitalizations associated with heat. We’re also starting to see signals in some of the more nontraditional health outcomes that are associated with extreme heat. So, you might think of heat stress or heat stroke as some of the more obvious directly related pathways, but we’re starting to see things like dehydration illnesses, renal insufficiency. We’re seeing some patterns in terms of changes in the ways that people respond for those health outcomes as well. So I think looking beyond just the traditional health outcomes is a good way that we can start to see those signals sooner as well.
Speaker: 000:14:59
Jeva, it’s been a few weeks since the July 4 weekend, which we saw record breaking heat waves throughout the country. More than 20 cities broke heat records this month. We know temperatures are rising year after year as a result of climate change. What factors are behind this summer’s extreme heat that we need to know about?
Speaker: 400:15:19
Yeah. Great question. June 2026 was the second warmest globally, and it was the hottest ever for Western Europe. I think when you look at the headline number for The United States, it’s the eighteenth warmest June in the Contiguous United States. It just doesn’t sound very extreme. But what we’re seeing is these prolonged severe heat domes. So those highs are really, really high. Like you were saying, there were, I think, 1,300 heat records matched or broken over that fourth of July weekend. And that’s just, again, because the because of greenhouse gas emissions and also, likely a strong El Nino. We’re still figuring out exactly what mechanism is at play for the heat here, but
Speaker: 000:15:58
the greenhouse gas emissions make the entire atmosphere warmer. That means we’re starting at a warmer baseline. So these highs can get really, really high as a as a result of that. Jeva, we should I wonder if you can just help us understand. We’ve used the term extreme heat a few times now. Can you define that for us precisely in how it’s categorized?
Speaker: 400:16:16
Yeah. It’s a it’s a hard question to answer because extreme heat, is so contextual. Extreme heat for people in the South is very different than extreme heat for people in, say, the Pacific Northwest or people in Northern Europe, these places that haven’t seen extreme temperatures before. So there isn’t really, like, a number or a threshold that you have to break in order to be have extreme heat or not. It’s really about, how
Speaker: 000:16:40
how much does this diverge from the historic norms in this area. So, Amrita, you talked about heat related emergency room visits. Around 120,000 were recorded across The US in 2023. That’s according to the CDC. At what temperature and under what temperature conditions with the heat index, does the heat become particularly dangerous for our bodies? And I imagine, of course, there are caveats to people who are much more vulnerable than others.
Speaker: 300:17:10
Yeah. That’s a really good question. And I think, going back to one of the things that Jeeva was saying a few minutes ago, it’s so contextual because extreme heat, it means something different if you’re in the Northern Part of US compared with the Southern Part of US. Some of that is also about adaptation that’s already been implemented in different communities. So, you know, homes in the Southern United States might have air conditioning, for example. So the ambient temperatures might have a less of an impact until the temperature gets much more extreme. But generally speaking, once we see a combination of heat and humidity, that’s above about the ninety fifth percentile of whatever is normal for that area. That’s when we start to see these really sharp increases. And we think of that as a more extreme heat period. And we start to look at comparing increases in some of those severe cases of heat related illness around that threshold. What does the ninety fifth percentile mean? Again, it means something different if you’re in the Southern US compared with New York or Boston, for example.
Speaker: 000:18:15
What are some signs people should look out for that might signal heat exhaustion or heat stroke, and what’s the difference between those two, Amrita?
Speaker: 300:18:24
Yeah. So heat exhaustion is, maybe I could call it a little bit of a less extreme version of heat related illness. It’s where people start to feel tired. Your body is no longer able to sweat, which is one of the primary ways that we kind of cool off when it’s very hot outside. By comparison, heat stroke looks very similar to a regular stroke. It’s dizziness. It’s, kind of loss of speech patterns. It’s, you know, changes in your ability to speak. It’s changes in your ability in your cognitive function. And it is generally something that requires more severe treatment. So, if you have heat exhaustion, you can generally treat that at home with hydration. One of the things that the mayor was mentioning earlier is that water is life. That’s very important. If you’re having a heat stroke, that should be you know, you should be looking out for some of those more severe symptoms, and that should be a good reason to visit an emergency room or an urgent care facility to get your core body temperature cooled down.
Speaker: 000:19:32
Jeva, there are as many as twelve thousand recorded heat deaths in The US each year. How does that how do we account for that? How do we know that people have died because of extreme heat?
Speaker: 400:19:42
It’s a complicated question. There’s about three different ways you can calculate excess or, heat deaths. One is direct and indirect. These are two different categories of looking at deaths. So direct deaths from heat, there’s a diagnostic code. It’s x 30. It’s a medical classification for a death due to excessive natural heat. This is distinct from excessive unnatural heat, such as a tanning bed death, a little bit of morbid trivia through the morning. But the direct deaths are exactly what we’re talking about in terms of heat exhaustion or heat stroke. The the classic what you think of as somebody dying from heat. Then there are excess dust or indirect dust from heat. That’s cardiovascular events, stroke, complications from diabetes, respiratory illness, all the other ways that heat can kill you that’s maybe a little bit more invisible. So if somebody comes into a hospital with a heart attack, the physicians are treating that heart attack. They’re not sitting there being like, is this heart attack from the heat outside right now? So it might not be coded as a direct heat death, but it’s still somebody who died from the heat. And there’s two different ways you can count these excess heat deaths. So one is to look at how many more people died compared to what you would have expected for that period of time. And then for so for an example of this is, in France, there were, twenty one thousand six hundred all cause deaths between June 17 and July 2. That was their heat wave in Europe. Statistical modeling would have expected about fifteen thousand nine hundred and ten deaths based on the previous year, so that gives us an excess of about seven or, five thousand seven hundred. And then the third way of doing this is basically a predictive model. So saying we know when the temperature rises by x amount, this number of people will die and kind of using that model to fit with, the temperatures that were recorded. So there’s a bunch of different ways to record excess deaths, a bunch of different models that need to be peer reviewed. And so this this work is still ongoing for heat events, both in Europe and in North America. But this is why you can see many different numbers for how many people died in a given heat wave.
Speaker: 000:21:50
That’s Jiva Lang, a staff writer at Heatmap News. We’re also talking to Amrita Nourasarmi Nuri Sarma. She’s a environmental epidemiologist studying climate change and health. We’re getting texts and emails from you all. We got this text from one of you. I am medically unable to deal well with heat. Anytime the temps start hitting the upper eighties, I am strictly inside or headed for another air conditioned space. Of course, that means I miss out on all the nice outdoor activities, including the beach. Amrita, can I ask you we also got this text? Is there any data on how COVID is impacting people’s heat tolerances or exacerbating heat effects? I’ve been getting more frequent migraines from the heat. Friends of mine with high blood pressure are reporting suffering. It seems like I’m less able to tolerate it now than I was a couple of years ago.
Speaker: 300:22:40
Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that there are potentially two things that are happening here. The first one is that, obviously, COVID changed a lot of people’s, ability to be in public spaces. And I think for a long time, people were kind of isolating and staying indoors, avoiding close contact with other people. And as a result, I think there have been some long term impacts on, immune systems across the board. And so I think people have definitely suffered from that long lack of exposure to the outdoors and to other people. And I think that has some, immunological implications for the long term. I think the other thing is that people who have experienced COVID illness, and at this point, we’ve gone through multiple waves of COVID, that might also have an individual level impact, as this person mentioned in their note. So people who have experienced maybe some of the symptoms of long COVID, we do talk about often how one of the most vulnerable groups, to extreme heat is people with preexisting medical conditions. So we do know that people who have underlying, for example, cardiovascular diseases or illnesses, people who have respiratory illnesses, people who have pre existing mental health conditions may be particularly susceptible when it’s very hot outside. And I would say the same is likely true for people who are experiencing the symptoms of long COVID. There might be some individual level vulnerability because of the long term medical impacts that you’re facing after having a period of COVID infection as well.
Speaker: 000:24:16
I wanted to, Jeeva, talk to you about wildfire smoke. This year, along with the heat, we’ve seen wildfire smoke from Canada blanketing the Midwest and East Coast affecting a hundred and fifteen million Americans. What’s the relationship between extreme heat and wildfires? What’s made this year’s wildfire smoke especially bad?
Speaker: 400:24:35
Yeah. So there’s, it’s there there’s a lot of relationships between wildfire smoke and heat. In particular, this year, the the smoke was directed over the most populated areas of The United States by the heat dome, which was raising all of those temperatures. So the temperatures got really hot in, Northern Minnesota and Ontario. There were lightning fires, and, that smoke then rotated around this heat dome that was making extreme temperatures, and blew the smoke into some of the most populated areas of the country. And this is, when we talk about, like, compounding climate crises, this is kind of the classic example of you wanna run your air conditioning, you wanna have your windows open because it’s so hot out, but at the same time, you need to protect yourself from the wildfire smoke. So these two crises really go hand in hand and make a kind of a perfect storm of, like, terrible conditions that you want to avoid.
Speaker: 000:25:34
Yeah. Emerta, a study published in February by the journal Scientific Advance shows that wildfire smoke inhalation caused twenty four thousand deaths each year from 2006 to 2020. What effect does wildfire smoke have on our bodies?
Speaker: 300:25:53
Well, we know that there are a lot of impacts from just overall air pollution exposure. There’s a pretty direct relationship between how much particulate matter you’re inhaling, especially the finer particulate matter that’s smaller in size, which can descend deeper into the lungs and cross the blood brain barrier and lead to a whole host of different health outcomes. And we know that that happens even at very low levels. So once we get into particulate matter that’s much of much higher in concentration, such as the, PM that we see from wildfires, we can see a lot of different health impacts from that. We see respiratory illnesses. We see cardiovascular illnesses. We see increases in stroke. There are a lot of different health impacts from, exposure to that high level of particulate matter. The other thing that I think is really important is, you know, in addition to people not being used to those very high levels, you know, in The United States, because PM 2.5 has historically since the Clean Air Act, been pretty heavily regulated, we’ve seen, pretty low concentrations on a regular basis of particulate matter. But when we have a wildfire where trees are burning or maybe urban areas are burning, we’ll see these huge spikes in the levels of PM 2.5, and people just aren’t used to it. People are experiencing these extreme levels, that that they haven’t been experiencing historically at baseline.
Speaker: 000:27:18
Jeva, in a headline this month, heat map calls wildfire smoke the East Coast’s new forever problem. Are there federal guidelines that exist around wildfire smoke the way we’ve been talking about cities trying to deal with extreme heat? From a policy standpoint, are we doing enough to deal with this persistent problem?
Speaker: 400:27:38
I don’t think so. This is such a new problem in parts of the country that there aren’t really standards for dealing with it. I think a really good example of this actually is that heat and air quality alerts are not typically considered together. These are two separate metrics and two separate alert systems. And, really, they should not be triggered independently. They should be considered together. Again, as you were talking about, they go hand in hand. And I think we’re just seeing the way that cities are kind of on their back foot with dealing with wildfire smoke when it comes to everything from deciding at what point we should cancel sporting events or outdoor events. There’s not really an AQI threshold that people talk about yet. And I think, yeah, it’s just an area that there’s a lot of opportunity to make decisions now before it gets worse.
Speaker: 000:28:30
That’s Jiva Lang, a staff writer with Heatmap News. We’re discussing street extreme heat as well with Amruta Nuri Sarma. She’s an assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at Harvard. Still to come, what are the long term effects of heat exposure on your health, and what responsibility do local and national governments have to protect you? And you can join the conversation. We got this text. I live in Dallas, and the temperature yesterday went up to 111 degrees. I make sure I have lots of water, leave my car windows open when I park, and I park my car in the shade. I’m trying to stay in shaded areas as much as possible. We’re gonna be talking about shade coming up. You can keep the questions or comments coming to 1a@wamu.org. I’m Nyla Voodoo. This is one a. Let’s get back to our conversation on extreme heat with Amruta Nuri Sarma. She’s an assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at Harvard, and Jeeva Lang, a staff writer at Heatmap News. Jiva, I wanted to go back to Europe for a moment. We’ve talked about the fifty seven hundred heat related deaths in June that France recorded, thirty six percent more than the average year. That’s the most since February heat wave. Jiva, I hear from my family in Europe a lot about how different it is compared to America experiencing heat waves. You were in Europe in June. What was it like?
Speaker: 400:30:30
Yeah. I was in Europe in June, and I was there specifically with my nine month old baby and my father who both fall into these vulnerable populations, a very young person and older person. And it was really scary. I mean, we were privileged enough to be on vacation. We were staying hotels that had great AC, but I really feel for people who didn’t have that ability to get out of the heat very easily. One of our kind of scary experiences was actually in Paris the first day of the heat wave where we were out with our baby in a backpack, and she got way too hot. She was slumped over. We actually were trying to find a place that had AC to get her to cool down. And it was very difficult to find AC. It’s just not as widely available as it is in The United States. So I think both culturally, there’s not the same, emphasis on putting an AC unit in your building as there is in The United States. And then also just these aren’t places that have historically had to deal with extreme heat. And as a result, the buildings, the airflows, all of the infrastructure there is just not set up for,
Speaker: 000:31:34
these triple digit temperatures that they’re seeing now. We got this text from James. I spend most of my day in my living room because it’s the only air conditioned room in my 100 year old home. Having just returned from The UK, I appreciate the amount of air conditioning we have in The US. I’ve also been taking cold showers to cool off. As for others in my area, I know in the past that the city has used the old train Depot as a cooling center as we do have a significant number of unhoused people. Jiva, when we talk about air conditioning, that’s 90% of American households who have it. In Europe, that’s about 20% to what you’re discussing. I wanted to ask you, there’s a pilot program in New York City that’s giving renters power banks to try to alleviate the strain on the power grid for their, air conditionings from everyone turning on their AC at once. It’s just a small program right now, but giving away renter friendly generators. The company that’s giving away these renter friendly generators hopes to roll it out in other cities. How important is air conditioning to this conversation, especially as we factor in the electrical grid as well as the fossil fuel consumption that happens as we’re using AC?
Speaker: 400:32:47
Yeah. AC is life giving at this moment in The United States. We really rely on it. And I think that there is a danger in over relying on air conditioning. There are scenarios that have been run specifically looking at what would happen in Phoenix if there was a heat wave, and the numbers up there are pretty scary. I think it’s like a third of the city could end up hospitalized if there was a multi day heat wave where there was a blackout at the same time. And so while AC is important and critical and especially access to AC, again, this is also an affordability issue, of course, or people who can’t afford to run their AC all summer. We need to be finding other ways to keep our cities cool as well.
Speaker: 000:33:31
We got this text from Diane. Houston is hot, muggy, and feels like temperatures of a 105 and up. It’s best to stay inside and only go outside if necessary. Even dog walking has to be curtailed and shifted off sidewalks and roads to shaded area. My biggest fear is that the electrical grid can’t handle the load and power outages result. Dheeva, how have we seen the grid handling things this summer? Pretty well, it seems.
Speaker: 400:33:55
Yeah. So far, it’s been okay. And I think that’s a relief. We’ve also seen these record pulls on the grid, especially in the New York City area, I believe. And so it’s holding up okay. But, again, this is always a thing that operators are worried about in the summer is the potential for because the heat doesn’t just stress people’s bodies. It stresses the infrastructure too, the electrical grid’s infrastructure. So, at the same time, our bodies are getting exhausted. The infrastructure is getting exhausted.
Speaker: 000:34:27
Emerta, do we need to be considering AC as a public health matter, access to air conditioning?
Speaker: 300:34:34
Absolutely. And it’s one of the strategies that I think has been mentioned consistently throughout the last, you know, few minutes of the conversation, you know, opening up cooling centers as a public health intervention, air conditioned spaces for public access. And I think that, you know, we need to, as you said, balance the pros and cons of additional reliance on, air conditioning, especially as we start to see more and more number of days where we’re hitting these extreme temperatures and longer and longer periods where we need those types of interventions or some sort of alternative
Speaker: 000:35:08
for public health. Can I ask you about Diane’s text, Ruta, where she says that it’s best to stay inside and only go outside? Dog walking even has to be curtailed. What are we seeing with extreme heat? I know it’s really affected my exercise routine this summer. As someone who likes to exercise outdoors, how how are we seeing extreme heat affecting people’s health in that way?
Speaker: 300:35:31
Yeah. I think it makes it more challenging to do some of those outdoor activities that you might enjoy. I think that, you know, one of the things we could do is we could ask people to shift the timings when they’re going outside for their activities or for their exercise. So instead of, you know, going in the middle of the day, maybe focusing on early morning periods where the temperatures might be slightly cooler, of course, that only works when we don’t see the extended periods of extreme heat that lasts into the night. And there might be other options such as, you know, trying to work out in an air conditioned space or in a gym or something along those lines. But I do think it does have impacts for people who usually prefer to exercise outdoors.
Speaker: 000:36:10
Let’s talk about air conditioning, cooling centers. I wanted to play a little bit of New York City mayor Zoran Mondami before the fourth of July holiday earlier this month talking about mitigating the effects of heat exposure.
Speaker: 500:36:23
These are extremely dangerous conditions, and they will affect every part of our city. To prepare, I have activated the city’s heat emergency plan. Since last week, our city agencies have been proactively coordinating to keep New Yorkers and tourists safe. We will also issue targeted alerts through our city’s advanced warning system to protect our most vulnerable neighbors, like older New Yorkers and those with chronic illnesses. Beginning tomorrow, the city will open hundreds of cooling centers across the five boroughs.
Speaker: 000:36:57
Amruta, aside from cooling centers and vans that the New York City mayor announced, what else is important to be, you can do to stay cool in record heat, especially if you’re not able to access those facilities?
Speaker: 300:37:12
Yeah. We’ve done a lot of work, especially in the Greater Boston area to try and understand what the, factors are that encourage people to use public spaces for cooling activities and also what some of the barriers might be. I think a couple of things that are really important is that people who would use those facilities want active cooling or active opportunities to become cooler in places that they’re already going. So I think one of the things that the mayor mentioned earlier was providing drinking water in those high important component, rather than having another place that people have to go to get protection from the heat. Other things are looking for other types of cooling. So public splash pads, public pools, places where people could use water based activities. We know that those are really protective during extreme heat waves as well. And then finally making drinking water widely available, shaded spaces widely available. Maybe those aren’t as effective as air conditioned spaces, but in an opportunity to have shade versus direct sunlight, I think the shade will often be preferable,
Speaker: 000:38:28
to reduce some of those health impacts as well. I do wanna talk about shade, but first, can I just ask you about the water breaks, especially for outdoor workers? We heard Miami Dade mayor Danielle LaVine Cava talk about the fact that they tried to pass legislation in Miami that was overturned, by the governor. The same and the similar things we’ve seen in Texas in 2023. Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott approved a law eliminating ten minute water breaks for construction workers arguing that it bogs down businesses. As we’re seeing some states move to take away these protections from different municipalities, what can people who work outdoors or have to be outdoors for prolonged periods of time do to stay safe?
Speaker: 300:39:13
It’s a good question. And I think, you know, carrying water on their person so that they can continue to take sips of water throughout the day, it’s really important to stay hydrated. That’s the only way that we’re going to see, you know, less of these extreme health outcomes. And one of the things that I would argue from a public health perspective is that, yes, it could be disruptive to have a ten minute water break, but it would also be disruptive to have a worker who experiences heat stress or heat exhaustion or heat stroke and has to have a more severe medical intervention as a result. So I think it’s important for businesses to take those different trade offs into consideration. Do I give my workers a ten minute water breaks in order to ensure that I’m not they’re not experiencing a larger health event down the line? So, you know, I think I think it’s really important to make sure that people can have access to hydration, access to breaks, access to shaded spaces if they’re working outdoors.
Speaker: 000:40:08
As we’re talking about shade, last summer during another heat wave in Europe, we spent an hour talking about the value of shade and staying cool and why most cities in The US don’t have enough of it. Here’s V. Kelly Turner, a professor of planning at UCLA.
Speaker: 300:40:23
Shade fundamentally changes the equation about how much energy your body needs to expend when it’s hot. All else equal, a person standing in the shade can be up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than someone just a few feet away standing in the sunlight.
Speaker: 000:40:40
You can find that conversation online at the 1a.org. Emerita, this morning, I will say it was a wonderful, amazing 68 degrees in DC. I was so excited. I had a wonderful few minutes outside before I came into the station. I feel like I’ve been trapped inside for so long. As someone who’s researched the effects of heat on mental health as well, what do we need to know about that?
Speaker: 300:41:02
Yeah. We know that heat has really severe impacts on people’s physical health and what’s starting to become more apparent is that people’s mental health is really impacted as well. We’ve seen in some recent work that my team has done looking at emergency department visits associated with all different types of mental health causes, increases in emergency department visits as summertime temperatures increase. So this is for things like substance use disorders, schizophrenia, self harm, mood disorders, anxiety, stress disorders. There are a whole host of different mental illnesses that present and get exacerbated
Speaker: 000:41:36
during periods of extreme heat. We got this email from Jordan. Amrita, I wonder if you can just answer it quickly. Jordan says, I’ve heard that those who take SSRI medications for anxiety or depression have a more difficult time regulating body temperature and wind up suffering a bit more in excessive heat. Is there any truth to this?
Speaker: 300:41:55
Yes. This is actually, a documented pathway. SSRIs can cause heat intolerance because they interfere with the hypothalamus, which is the temperature regulator in the brain. This also, can increase the risk of things like dehydration, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. I think SSRIs also have been shown to, interfere with sweat production as well. So, you know, taking SSRIs can impair your body’s cooling ability. They can also disrupt the thirst mechanism. So they can make it harder to know when your body is actually getting thirsty, which is a signal that starts the pathway of dehydration. So again, all of the same things that we’ve been talking about previously, just making sure that you’re staying hydrated, important for folks who have underlying medical conditions that require treatment with SSRIs.
Speaker: 000:42:45
Jibo, I just wanna shift the conversation back to the idea of federal policy, federal funding. The Trump administration is proposing a $1,700,000,000 or about 27% cut to NOAA as part of the 2027 fiscal splint spending plan. How will these cuts affect forecasting, if at all?
Speaker: 400:43:04
Yeah. This is a really important point, and there’s a lot of things that worry me about this, but the most relevant to our conversation is that staff cuts would mean things like weather balloon launches and sensor maintenance are no longer happening. Weather balloon launches, happen regularly. They help us measure wind, temperature, humidity, pressure, and make those severe weather forecasts. And the administration has said that they want to pivot to AI, that they think that this is a way forward in forecasting, but artificial intelligence is only as strong as the data that’s being input. And if we’re not getting that robust data from the field, which takes takes boots on the ground, takes people out there launching the balloons themselves or fixing sensors at sea, then we’re just not the quality of our forecast is going to be severely degraded.
Speaker: 000:43:51
We just have about a minute or two left. I just wanna ask you, Amrutha, if we talk about climate change making it hotter each year and this is our new normal, what should we be thinking about or doing as individuals or at the community level?
Speaker: 300:44:04
We we have a lot of, individual level protective factors. One of the ones that I like to mention is, social networks, reliance on social networks to help us to stay safe during times of extreme weather, including extreme heat. You know, David mentioned earlier, some of the vulnerable populations, including the elderly, making sure that friends are checking in on friends, neighbors are checking in on neighbors or if you know that your loved one has a medication that they’re taking that they might, that might impact their ability to regulate during heat waves, that they have access to the resources that they need. I think there are a lot of other resources that are available, that we’ve been talking about over the course of the last little bit. And, one of the best ways that we can make sure that especially those folks who are vulnerable know about the resources that are available within your community is also through those social networks as well.
Speaker: 000:44:59
That was Emerita Nuri Sarma. She’s an environmental epidemiologist and assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. I wanna thank Jeeva Lang as well for joining us, a staff writer at Heatmap News. Remember, the one a podcast is a great way to catch up on anything you might have missed. It’s where you’ll find our best guests and stories every day. Today’s producers were Arfy Geddie and Thomas Lu. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I’m Nyla Budou in for Jen White. Jen’s out for a few weeks. Join me tomorrow for the Friday news roundup. This is one a.
Climate Change and Extreme Heat End of Summer Episode with Dr. Kelly Turner and Dr. Ladd Keith
Duration: 00:53:01
Released: 2023
Series: America Adapts - The Climate Change Podcast
In episode 192 of America Adapts, Doug Parsons hosts Dr. Kelly Turner and Dr. Ladd Keith. Kelly is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and Ladd is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona. We learn how extreme heat disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. We also explore the evolving media coverage of extreme heat. The three of us break down the highs and lows of all the media coverage of extreme heat this past summer. We also learn about Kelly’s research on heat’s impact on California schools, and what that means for both public health and student learning. We take a dive into federal approaches to heat management and learn about the glaring disparity in resources and attention allocated to extreme heat compared to other climate hazards and ponder the potential for FEMA to classify extreme heat as a disaster declaration. We also discuss the value of having a national adaptation plan for extreme heat planning. Finally, and yes, we go there, we get an update on the efforts to name heat waves. We highlight the pros and cons of this approach and discuss other options. It is a gangbuster episode and that’s just a sampling of what we cover. Transcripts for this episode available here. (These are computer generated so pardon the errors.) Topics Covered: Dr. Turner specializes in heat equity research, while Dr. Keith focuses on heat policy planning and governance. Increasing prevalence of extreme heat due to climate change and its disproportionate impact on marginalized groups. Media coverage of extreme heat is becoming more sophisticated, highlighting impacts on workers and public health. Dr. Turner’s research in California focuses on schools and heat’s impact on student learning. Discussion of heating planning strategies including shade in urban design. The Biden administration is updating heat safety labor laws, emphasizing the need for comprehensive regulations at state and federal levels and the potential for FEMA labeling heat events as disaster declarations. Naming heat waves to increase public awareness is debated, highlighting the importance of reaching vulnerable populations. Will heat lead to managed retreat from regions that become uninhabitable? A national adaptation plan is emphasized to address heat impacts, especially for marginalized communities. Thoughts on Jeff Goodell’s “The Heat Will Kill You” book. Donate to America Adapts Subscribe to the America Adapts newsletter here. Listen to America Adapts on your favorite app here! Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/americaadapts/ @usaadapts https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-parsons-america-adapts/https://www.linkedin.com/in/laddkeith/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-kelly-turner-a321a21b/ Links in this episode: https://luskin.ucla.edu/person/v-kelly-turner https://www.laddkeith.com/ Shade is an essential solution for hotter citieshttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02311-3 Opinion: How California can keep kids cool amid extreme heat https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-07-18/california-extreme-heat-schools-kids-equity How cities are battling extreme heat, and why record-breaking temps don’t tell the whole story https://news.arizona.edu/story/how-cities-are-battling-extreme-heat-and-why-record-breaking-temps-dont-tell-whole-story?fbclid=IwAR0YgLHqTVhNXpZnE5T_mpLf-N9ZxA2VaqE-b1BpZuKIVU96pFXRZhM1zjk Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory https://sw-ifl.asu.edu/?fbclid=IwAR0H703Z4jWEheQDYuv2N2cQzvrJOVkM11LW001tZBJIR6GmfTma9NW77TE https://climas.arizona.edu/?fbclid=IwAR0H703Z4jWEheQDYuv2N2cQzvrJOVkM11LW001tZBJIR6GmfTma9NW77TE Reporting on Extreme Heat and Healthhttps://ghhin.org/press/?fbclid=IwAR04LNV-ZvBvIOV-nMLFROLO0ZWu1MdJmIZ7ofuNQ92VihN0smNmhPt12U4 Donate to America Adapts Follow on Apple Podcasts Follow on Android Doug Parsons and Speaking Opportunities: If you are interested in having Doug speak at corporate and conference events, sharing his unique, expert perspective on adaptation in an entertaining and informative way, more information can be found here! Now on Spotify! List of Previous Guests on America Adapts Follow/listen to podcast on Apple Podcasts. Donate to America Adapts, we are now a tax deductible charitable organization! Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Strategies to Address Climate Change Risk in Low- and Moderate-income Communities - Volume 14, Issue 1 https://www.frbsf.org/community-development/publications/community-development-investment-review/2019/october/strategies-to-address-climate-change-low-moderate-income-communities/ Podcasts in the Classroom – Discussion guides now available for the latest episode of America Adapts. These guides can be used by educators at all levels. Check them out here! The 10 Best Sustainability Podcasts for Environmental Business Leadershttps://us.anteagroup.com/news-events/blog/10-best-sustainability-podcasts-environmental-business-leaders The best climate change podcasts on The Climate Advisorhttp://theclimateadvisor.com/the-best-climate-change-podcasts/ 7 podcasts to learn more about climate change and how to fight ithttps://kinder.world/articles/you/7-podcasts-to-learn-more-about-climate-change-and-how-to-fight-it-19813 Directions on how to listen to America Adapts on Amazon Alexahttps://youtu.be/949R8CRpUYU America Adapts also has its own app for your listening pleasure! Just visit the App store on Apple or Google Play on Android and search “America Adapts.” Join the climate change adaptation movement by supporting America Adapts! Please consider supporting this podcast by donating through America Adapts fiscal sponsor, the Social Good Fund. All donations are now tax deductible! For more information on this podcast, visit the website at http://www.americaadapts.org and don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts. Podcast Music produce by Richard Haitz Productions Write a review on Apple Podcasts ! America Adapts on Facebook! Join the America Adapts Facebook Community Group. Check us out, we’re also on YouTube! Executive Producer Dr. Jesse Keenan Subscribe to America Adapts on Apple Podcasts Doug can be contacted at americaadapts @ g mail . com
Heat is a ‘silent killer’
Duration: 00:32:54
Released: 2019
Series: Better Off
Climate change will mean more extreme weather, including heat waves. And it’s not a distant threat—we’re already seeing the effects now in the United States. In this week’s episode, we explore the health threat posed by severe heat and how our society needs to adapt in the decades ahead. You’ll hear from Augusta Williams, a doctoral student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who studies how extreme heat can affect our bodies and minds. She’ll explain why heat is considered a “silent killer” and how we can combat the effects of our warming world. Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/heat-pod This episode was produced with assistance from Veritalk, a podcast from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
How The Current Heat Dome Can Affect Human Health
Duration: 00:10:58
Released: 2024
Series: Short Wave
Right now, there’s a “heat dome” lingering over the southwestern U.S. – a high pressure system that pushes hot air down and traps it, raising the temperature. Heat is becoming increasingly lethal as climate change causes more extreme heat. So in today’s encore episode, we’re exploring heat. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer talks with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber about how the human body copes with extended extreme heat and how today’s heat warning systems could better protect the public. With scientists predicting a very hot summer, if you can, stay cool out there, dear Short Wavers.What science story do you want to hear next on Short Wave? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Why are scientists planting tiny forests in big cities?
Duration: 00:12:12
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
Healthy forests help combat climate change, provide humans with drinking water and even improve mental and physical health. But it’s hard to imagine an entire forest in the middle of a big city. That’s where micro-forests come into play — public forests on a smaller scale, filled with native plants. They exist around the world, and producer Rachel Carlson went to visit the largest micro-forest in California in this encore episode. She joins host Emily Kwong to chat about what she saw. Interested in more of the science behind urban nature? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Why Heat Waves Become Deadly
Presenting: The Carbon Copy – Why Heat Waves Become Deadly
Duration: 00:28:23
Released: 2022
Series: How to Save a Planet
Today we’re sharing an episode of The Carbon Copy, a climate change podcast produced by Canary Media. The topic is extremely timely: heat waves. This summer saw extreme heat blanketing almost every region of the northern hemisphere. And these heat waves aren’t just uncomfortable or inconvenient. They’re deadly. In most years, extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other weather-related disaster. This episode asks: how can we better prepare for these heat waves? Some of the answers are surprisingly simple–and they could help address problems beyond extreme heat.Check out the rest of the series on Spotify or CanaryMedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Video Clips
Climate Change Resilience Cooling an Urban Heat Island
American Museum of Natural History, 08 11, 2018
Video (1:42)
Description
Cities tend to be much warmer than their surrounding areas, and global warming is exacerbating this heat island effect. Painting roofs white helps cool buildings and lower energy demand. In New York City, installing these reflective rooftops supports the City’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
Visit the Museum’s Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth to explore how climate works and the consequences of climate change. Find more info here: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/rose-center-for-earth-and-space/david-s.-and-ruth-l.-gottesman-hall-of-planet-earth
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© American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
Transcript
0:02 · COMMISSIONER GREGG BISHOP: The “urban heat island” effect affects a lot of cities like New York. Because a tremendous amount of buildings, a lot of concrete, and little vegetation increases the overall temperature of the city. And when the city is really, really, really hot, it affects the health of our citizens, individuals who may suffer from asthma, or may be susceptible to heat waves, our elderly population. So, heat actually affects life and safety.
0:31 · One of the strategies that we have to combat the urban heat island effect is the NYC CoolRoofs initiative, which works simply by painting the roofs white.
0:39 · BRIDGET CARTER: See how the coating is going inside the seams?
0:42 · Put it on as heavy as you can get it.
0:44 · BISHOP: Many buildings, because of the black roof, absorb heat. And painting them white reduces the internal temperature of a building by 10-30 percent.
0:53 · CARTER: Remember guys, don’t stretch the coating.
0:55 · Don’t stretch the coating.
0:56 · Where is your bucket?
0:57 · That reflective coating is going to keep the building cooler, conserve energy for the people that live in the building— less air conditioning and less fans being run. People can save some money.
1:07 · Very energy efficient.
1:08 · BISHOP: This CoolRoofs program is really a part of the Mayor’s strategy to lower New York City’s emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and to really help New York City become a great partner in fighting climate change.
Extreme Heat Is the New Normal
New York Times Opinion, 08 28, 2026
Video (15:42)
Description
We filmed “A New Inferno,” the short documentary above, in Phoenix, one of the hottest cities in America, through some of the city’s hottest days of 2025, during one of the hottest years on record globally. On one of our production days, temperatures reached 118 while we were filming outside.
In the face of extreme heat, we documented firefighters and paramedics of the Phoenix Fire Department saving lives in real time. We wanted to call attention to a specialized technique of ice bag immersion for people facing life-threatening heat stroke. We hope that telling their story and showcasing the efficacy of this strategy will encourage wider adoption of this protocol across the country.
Yet this procedure is ultimately a stopgap, as firefighters do their best to adapt to the climate crisis in front of them. The underlying story of heat in Phoenix is one of broader, interlocking crises: homelessness and substance use disorders that are deeply entangled with urban heat, each amplifying the other, illustrating how climate change affects the disenfranchised most brutally.
With our film, we aim to reframe how the public thinks about heat: as an invisible, silent killer reshaping the rhythms of urban life.
Documentary and text by By Nita Blum-Reddick and Jonathan Pickett
More from Op-Docs: https://www.nytimes.com/column/op-docs
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0:00 Phoenix is only getting hotter
2:06 ‘The feedback loop of nightmares’
3:53 Ice bag immersion training simulation
7:40 How firefighters respond to heat-related emergencies
12:55 ‘He was really close. He was at that threshold.’
14:40 Facing a warming world
Transcript
Phoenix is only getting hotter
0:00 · [SIREN]
0:20 · Special call rescue 903.
0:23 · So it looks like the male patient —— he’s on the side of the road, probably heat-related.
0:28 · He’s not responsive at all.
0:30 · How long has he been down?
0:32 · Unknown downtime.
0:34 · OK, cool.
0:35 · We’ll be there in a minute, bro.
0:36 · Easy.
0:38 · [HONKING] [TENSE MUSIC] “Phoenix is known for heat, but it’s never been this hot before.”
0:52 · “That’s a record.”
0:53 · “Broken a record.”
0:54 · “An all-time record.”
0:56 · “And we’re already experiencing that human toll.”
0:59 · “Arizona has reported over 800 heat-related deaths.”
1:02 · “Governor Hobbs declaring a state of emergency.”
1:05 · [SCREECHING TIRES] “They’re turning to tools that could be the difference between life or death.”
1:19 · “Starting this year, each Phoenix fire truck will be immersing heatstroke victims in ice.”
1:26 · Put it right over their chest and their groin.
1:29 · Get it right on top of them.
1:31 · It’s the evolution of our job.
1:34 · Heat-related emergencies are definitely on the rise, and we’re on the front lines.
1:39 · This is what we have to do.
1:42 · So they’re kind in this little cocoon filled with ice and water.
1:47 · “Potentially saving them before reaching a hospital.”
1:50 · [HONKING] Another day in paradise, baby.
2:04 · Go check him out.
2:04 · Go check his temp.
‘The feedback loop of nightmares’
2:08 · He’s overheated.
2:09 · Sir, we’re going to take you to the hospital, OK?
2:15 · OK, keep that arm still, OK?
2:16 · What’s your name?
2:19 · Do you know where you are?
2:22 · He’s ODing.
2:26 · K-1 fire dispatch.
2:29 · 11,309.
2:32 · This is where we’re at in the city of Phoenix.
2:37 · You hang around our station long enough, you see people living a feedback loop of nightmares —— the heat, the drugs, and homelessness.
2:54 · I know that I won’t be able to help everyone.
2:58 · But I just want to be that relief for as long as possible.
3:12 · Did you do any alcohol or drugs today?
3:15 · Use any alcohol or drugs?
3:16 · Yeah?
3:16 · What did you use?
3:17 · Did you use fentanyl?
3:18 · [SIREN] Yeah, mate.
3:29 · The heat makes people do some strange things.
3:32 · [SINGING] When you’re strange, faces come out.
3:38 · When you’re strange.
3:40 · When you’re strange.
3:46 · OK, he still has a pulse.
3:47 · It’s just high.
3:49 · Hypothermia alert.
3:50 · Arriving.
Ice bag immersion training simulation
3:56 · It’s going to be a 40s male, altered level of consciousness.
3:59 · We found this patient down at a bus stop.
4:02 · His temperature was too high for our thermometer to read.
4:04 · It just said high.
4:05 · Can you just hand whatever she needs?
4:07 · Let’s add some ice.
4:08 · Let’s add some water.
4:09 · Let’s get them on the monitor.
4:10 · Let’s see what we’re dealing with.
4:11 · So we can help with this.
4:12 · Alert, five minutes out.
4:14 · And it sounds like we got another one coming.
4:16 · [BEEPING] We got more ice.
4:19 · We’re going to try to get them down to under 41.
4:21 · And under 41, we’ll get them out of the cold water immersion.
4:25 · She had a GCS of 5 and a temperature of 107.6 on arrival.
4:30 · Shannon, can you bring some Levophed?
4:31 · I think his pressure’s going to tank on us.
4:35 · Hopefully, our temp will be coming down soon.
4:37 · Your temp is 42.6.
4:40 · 42.6?
4:40 · Great.
4:40 · So we’re starting to make some progress here, guys.
4:43 · I’ve got 42.2.
4:45 · I love that.
4:45 · [TRAFFIC WHIRRING] “The heat is taking a devastating toll again this summer with 44 deaths confirmed so far.
5:08 · And with homeless shelters across the valley full, demand for those cooling center seats has been enormous.”
5:27 · There’s a large population of unhoused people that is out in the heat constantly, right?
5:31 · And so it compounds, OK?
5:34 · So one of you —— I want you to come up and establish if they’re conscious.
5:38 · Eric, I want you to take the back of your hand and touch the sidewalk.
5:42 · OK?
5:43 · Pull your glove back.
5:44 · If that’s hot, that patient is really hot.
5:47 · This is also, potentially, a patient who now has burn injuries.
5:50 · Right?
5:51 · They’ve been laying on the pavement.
5:53 · That might be 170 degrees with potential first- and second- degree burns.
5:59 · That’s it.
6:00 · Anybody got any questions?
6:09 · I mean, it’s so simple, right.
6:12 · Like, OK?
6:13 · This is kind of barbaric in a sense because it’s just a blue bag with ice.
6:21 · But the heat is definitely not going away.
6:25 · And this is all we have right now.
6:35 · Engine 18.
6:41 · K deck 9.
6:48 · This is going to be a busy day, though.
6:49 · It’s not really hot yet.
6:51 · It’s probably 100 degrees, but it’s super humid.
6:53 · It’s not a good start to the day.
6:56 · Why do you sweat so much, man?
6:57 · Are you watching “Cops”?
6:58 · Man, that dumpster fire almost kicked my ass.
7:02 · Have a good day.
7:04 · Thank you, my friend.
7:10 · Yeah, she’s moving too fast.
7:14 · Exactly.
7:14 · Tell her to slow down.
7:15 · ’Cause I haven’t introduced my daughter to nobody.
7:17 · Ooh, that’s crucial.
7:19 · But, yeah.
7:20 · So I think I’m going to pull back a little bit.
7:24 · And fallback game is like Nick Van Exel three.
7:26 · Dog.
7:27 · Wet.
7:28 · Kobe.
7:30 · The universe will always work it out, bro.
7:33 · [BEEPING] Fire Department.
7:36 · What’s the address?
‘He was really close. He was at that threshold.’
12:58 · Like, if somebody didn’t find him at that particular moment.
13:01 · So I don’t know if they induced coma, but he was in bad shape.
13:05 · To be intubated is —— a lot of times, that was associated with, like, they’re probably not coming out of the hospital, right?
13:11 · [MUSIC PLAYING] Engine 18, arrived on scene, finding patient lying next to bus stop, overheating and not breathing.
13:30 · Patient was placed in cold immersion bag with ice on top and surrounding his body.
13:39 · Part of you knows, like, damn, we did all this stuff.
13:44 · But even our best effort —— he might not have had a good outcome.
13:54 · Fortunately, it’s part of life, you know.
13:59 · But we try to do the best.
14:00 · So I felt like we did the best we could for him.
14:13 · It’s a nice night, bro.
14:15 · Yeah, it is, dog.
14:17 · But if it’s so hot out here that we got to throw people in bags, what are we doing here?
14:24 · Maybe that’s a sign.
14:25 · It’s the devil’s playground, bro.
14:27 · [Expletive] It ain’t fun here anymore.
14:30 · You know what I mean?
14:35 · [SIREN CHIRPS] Ooh, the boys.
14:38 · Go get some.
Heat Wave Cooling Our Cities Without Air Conditioning
Bloomberg Originals, 03 08, 2023
Video (12:22)
Description
Humans are increasingly reliant on air conditioning, but its use contributes to global warming. As the world warms and demand rises, how can we make A/C sustainable? In Spain and India, Kal Penn explores two innovative solutions.
Getting Warmer is Bloomberg’s exclusive new show about climate, clean energy and business, anchored by actor and former White House aide Kal Penn.
Accompany him on his journey as he takes an up-close look at bold climate solutions and discovers new facets of the global transition to clean energy.
In a hosted studio segment, Penn sifts through the overwhelming news about our climate and breaks down the facts and trends to understand with a dose of humor and optimism. Why are the recycling symbols on your plastic cups misleading? How does the carbon credit market work and does it actually help? And what is the future of water in a drought-ridden world?
On the road, Penn meets the innovators, researchers, communities and businesses pivoting to new energy sources and spearheading low-carbon technologies. In documentary segments, Penn speaks to the self-declared “crypto cowboys” of Texas who claim Bitcoin mining can help stabilize the state’s troubled electrical grid, and travels to Nevada to visit the company attempting to build America’s first closed-loop supply chain for electric vehicles. In New York, Penn explores the urban designs proposed to save the city from the next Superstorm Sandy and goes inside New York’s Empire State building to investigate the challenges of decarbonizing our cities and landmarks.
The show builds on, and includes contributions from, Bloomberg Green’s award-winning team of climate journalists as well as London-based climate storytellers Jack Harries and Alice Aedy. With a focus on the most pressing questions for young viewers, Jack and Alice unpack one big idea each episode. From recycled wastewater to regenerative agriculture and the challenges of a just transition for workers in the energy sector, they’ll break down how countries across the world are finding intriguing solutions to our climate crisis, and outline the challenges ahead.
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Transcript
Intro
0:04 · Cooling, whether that’s air conditioning or refrigerators is probably one of the biggest challenges we face with respect to climate change.
0:13 · It’s one of the least publicized threats in my view for all the progress we are making towards decarbonizing a broader energy system.
0:24 · Global demand for air conditioning is predicted to triple by 2050.
0:29 · Meeting that demand is a challenge that’s at the heart of both the climate and cost of living crises around the world.
0:36 · I think the problem is very rancid because we see the prices of electricity going up.
0:41 · I don’t think that low income population can cope with all these increased prices.
0:46 · If everybody started to use air conditioning, for this we really need sustainable solutions to really take this forward.
0:55 · So what else can we do to survive extraordinary heat without costing the environment?
1:01 · Turns out some of the solutions already existed centuries ago.
Cool roofs
1:10 · Dr. Denia Kolokotsa has been studying energy efficiency in buildings for the last three decades.
1:17 · When I started doing this research everybody said that I was crazy.
1:21 · You know, what are you going to do?
1:23 · Now, I think everybody speaks about that.
1:26 · So that’s the difference.
1:29 · Denia has studied a deceptively simple solution to our cooling problem.
1:34 · Cool roofs.
1:35 · Mainly that can be tiles, paints, shingles whatever it is attached within a roof that has the ability to reflect the sunlight and emit the thermal energy that is absorbed by the surfaces.
1:52 · If it sounds a bit low tech to you that’s probably the point.
1:55 · This simple, yet effective solution has been around for centuries.
1:59 · It’s rooted in the concept of passive cooling used in ancient architecture.
2:05 · For example, passive cooling in Cyclades in Greece is to paint the buildings white to emit the sun back to the sky.
2:16 · Passive cooling in Egypt is to have smaller openings and smaller windows in order not to allow the sun to come in.
Madrids fish market
2:27 · Madrid is notoriously hot in the summer.
2:29 · That’s a problem for Mercamadrid, the world’s second biggest fish market.
2:34 · It has the mammoth task of keeping thousands of workers and fish cool under its massive roof.
2:53 · The market sells 172,000 tons of fish annually.
3:10 · For example we were told this guy came all the way from Scotland.
3:14 · Thanks to the cooling system, it’s still alive.
3:18 · Temperature inside the market used to get as high as 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit, in the summer.
3:25 · With thousands of people and fish sloshing in and out, keeping everything cold is a top priority.
3:33 · In 2018, the market underwent a 3 million Euro makeover to do just that.
3:51 · The entire roof was cleaned and repainted with a waterproof and highly reflective coating.
4:08 · The project also added 68 evaporative cooling units to supply a constant stream of cold air into the market.
4:33 · Mercamadrid says the new system saves up to 70% energy and cuts 34 tons of carbon emissions a year.
4:41 · The temperature is now kept around 15 degrees Celsius, or about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, even on the hottest of summer days.
4:58 · So cool roofs are helping this market, but in order to make a dent in the global demand for cooling we need multiple solutions working at once.
Skycool
5:11 · In California, a company has come up with a new cooling technology that is also inspired by ancient wisdom.
5:18 · About 10 years ago, I was finishing my PhD at Stanford and a labmate and I came across these references to a capability that apparently many ancient cultures had, which was the ability to make ice in the desert even though the air temperature was above freezing.
5:36 · It turned out they were taking advantage of a natural phenomenon that’s known as radiative cooling.
5:44 · All objects, including you and I, and the walls around us actually emit our own heat away as a kind of light that we can’t see.
5:53 · So this light happens to be in the infrared part of the spectrum.
5:57 · Now, if you go outside and look upwards our atmosphere actually lets out some of this light all the way out to outer space.
6:06 · This effect was often known as night sky cooling or nocturnal cooling because it’s really easy to observe at night.
6:15 · We asked the question, why can’t we make this passive cooling effect work during the daytime when we need cooling the most?
6:24 · The co-founders of Skycool then developed a nano material to achieve this effect.
6:30 · It’s a class of materials that when you put them outside on a hot day, are actually cool to the touch.
6:36 · It’s not getting heated up by the sun but it’s continuing to send that heat out upwards to the sky and space over those infrared wavelengths.
6:46 · We were the first to actually demonstrate that radiative cooling was possible during the daytime.
6:50 · A common challenge early on has been to kind of reorient engineers and people working in this industry from thinking about their cooling systems as a simple box that they’ve been used to for decades, and instead to kind of imagine a new possibility, which is that you might need a little more area on your roof but in return you get all this energy savings.
7:13 · In the US, Skycool now works with supermarkets and data centers.
7:17 · They say their clients save cooling energy by 15-20% but Skycool is also keen to introduce their technology to emerging economies like India, where demand for cooling is expected to skyrocket.
India
7:35 · Recently, they’ve partnered with industrial equipment maker Trane to help Indian street vendors who have little access to refrigerators.
7:43 · First, we came here, we studied how they were doing, and immediately found out they had 30% waste.
7:59 · Anuradha makes $8 a day selling vegetables.
8:03 · Some days she went home with just about $2 because of the hot weather.
8:12 · They are at the bottom of the society.
8:15 · These people are pushing the cart through the streets and they don’t have power and other things.
8:21 · Back in the lab, the engineers have developed a cart to solve the vendor’s problem.
8:26 · They’re applying Skycool’s high-tech film on top so that the fruits and vegetables will stay cool, even under harsh daylight.
8:33 · As long as it’s exposed to the sky, you get the cooling.
8:37 · As you can see, the temperature of the canopy is low.
8:41 · Inside the cart is also low.
8:43 · And as you come down, it’s more than 35 degrees.
8:48 · But here it is, you know, 25, 22.
8:51 · All kinds of leafy vegetables.
8:53 · They lose water and shrivels very quickly.
8:56 · This technology has helped them to extend life of this by at least one day.
9:02 · This is a zero energy input, zero water input way of getting cooling, that is unlike any other technology or capability that’s out there.
9:29 · Skycool has been collaborating with 3M in their research.
9:33 · Together, they received $3.5 million of funding from the US Department of Energy to improve their films, making them cheaper and more durable.
9:43 · So I am most excited about our technology in the context of emerging economies.
9:47 · So places like India, South America, Africa, these are locations where air conditioning has very low penetration rates today.
9:55 · So there’s enormous growth potential for cooling equipment.
10:00 · We’ve seen some pretty compelling examples of alternative cooling solutions, but are they enough to really slow our demand for air conditioning?
10:08 · With all these appliances and facilities that we have, life is becoming easier.
10:14 · So if life is becoming easier you don’t think how to solve problems.
10:18 · So the all day solution should be reminded now.
10:23 · Denia says only having cool materials on our roofs is not enough.
10:28 · We have to combine it with greenery and other technologies to lower the temperatures of our cities.
10:34 · And every building has to play a part to make a difference.
10:38 · In Spain, the energy demand for air conditioners is so high that the government had to impose a rule last summer to stop people from turning their AC’s below 27 degrees Celsius, or 81 Fahrenheit.
10:53 · Today’s buildings are not really designed to optimally exploit radiative cooling because architects and engineers didn’t know that it was a possibility.
11:02 · But if these kinds of materials are available you might imagine entirely different configurations for next generation, extremely energy efficient buildings.
11:13 · If we wanna stop the vicious feedback loop between air conditioning and global warming, the International Energy Agency says policy action is critical to ensure a sustainable path to the future of cooling.
11:26 · We need more than money to essentially drive these initiatives.
11:30 · We need to have certainly policy changes but we also need to change how individuals make decisions.
11:35 · Cooling equipment is only as efficient as the policies that governments dictate.
11:40 · There is no solution fits all.
11:42 · But I think that now that we have the citizens that have raised their awareness and understand that they cannot continue consuming electricity the way they used to be, things will change very dramatically in the near future.
Heatwave What is the urban heat island effect
Sky News, 07 15, 2022
Video (2:40)
Description
Extreme heat is going to be felt across the country, but it’s our cities that will be worst hit, as a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect drives temperatures even higher.
There are solutions but it takes time and investment. Sky’s Science Correspondent Thomas Moore reports.
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Transcript
0:00 · our towns and cities just weren’t built to be this hot baked by the sun with little shade urban living can be stifling at mossborne parkside academy in east london the children are well drilled the school is victorian and keeping the classrooms cool is a challenge
0:18 · all our windows are open and as much as possible before and after school and during the day we have blackout blinds so we actually have them closed when the children aren’t learning and just to try and keep those classrooms as cool as possible temperatures could top 40 degrees in parts of england early next week but in the cauldron of the concrete jungle the heat is intensified still further studies have shown the centers of london and manchester can be 10 degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas it’s an effect called the urban
0:47 · heat island and with a thermal imaging camera you can see it in action the brick the concrete the asphalt is all glowing red hot as it absorbs the sun’s radiation and stores it as heat but look at the contrast of a tree it’s not just the shade beneath which is a cooler blue but the leaves themselves are kind of in between on that color spectrum as they’re absorbing some of the sun’s energy but evaporating water
1:13 · keeping them cool and the surrounding air data given to sky news shows how that makes a difference even in a relatively small town sensors dotted around guildford in surrey show the heat rising on monday morning by early afternoon the temperature in the built-up area was seven degrees higher than a nearby park
1:33 · and it took longer to cool still three degrees warmer at midnight you will not feel comfortable you know the thermal comfort is an issue but if you are an elderly or having any pre-existing you know the the conditions so you are higher at risk for the heat stroke or cardiovascular or the respiratory you know the impact and that can be fatal that
1:55 · can be fatal 90 of the uk population is expected to live in an urban area by 2050. the charity trees for cities is planting shade for the future but warns it can’t do it fast enough there’s never been more focus and funding for trees in general which is fantastic we should recognize that but a lot of that funding historically has been focused on on the the royal
2:17 · environment on the countryside and we believe that we need to shift that balance in order to invest much more into our cities the government says it wants to plant 150 000 trees in urban areas but the money for this year has already run out the sooner they go in the ground the greater the shade and the even more intense heat waves of the future thomas more sky news
How America’s hottest city is trying to cool down
Vox, 09 20, 2021
Video (6:48)
Description
Can trees help save Phoenix from extreme heat?
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It’s time to stop looking at trees as a form of “beautification.” They are, instead, a living form of infrastructure, providing a variety of services that include stormwater management, air filtering, carbon sequestration, and, most importantly for a city like Phoenix, Arizona, they cool the environment around them.
Trees can lower neighborhood temperatures in three ways: 1) Their shade prevents solar radiation from hitting paved surfaces like concrete and asphalt, which absorb energy and rerelease it into the air as heat. 2) Their leaves pull heat from the immediate area in order to evapotranspirate water that’s drawn from the soil. And, 3) If you’re standing under one, a tree protects your body directly from the sun’s rays. If you’ve ever made a summer visit to a dry, hot city like Phoenix, you’ll know how important shade is for making any outdoor experiences tolerable.
As Phoenix deals with a rising frequency of extreme heat waves — which aren’t only deadly, but also cause worrisome spikes in energy demand — the city is looking to trees as part of its heat mitigation strategy. Phoenix isn’t devoid of trees, but they’re distributed unevenly across the city. A quick glance at a satellite image of the metro area reveals substantial green splotches in the north and east and brown ones in the south and west, where many lower-income neighborhoods are located.
So Phoenix recently pledged to reach “tree equity” by 2030, under an agreement with American Forests, a national tree organization. I visited Phoenix recently to take a look at the current state of the city’s urban forest. In this video, we use drone imagery and thermal cameras to understand how the urban design of the city contributes to extreme heat, and what it can do to cool down.
This is the first video of five videos we’re releasing on climate change. You can watch the second video, about high-voltage transmission lines ⚡️ and why the US isn’t ready for clean energy, here: https://youtu.be/s3ScJ_FwaZk
And the third video dives into prescribed burns, and how a decade of suppressing forest fires 🔥 may have made them worse, here: https://youtu.be/0o6ezu_h6iE
Further reading:
Tree Equity Score Tool by American Forests https://treeequityscore.org
Assessment of heat mitigation strategies in Phoenix by Arizona State University https://www.phoenix.gov/parkssite/Documents/PKS_Forestry/PKS_Forestry_NOAA_PHX_Urban_Spaces_Report.pdf
Urban Heat Implications from Parking, Roads, and Cars https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10201112
“Phoenix pledges tree equity for all neighborhoods by 2030” by KJZZ https://kjzz.org/content/1677263/phoenix-pledges-tree-equity-all-neighborhoods-2030
Phoenix Draft Climate Action Plan: https://www.phoenix.gov/oep/cap
Phoenix tree bank https://www.phoenix.gov/sustainability/plantatree
“50 Grades of Shade” by Ariane Middel https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/aop/BAMS-D-20-0193.1/BAMS-D-20-0193.1.xml
“A New Investigation About Who’s Getting Sick From Heat-Related Illness Should Be a Wakeup Call for America” by Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/01/a-new-investigation-about-who-is-dying-from-heat-related-illness-should-be-a-wakeup-call-for-america/
“As rising heat bakes US cities, the poor often feel it most” by NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/754044732/as-rising-heat-bakes-u-s-cities-the-poor-often-feel-it-most?t=1628079007286
“Can trees really cool our cities down?” by The Conversation https://theconversation.com/can-trees-really-cool-our-cities-down-44099
“Trees are key to fighting urban heat, but cities keep losing them” by NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/755349748/trees-are-key-to-fighting-urban-heat-but-cities-keep-losing-them
Watch our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/IZONyE
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Transcript
0:02 · I’m looking at a map of surface temperatures in the Phoenix metro area.
0:05 · So this is in Arizona, in the southwest US and it shows how hot the ground is in June.
0:10 · And this is a map of child poverty rates.
0:13 · Darker blue means more poverty.
0:15 · So this is heat.
0:16 · And this is poverty.
0:18 · Heat.
0:19 · Poverty.
0:20 · Heat, Poverty.
0:21 · The correlation is pretty obvious.
0:24 · This is where it becomes clear that climate change and wealth inequality are not really separate issues.
0:29 · And you can probably find examples of that wherever you go in the world, but for this story, I went… there.
0:36 · “An excessive heat warning is in effect.”
0:39 · “Warmer is the new normal in Phoenix.”
0:41 · “The city’s grappling with an increase in heat related deaths.”
0:44 · “Phoenix, last year, hitting 100 degrees or higher for more than 144 days.”
0:49 · “Climate change is one factor causing rising temperature.
0:53 · “Urban development is the other.”
0:58 · The forecasted high that day was 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:02 · That’s 44 degrees Celsius.
1:04 · But in reality, some areas can feel warmer or cooler than that.
1:09 · So here I am in a neighborhood with some of the hottest surface temperatures, but when I drove 8 miles north of there, I was in one of the coolest parts of Phoenix.
1:19 · And it was in the hot neighborhood where I met up with Eva Olivas.
1:23 · She’s a local community advocate and Phoenix native.
1:26 · It’s nice to meet you.
1:27 · OLIVAS: It’s nice to meet you.
1:28 · Can you tell me a little bit about this neighborhood and who lives here?
1:31 · OLIVAS: So the community of Central City South is located just south of the downtown business district.
1:38 · OLIVAS: The average income level for a family of four is about $19,000.
1:42 · OLIVAS: The vehicle ownership rate is between 23-28% of the population.
1:45 · Oh wow.
1:46 · OLIVAS: Yes, very low.
1:47 · So they’re very dependent on public transportation.
1:50 · This zip code has the highest rate of heat-related illnesses in the city, what makes people here vulnerable to extreme heat?
1:58 · Well, I think it’s a combination of things.
2:00 · We have the freeway.
2:02 · OLIVAS: We have the railroad tracks on the north.
2:04 · OLIVAS: We have the airport on the east.
2:06 · OLIVAS: So we’re like a little pocket.
2:07 · That’s a lot of pavement.
2:08 · OLIVAS: A lot of concrete, a lot of industry here.
2:13 · A lot of our streets, as you can see, don’t have sidewalks.
2:17 · You’re having to walk in the street, like we are.
2:20 · And there’s not a lot of shade.
2:22 · If you can look around, you don’t see a lot of trees.
2:26 · This is the Sonoran Desert, so of course the summers are hot.
2:29 · But it also seems like this entire city was almost designed to capture heat.
2:34 · The streets are so wide.
2:36 · This isn’t a highway, this is just the Phoenix grid.
2:38 · And the buildings are so flat and set back from the sidewalk, so they don’t create much shade at all.
2:44 · And then there’s the parking lots.
2:46 · I read one estimate that there are more than 4 parking spots for every car in Phoenix.
2:52 · The sun just beams into all that pavement.
2:54 · And it doesn’t just roast anyone who happens to walk across it, it’s also transferring heat to the air, day and night.
3:02 · Wow I really … did that poorly.
3:05 · Also, I promise this is not a Chevy ad, I just borrowed my dad’s car.
3:09 · So what do you do to try to mitigate heat in a city like this?
3:13 · Well, reflective roofs can help a bit.
3:15 · The thermal image shows the surface temperature of the dark roof is hotter than the white ones.
3:20 · And the city has also tried painting some roads with a more reflective coating.
3:25 · But if you compare the hottest and coolest neighborhoods, it’s pretty clear that the big difference between them isn’t the black or white surfaces.
3:33 · It’s the green ones.
3:36 · Plants are the variable that connects this map of heat to this map of poverty.
3:41 · And studies have confirmed that the cooling effect of cool roofs and cool pavements is smaller than the cooling effect of trees.
3:48 · “One of the best ways to beat the urban heat.”
3:50 · “The more trees you plant, the more benefits.”
3:53 · “It’s cleansing for the air.”
3:54 · “Reduce carbon footprint.”
3:55 · “Lower levels of stress.”
3:56 · “Decrease energy costs.”
3:58 · “Storm water management.”
3:59 · “It’s a very important engine of cooling.”
4:01 · If you take an area that’s just parking lots and buildings, and cover at least a quarter of the space with trees, you can lower air temperatures there by around 8 degrees Fahrenheit or 4.4 degrees Celsius.
4:12 · That’s according to a study from Arizona State University.
4:15 · For those who are used to humid summers, it can be hard to understand just how much relief shade provides in a dry heat.
4:22 · You can easily see the temperature difference on my arms and on the concrete there.
4:27 · So the city of Phoenix has committed funds to planting more trees.
4:30 · They want all neighborhoods to reach a minimal level of canopy cover by 2030.
4:36 · And I love the idea of recruiting an army of trees to protect the vulnerable from extreme heat.
4:42 · But there’s a problem.
4:44 · Outside of parks and along major streets, the urban forest currently depends not on public resources, but on private ones.
4:55 · What would it take for a street like this one to become one of those shady tree-lined streets that they have uptown.
5:02 · OLIVAS: Well, any tree that’s planted in this neighborhood in front of someone’s home, they would have to maintain.
5:09 · OLIVAS: The city does not maintain them in these residential areas.
5:13 · I see, okay.
5:14 · So there are some utility companies here that will give you a couple of free trees if you agree to plant them on the west side or south side of your home, because eventually that can end up saving something like 30% on your air conditioning bill.
5:26 · But it sounds like that doesn’t really solve the maintenance issue.
5:29 · OLIVAS: Correct.
5:30 · OLIVAS: Because there’s that tradeoff between shade or increased water bill.
5:35 · But it’s the cost of maintaining the trees that is challenging, obviously in a very low income neighborhood like ours.
5:41 · And it’s not a priority for them in their family, in their home.
5:45 · Are there no programs here that are actually going to take on the watering cost?
5:50 · OLIVAS: Zero.
5:51 · That is the responsibility of the homeowner and you have to remember, what did I say?
5:54 · These are mostly renters.
5:57 · I walked with Eva along Buckeye Road where there’s a big triangular lot, it’s owned by the city, and has been left unplanted.
6:04 · She said that would probably change with the city’s new tree equity plans.
6:07 · But she also hoped for some more basic things: like sidewalks, and shade shelters for all the bus stops.
6:15 · It was a reminder that wealth already affects access to infrastructure, even infrastructure that doesn’t have to be watered and pruned.
6:22 · And that’s what will have to change if cities like Phoenix want to make sure that the heaviest burdens of climate warming don’t fall on those who are least prepared to withstand them.
How Green Roofs Can Help Cities NPR
NPR, 07 12, 2017
Video (3:49)
Description
We took a field trip to the largest green roof in New York City. Then we imagined what the city could be like if all of its roof space was green.
Note: A previous version of this video incorrectly thanked the Audubon Society. We meant to thank the NYC Audubon Society.
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Transcript
Intro
0:01 · This is the largest green roof in New York City.
0:04 · It’s in the middle of bustling Manhattan, on top of the Javits Convention Center— a behemoth of a building with a six-block footprint.
0:13 · But the roof hasn’t always been green.
0:16 · Before 2014, it was totally barren.
0:20 · Now, just a few years later, when people walk out onto the roof, they say things like: “Amazing,” “That’s great,” “I didn’t expect this,” “What a surprise.”
0:28 · But besides the great reactions, there are practical benefits.
0:31 · We have 300,000 bees.
0:34 · We’ve seen 25 different species of birds on the roof.
0:36 · We reduced the temperature up here by about six degrees Fahrenheit.
0:39 · And we also save about 7 million gallons of stormwater runoff that’s absorbed in the soil and the plants that are on our roof.
0:46 · We’ve been able to reduce our energy
consumption by about 26 percent, and that translated for us last year
into a saving of about 3 million dollars.
0:55 · That is impressive.
Green Roofs
0:58 · How does one green roof get so much done?
1:01 · And what are all of the NOT green roofs in New York City doing with their lives?
1:06 · First, let’s see how much roof space actually exists.
1:09 · You know, they are a major part of urban landscapes.
1:12 · The the round number that most of us think exists is about 1 billion square feet.
1:18 · One billion with a ‘b.’
1:20 · That’s like 22 times the size of Central Park, in roofs.
1:24 · And in most cities, what isn’t roof is another impermeable surface like road, sidewalk, or parking
lot.
1:31 · And these surfaces create a lot of problems for cities That green roofs can actually help solve.
stormwater runoff
1:38 · Let’s take a look at three of these issues. The first is
stormwater runoff.
1:42 · Rainwater goes in pipes. It combines
with what’s called sanitary water.
1:48 · When there’s too much rainwater, which happens hundreds of times a year around Manhattan, the wastewater treatment
systems shut down, and valves just let the water just, you know, shunt out into the rivers. You know, it’s got human sewage.
2:01 · It’s the biggest source of pathogens to
the Manhattan Island.
2:04 · With green roofs, that water instead of going into the
drain and polluting the environment, ends up just evaporating the atmosphere
through the leaves of these plants.
heat island effect
2:13 · And then, there’s what scientists call the “heat island effect,” which basically means that cities are significantly warmer than the surrounding areas.
2:20 · I’ve seen asphalt roofs get up easily 170, 180 degrees Fahrenheit in the strong sunlight.
2:26 · They absorb about 90 to 95 percent of the sunlight.
2:30 · Green roofs, by comparison are close to air temperatures.
habitat loss
2:34 · Another problem green roofs can help solve is habitat loss.
2:37 · Cities can shrink or destroy the green space that’s crucial for certain plants and
animals to survive.
2:43 · Currently a lot of species might occur in smaller parks throughout the city that are relatively unconnected, But having high densities of green roofs would allow those patches to be more connected.
2:53 · Letting, for example, butterflies travel from patch to patch with lots of stepping stones of green roofs in between.
2:59 · And these are just three of the problems that green roofs can help solve.
conclusion
3:03 · But to really put a dent in any of these issues cities would have to implement green roofs at a large scale.
3:09 · Stuart Gaffin, the research scientist
you heard from earlier, estimates that if all of New York City’s 1 billion square feet of roof space were greened, those green roofs could lower the city’s
temperature by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit and absorb over 10 billion
gallons of stormwater each year.
3:27 · As cities continue to grow, all that empty roof space starts to look more and more like an opportunity, an untapped resource, a future ecosystem of problem-solving meadows in the sky.
How Singapore Uses Science to Stay Cool
Bloomberg Originals, 03 17, 2021
Video (9:49)
Description
Heat waves kill more people than any other extreme weather event: more than tornados, hurricanes, and even floods. That’s why scientists are coming up with novel, new designs to help keep temperatures down in Singapore.
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Transcript
Intro
0:01 · If you look at a thermal image of a city and then compare that to a map of vegetation, you’ll find that where there’s greenery, the temperature is lower.
0:11 · That’s because things like asphalt, concrete and shingled roofs absorb more heat from the sun than trees.
0:19 · This is the urban heat island effect, and it accounts for the higher temperatures in cities, often by several degrees compared with their surroundings.
0:28 · It’s becoming a huge risk to human health as growing urban populations exacerbate the heating effects of climate change.
0:36 · Heat waves kill more people than any other extreme weather event, more than tornadoes, hurricanes and even floods.
0:47 · That’s why urban heat island mitigation strategies are being studied in Singapore by a group of researchers.
0:54 · The government-backed project called Cooling Singapore is now in the process of combining everything they’ve learned to create a digital tool that can help cities all over the world, starting with Singapore.
Cooling Singapore
1:10 · In Singapore, close to the equator, temperatures regularly rise above 32 degrees Celsius or 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:19 · And the city structures only make it worse.
1:22 · And that is also the case for Singapore, which is basically a concrete jungle, more urbanized, more developed city.
1:29 · And even in Singapore, what you have is a situation whereby there’s a temperature difference of 7 degrees Celsius between the more urbanized and the more rural areas.
1:41 · The government has taken drastic steps to keep temperatures down.
1:46 · This is Gardens by the Bay, an award-winning park.
1:50 · And inside this greenhouse it’s a pleasant 24 degrees.
1:54 · That’s because the dome, along with two dozen nearby towers full of thousands of people, is chilled by what’s probably the world’s largest underground district cooling system.
2:04 · It uses a large central plant that cools water and then pipes it into banks, residential towers, an exhibition center, shopping malls and the city’s iconic Marina Bay Sands hotel and casino complex.
2:18 · So one of the biggest perks of using this system for the buildings is that they can save 40% in terms of electricity usage compared to your traditional air conditioners.
2:32 · And with Singapore relying on natural gas for most of its power, this new system means emissions savings equivalent to removing 10,000 cars from the city’s roads.
2:43 · That has big implications for the rest of the world.
2:45 · If things stay as they are, more than a third of the world’s electricity could end up being used to cool buildings and vehicles by 2050.
2:55 · As the world gets hotter, gets warmer, there is a greater need for air conditioning and as well as refrigerators, for instance.
3:03 · And the more people are buying these household appliances, the more energy usage they use and they release heat more, and that then exacerbates climate change.
3:18 · It’s a vicious circle.
Vegetation
3:20 · And so since 2017, researchers at Cooling Singapore have been identifying design solutions that reduce our need for so much cool air in the first place.
3:31 · One thing many cities have in common, and that’s the importance of vegetation.
3:36 · That’s a very important measure to mitigate the urban heat because of the shading effect, of course, and deep psychological effects of the vegetation.
3:46 · And also because of the possible evaporative cooling effect of the vegetation.
3:53 · Vegetation can be, of course, on the ground floor in form of trees and shrubs.
3:58 · And you can walk under them.
4:00 · This is the so-called canopy layer that the vegetation forms above us.
4:05 · But vegetation can also go up the facades of buildings and it can go to the roof of the buildings.
Garden City Feel
4:14 · Luckily, Singapore has been striving for the Garden City feel for quite some time.
4:20 · It was a vision initially introduced by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1967 to make life more pleasant for people.
4:28 · And today, Singapore is one of the world’s greenest cities in terms of urban vegetation.
4:33 · Kampung Admiralty, a community center that contains health facilities and social spaces, now provides more green space than the plot of land it was originally built on.
4:44 · It’s topped by a roofscape of staggered terraces covered in local plants, which functions as a community park, and a village green in the center that contains farm plots for residents to tend to.
4:56 · Parkroyal on Pickering was designed as a hotel in a garden that doubled the green-growing potential of its site.
5:04 · There’s now 15,000 meters of sky gardens, reflecting pools, waterfalls, planter terraces and green walls.
5:12 · And the government has big plans as well.
5:17 · Singapore actually has a plan to plant 1 million trees and add more green spaces over the next 10 years.
5:24 · It is actually a mix of one thing to reduce the urban heat island effect.
5:30 · But on the other hand, it’s also to to get the people to be more connected to nature.
5:39 · But it’s not enough.
Heat Mitigation
5:41 · The city-state has still been warming twice as quickly as the world average over the past six decades.
5:47 · That’s why Cooling Singapore has developed a catalog of other potential heat-mitigation measures.
5:54 · When you try to mitigate the urban heat island effect in a city or in any building, in a village as well, the first place to start is by shading of the windows.
6:05 · You have to keep areas clear so that the wind can move through it.
6:11 · Water of a certain depth can act as a very good thermal buffer.
6:15 · If you have to construct heavy buildings, such as high rises, at least you can make the surface, the facade less heavy.
6:24 · And you can protect it from direct sun penetration.
6:27 · We have to make sure that no combustion engines will be in the city in the middle, in the medium- to long-term range.
6:35 · So ideally, the electricity production is outside of the city.
6:39 · And you bring just the clean electricity into the city.
6:43 · You can at least minimize the use of energy in the city.
6:48 · And you can start to slowly convert the roofs, the facades of the city, into production areas for renewable energy.
6:58 · In Singapore, unfortunately, this is a limited option.
7:01 · But in the long run, it could produce up to 20%, 25% of the energy, of the electricity needed in Singapore.
7:10 · If all the roofs and the areas in the buildings, on the buildings, on the facades would be used to do that.
Urban Climate Twin
7:20 · With so many different ideas, Cooling Singapore is also designing a virtual model of the city to test them out.
7:26 · It’s called a Digital Urban Climate Twin, or DUCT, that will calculate how each element of the city’s design will impact the urban heat island effect.
7:37 · That means we model not only the geometry of the buildings digitally, but also we model the transportation, the insulation, the temperature, the radiation coming from the sun, the weather, the local weather, the local climate, the even very, very microclimate of the city, the water, the movement of people in the city.
8:01 · We can invent scenarios.
8:04 · We can design scenarios, test them before we actually build them.
8:09 · And if they test very well and we are sure that they will function, then we can start to build them and put them into reality.
Conclusion
8:23 · Singapore will be using this new tool to figure out which actions it should take next.
8:28 · And the model can be applied to any city, whether it needs to keep heat out or keep heat in, which will ultimately save energy, slow climate change and improve our quality of life.
8:41 · So this is something that Singapore will be able to export, maybe even together with its city development systems that it already has.
8:51 · Singapore is one of the very few cities in the world that really combined this scientific approach with a very well-established urban redesign and urban design approach.
9:03 · Through its agencies and the combination of its agencies, it has achieved a lot in the past.
9:10 · If it keeps following the scientific path and the combination with the other knowledge in the city already, we think that it will be a very comfortable and very livable city in the future, even more than today.
How systemic racism shaped the ecosystems of U.S. cities
Science Magazine, 10 09, 2020
Video (4:08)
Description
Historically Black and immigrant communities are more vulnerable to environmental stressors
Read the research: https://scim.ag/3nzjnQE
Credits
producer
Meagan Cantwell
supervising producer
Joel Goldberd
research
Schell et al., Science 2020
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay4497
special thanks
Elizabeth Pennisi
Pratheek Rebala
Sacha Vigneri
video footage
Meagan Cantwell
Pond5
Videoblocks
Videvo
archival footage
Dynamic Films
Encyclopedia Britannica Films
FDR Presidential Library
Prelinger Archives
photos
Library of Congress
Ted Etyan/Flickr
Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program
Enoch Pratt Free Library/Maryland’s State Library Resource Center
illustrations
British Library/Flickr
maps/data
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism/CNS/NPR
Johns Hopkins University
Library of Congress
Meagan Cantwell
Portland State/SUPR Lab
Robert K. Nelson et al., 2020 “Mapping Inequality”
music
“Vultures” by Chris Burns
Transcript
0:01 · The urban environment is a feat of human decision-making— from where to develop street grids lined with large glass office buildings, to which green spaces to preserve for outdoor recreation.
0:13 · How humans make these choices, and the natural environment’s response, can create extremely different ecosystems in neighborhoods just a few blocks away from each other.
0:23 · Researchers delved into dozens of studies to understand what drives these variations.
0:29 · One well documented phenomenon in cities is the relationship between wealth and biodiversity.
0:35 · More affluent areas generally have greater canopy cover, with larger, mature trees, as well as a higher diversity of birds.
0:45 · This is known as the “luxury effect.”
0:48 · Low-income areas typically have more man-made surfaces— including major heat-absorbers like asphalt and concrete, compared to higher-income areas.
0:59 · The lack of shade from trees and vegetation, combined with more asphalt and concrete, makes it hotter in these neighborhoods— a phenomenon known as an “urban heat island.”
1:10 · These communities are also more likely to be near sources of air pollutants, like expansive interstates pumping car exhaust.
1:19 · Although wealth can sometimes predict the outcomes of an urban ecosystem, there isn’t always a clear relationship.
1:26 · In some cases, the racial make-up of a neighborhood is better than income when forecasting canopy cover.
1:33 · Researchers explored studies that highlight how systemic racism shaped our build environment.
1:39 · One glaring example in the United States is residential segregation.
1:44 · From 1933-1968, the federal government limited access to homeownership among Black Americans through a practice known as redlining.
1:55 · Neighborhoods were graded based on the riskiness of providing a mortgage in the area.
2:00 · The grades ranged from A, the most desirable areas, full of wealthy businessmen, to D, neighborhoods considered high-risk investments due to a combination of factors: from their environmental quality and distance from large industrial factories to the main determinant, the presence of foreign-born and Black people.
2:22 · The inability for Black people to buy homes in these neighborhoods meant many types of capital investments left— landlords abandoned their properties, and public services, such as transportation and park maintenance, weren’t prioritized.
2:36 · Today, many U.S. cities still exhibit long-lasting environmental impacts from this discrimination.
2:42 · Neighborhoods which had a “D” grade in the 60s have about half the canopy cover of historically white communities.
2:50 · Some studies evaluate how the current environment relates to historically redlined communities, but researchers did not find any research that traces how ecosystems changed over time because of this segregation.
3:03 · They propose that because habitable regions are more spread out in these areas, animal populations struggle to breed since they are cut off from each other.
3:14 · The reduced breeding options for animals could have decreased gene diversity, an important way for animals to adapt to changing environments.
3:23 · And decreased gene flow of native species could promote the abundance of pest species, like mosquitos and brown rats, which carry diseases that can infect humans.
3:34 · The combination of all these outcomes— from urban heat islands to increased pests— make low-income, marginalized communities far more vulnerable to risks like climate change.
3:47 · Scientists say such evidence shows that conservation and social justice cross paths— especially along neighborhood streets.
How Urban Heat Impacts Communities of Color
Did You See This?, 07 21, 2021
Video (7:14)
Description
The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon affecting more than 100 cities across the U.S. — here’s how it works and why it disproportionately impacts communities of color.
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Transcript
How urban heat islands make the impacts of excessive heat worse
PBS NewsHour, 07 27, 2023
Video (6:11)
Description
Living in certain parts of a city can make the impacts of extreme heat worse. That’s because of a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect. A recent report by the research group Climate Central showed that more than 40 million Americans live in these hot spots. William Brangham discussed what this means for those residents with Michael Mendez of the University of California, Irvine.
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Transcript
What is an urban heat island
0:00 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, in addition to the dangers faced by where someone works, sometimes, where you live can also make the impacts of extreme heat worse, like living in certain parts of a city.
0:10 · That’s because of a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect. A recent report by the research group Climate Central showed that more than 40 million Americans live in these hot spots.
0:22 · So, what does this mean for those residents? And is there any way that they can get relief?
0:26 · For that we turn to Michael Mendez. He’s assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine, Professor Mendez, very good to have you on the “NewsHour.”
0:38 · Can you help us understand, what is the urban heat island effect?
0:43 · MICHAEL MENDEZ, University of California, Irvine: Thank you for having me here today.
0:45 · It’s a pleasure to be here to talk to you about this important issue that is affecting many people across the nation of – 40 percent of residents in the United States are under a heat advisory.
0:56 · And many of them are living in urban areas that don’t have adequate infrastructure, let alone environmental amenities like trees and other forms of greenery that provide shade. So, an urban heat island effect is where you have a lot of urbanized and suburban areas that are paved over with asphalt, concrete, other – other types of building materials that absorb the heat.
1:20 · And with little vegetation and trees for shade, and other types of cooling material, these areas and communities could be anywhere between five and even 20 degrees hotter than other neighborhoods that have more green space for shade.
1:36 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That is such a shocking difference in temperature, simply that can be driven by how a certain area is built and what the structures are made of?
1:45 · MICHAEL MENDEZ: Most definitely.
1:47 · I think many of us that are millennials, Gen Z or even older remember being on the hot turf, asphalt, in schools and see the steam actually permeate out of these hard heat-trapping surfaces. So imagine not just a schoolyard, which is just, unfortunately, an urban heat island, but an entire neighborhood, and how that can really change how you experience an extreme heat event, and let alone if you’re living in an older home that’s 100 years old.
2:19 · You may experience it even more inside of a home that isn’t climate-resilient, can have even hotter temperatures than the ambient air outside.
2:29 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I cited this study that says that millions of Americans are living in – under these types of conditions that you’re describing.
Can you explain why certain people are more vulnerable
2:36 · But I also understand that it is not equally spread across demographics, that certain people are more vulnerable than others. Can you explain?
2:46 · MICHAEL MENDEZ: Yes, this phenomenon of the heat waves, extreme climate events have disparate impact. It does not affect everyone equally.
2:55 · And this is because a heat wave is a natural phenomenon – phenomenon in some part, but there’s been political choices have been – have been made over the decades, if not centuries, that have withheld vital resources and infrastructure from communities, primarily low income-communities of color, African American and Latino communities.
3:16 · So it’s no surprise, when a heat wave or other type of extreme weather event strikes these communities, they’re the least prepared and often suffered the most impacts, because they don’t have – they have crumbling infrastructure, and they don’t have the amenities that will protect them and make them more resilient from our changing and extreme climate.
What are the possible solutions
3:36 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You have been describing or hinting at a few of what seem like the possible solutions here.
3:42 · Walk me through those things. If I were a city planner, what are the things that I can do to try to reduce the urban heat island effect?
3:50 · MICHAEL MENDEZ: First is, a lot of these campaigns, we hear about the million-dollar campaigns that a lot of urban mayors are trying to institute in their cities, planting trees.
4:02 · Climate-resilient trees that are resilient to drought as well can help cool down are cities, cool roofs, rooftops, making sure that we’re able to reflect some of the sun’s rays and ensure that our houses that are cooler, having more climate weatherization in our homes, and, of course, having more cool pavements, moving away from that black asphalt and concrete that is absorbing and retaining the heat.
4:32 · And other types of green spaces, watershed management practices are multibenefit.
4:38 · They can clean our water, recharge our groundwater, but also provide green space and recreational spaces. So, we need to look for multibenefit policies and projects that attack multiple problems that climate change is causing our urban areas and throughout our nation.
What communities are doing
4:56 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, some of these things you’re talking about seem quite quick. I mean, you can paint a roof a different color quite quickly. Trees, we know, take longer to grow.
5:04 · Are there communities that you would point to in the country that are doing some of these things, that are taking this initiative head on and trying to do these things?
5:15 · MICHAEL MENDEZ: Well, in my in my hometown of Los Angeles, it’s often named – thought of as very suburban, very asphalt, concrete-driven area.
5:24 · But they’re really leading the way in terms of creating an Office of Climate Emergency and Resilience, where they have hired a full-time person and staff to understand these issues and try to target resources to the most immediate communities, those that are lacking these trees and green spaces.
5:44 · So, places like Los Angeles, Portland, of course, Seattle have been at the forefront of enacting climate action, but also having a strong equity and justice lens.
5:58 · WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Professor Michael Mendez, U.C. Irvine, thank you so much for being here.
6:02 · MICHAEL MENDEZ: Thank you for having me.
NASA Urban Heat Islands
NASA Goddard, 12 10, 2010
Video (2:23)
Description
At the 2010 American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, Dr. Ping Zhang will present her findings on the Urban Heat Island effect. The data collected spans from 1995 to 2005 and will give scientists an idea of why cities are warmer than their surrounding areas, as well as what effect this will have on the planet.
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Transcript
Intro
0:08 · Urban heat islands affect human health and it affects energy consumption. Those two things alone are enough to drive worldwide interest. (Zhang) When we build an urban area, we’re replacing the vegetated surface and also the soil surface with this imperious surface like the paving material and the building material. By doing this, we’re basically warming the urban areas, and this will generate a temperature difference.
What is Urban Heat Island
0:36 · And that’s what we can the urban heat island. We find out that the urban heat island affected by several factors.
Factors affecting Urban Heat Island
0:44 · The first factor will be the surrounding ecological context.
0:48 · And then will be the size of the city. When talking about size, we can we mean both the area of the city and also the population size of the city. And then will be the shape of the city and also the development patterns of the city.
Urban Heat Island
1:04 · (Imhoff) We used a variety of satellite data, both land surface data from MODIS and also impervious surface data from the Landsat satellite. Inpervious surface data essentially tells us how much building material is on the land surface in order to study the urban heat island. The urban heat island is much larger if you convert a forested area into an urban. And this is because the urban heat island is a relative measure. So, urban areas in forests are much warmer than the surrounding landscape than they are in deserts for example, because the surrounding landscape is already warm.
1:40 · I think the general public should be interested in urban heat islands because of the fact that it’s where most of the people live and in the next 50 years, we’re going to see 80% of the global population living in cities. And the urban heat island matters for everything from health, like asthma and heart conditions, to how much heating and air conditioning you need to use to cool or heat your living space.
2:09 · (beeping)
What Does Extreme Heat Do to the Body
PBS, 09 03, 2026
Video (9:59)
Description
Watch more of this series: https://to.pbs.org/4wkQIAG
The climate crisis isn’t a distant threat — it’s already here, and it’s deadly. But keeping people cool is surprisingly complicated.
In Sydney, Australia, physiologist Ollie Jay is tackling the problem by studying how the human body responds to extreme heat. The ultimate goal is to create low-cost cooling strategies for people without access to air conditioning — those most at risk from extreme heat. Science journalist Miles O’Brien puts himself in the hot seat — literally — to find out what it feels like when the body’s cooling system starts to fail.
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Resolve to Solve with Miles O’Brien
Miles O’Brien travels the globe searching for solutions to climate, water, and health crises. From building sea curtains in Antarctica to restoring wildlife in Argentina, the answers are closer than we think thanks to people with a “Resolve to Solve.”
Transcript
0:01 · MILES O’BRIEN: At the iconic Sydney Opera House, I met a scientist looking for an answer.
0:06 · Ollie Jay runs the Heat and Health Research Center at the University of Sydney.
0:13 · Lay the context for us a little bit on Australia, its climate, and the heat impacts you deal with here.
0:21 · We have an increased prevalence of heat waves.
0:23 · They’re greater intensity, the maximum temperature records are being beaten regularly.
0:28 · Among, uh, high income countries, we’re actually the most susceptible to the impacts of extreme heat on human health and well-being.
0:35 · For a researcher such as yourself, trying to find solutions, ways to adapt, this is the perfect laboratory, isn’t it?
0:41 · JAY: Absolutely.
0:42 · We take time to understand the nature of the problem before we start trying to develop solutions, because we don’t want to go down that route that a lot of academics do of finding solutions to problems that don’t exist.
0:52 · O’BRIEN: Ollie and his team are looking for smarter, more efficient ways to keep people safe and cool as the global thermostat rises.
1:01 · ♪ ♪ That was on his mind when I met him on a steamy Saturday at the University of Sydney Cricket Club Oval.
1:11 · (bat cracks) A match like this can last two long days, six to eight hours each.
1:19 · That was big!
1:20 · (cheers and applause) On the sidelines, Ollie Jay and his team were setting up a curious contraption they call the EMU.
1:30 · It’s a flightless Australian bird, but also something called the Environmental Measurement Unit.
1:35 · O’BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
1:36 · Like MaRTy in Phoenix, EMU measures four key parameters: air temperature, humidity, radiant temperature and wind speed.
1:47 · We measure temperature in this device right here.
1:50 · We can move air in a certain way across that temperature sensor to get a very accurate read on what the temperature of the air is in the shade.
1:57 · O’BRIEN: Humidity is measured in that same white chamber.
2:01 · Above it is a copper sphere that is painted matte black.
2:07 · It measures radiation that comes directly from the sun and bounces off the various surfaces surrounding an athlete.
2:15 · JAY: And then using all of this information, we can model how hot someone’s going to get, and therefore what their rate of dehydration might be.
2:21 · And, you know, potentially how much water they need to drink in order to maintain hydration.
2:29 · O’BRIEN: A short walk away from the cricket oval is Ollie’s lab.
2:33 · And that’s where he’s built another novel tool to better understand how heat affects the human body.
2:39 · It’s a climate chamber.
2:42 · Think of it as a science oven, and I’m on the menu.
2:47 · JAY: Just be careful of the step there.
2:49 · Here we go, Miles.
2:50 · O’BRIEN: You’re not messing around.
2:52 · JAY: No, we’re not messing around. O’BRIEN: All right.
2:54 · Reporting for scientific duty.
2:55 · I was finally going to find out what it’s like to be an order of French fries, waiting under the heat lamp on a short-order shelf.
3:05 · Before I got this far, I swallowed a horse pill.
3:08 · Right down the gullet there.
3:10 · A thermometer with a tiny transmitter inside that tracked my core temperature.
3:15 · I’m hot stuff.
3:16 · They took my blood pressure.
3:18 · Applied a strap to track my heart rate and a mask that measured the amount of oxygen I was consuming, to help estimate how much heat my body was generating on its own.
3:30 · JAMES SMALLCOMBE: If you can just blow out for me.
3:31 · (blows) Yep, that’s tight enough, that’s perfect.
3:34 · Your cardiovascular system seems to be in pretty good nick, uh, Miles, we’ve got, you know, great blood pressure and your resting heart rate’s nice and, uh, nice and low, so.
3:43 · Objective evidence demonstrating your very good health.
3:46 · O’BRIEN: He put it to the test by simulating one of the worst weather disasters in modern U.S. history: the heat wave in Chicago in 1995.
3:57 · More than 700 people died.
3:59 · Researchers concluded a working air conditioner would have prevented half the fatalities.
4:05 · And living alone doubled the risk of death.
4:07 · It became a stark lesson in how vulnerability and isolation can turn extreme heat into a mass-casualty disaster.
4:17 · Almost for the first time, it placed extreme heat on the radar of public health officials and actually seeing that it is responsible for excess death and morbidity.
4:27 · O’BRIEN: The tragedy exposed something deeper than weather.
4:31 · It was about inequality, and neglect.
4:35 · That summer, Chicago made it painfully clear heat doesn’t strike evenly, and it kills quietly.
4:44 · We’re doing this from the perspective of trying to understand the settings that the most vulnerable are going to be in, and then developing solutions that are fit for purpose in those settings.
4:54 · O’BRIEN: Here in the chamber, the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity between 50% and 60%.
5:03 · It was pretty miserable.
5:06 · I feel like a cheeseburger just off the grill.
5:08 · The human body cools itself by sweating, but that only works if the sweat can evaporate.
5:14 · At this temperature and humidity, it can’t.
5:19 · The air is nearly saturated.
5:21 · The sweat just sits there, and the body keeps heating up.
5:27 · It’s a huge challenge for human survival.
5:30 · What we know is that the people who are most vulnerable won’t have access to air conditioning.
5:34 · They most likely won’t have access to things like cooling shelters as well.
5:38 · They’ll be sheltering at home in place.
5:40 · So the question is, what type of activities, what type of risk reduction cooling strategies can these people use that is most effective at blunting that physiological heat strain that generates inside the body that we know is harmful to human health?
5:53 · O’BRIEN: He’s exploring cooling strategies for people who can’t afford to live in air-conditioned comfort.
6:00 · Practical, low-cost ways to survive the heat.
6:04 · Things like immersing your feet in water so they act like radiators.
6:09 · And using fans which, under the right conditions, can significantly reduce the effects of heat stress.
6:16 · These are the kinds of things that can help the most vulnerable among us, during a heat wave like Chicago in 1995.
6:26 · With the proper prior planning on that, could those deaths have been preventable?
6:31 · Most of them?
6:32 · There’s a, there’s a saying, um, in the heat health space that every heat-related death is preventable.
6:40 · O’BRIEN: Globally, heat kills about a half-a-million people every year.
6:45 · And in the U.S., the fatalities are growing at an alarming rate.
6:50 · In 2023, more than 2,300 died from heat in the U.S.
6:55 · About three times more than a decade ago.
6:58 · Far greater than the average toll for hurricanes and wildfires.
7:03 · They grab the headlines, but heat has always been the most lethal consequence of climate change, by far.
7:11 · Outside this window in Sydney, intense heat is everywhere– quiet, invisible and relentless.
7:20 · Ah.
7:22 · (sighs) Sheesh.
7:23 · After I’d mopped myself up, Ollie and I went from the frying pan to the fire.
7:31 · He took me on a walking tour of the University of Sydney campus.
7:35 · Born and raised in Wales, with a stop in Canada along the way, Ollie actually earned his PhD studying cold temperatures.
7:45 · But in 2014, Sydney beckoned.
7:48 · Suddenly, he was on the opposite end of the earth and the thermometer.
7:53 · Australia being a hot place, and it is a hot place, I figure that if, Australian-based researchers, if we can’t get a handle on these problems, and we can’t find a solution, then there’s very little chance that anyone else will.
8:06 · O’BRIEN: Plenty of scientists study the climate and the relentless rise of temperatures.
8:10 · But far fewer connect the dots to the impact on human health.
8:15 · How heat affects real bodies, in real time, in a warming world.
8:20 · It’s a mistake to overlook human physiology as you try to come up with some answers here, right?
8:25 · If you think about it from a health perspective, obviously, the hot weather is a problem.
8:29 · But the real problem is the hot person in the hot environment.
8:32 · ♪ ♪ O’BRIEN: It was time for us to solve that problem.
8:36 · We met up with his partner Allison and their adorable, precocious daughter Lottie.
8:41 · ALLISON: Ready to go to the beach?
8:43 · O’BRIEN: They took me to Coogee Beach, a short walk from their home in Sydney.
8:49 · Becoming a parent has changed the way he thinks about his work.
8:54 · It’s sharpened his focus and redoubled his resolve to solve.
9:00 · There are lots of solutions, but I think what we’ve got to do is focus on not just climate change mitigation, ensuring that the choices that we make don’t aggravate the problem in the future, but also got to face that we’ve got to adapt to a warmer world.
9:13 · We need to do both of them at the same time.
9:15 · It would be bad if all of that back and forth led to inertia and apathy. JAY: Well, it’s exactly right.
9:21 · People need to have hope in order to act.
9:22 · Otherwise, we just bury our head in the sand and try to pretend it’s not happening when it is.
9:26 · O’BRIEN: In the sand. JAY: Here we are.
9:28 · O’BRIEN: I see what you’re doing there, man.
9:30 · Nicely done, nicely done. (Ollie laughing) ♪ ♪
When Will Extreme Heat Become Unlivable
PBS Terra, 06 18, 2025
Video (11:45)
Description
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Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S. and many places around the world, and it’s only getting worse.
The most deadly heat waves so far have been dry heat waves. But a new threat is rising: humid heat waves, aka wet-bulb events. Scientists have identified wet-bulb temperatures where sweat can’t evaporate fast enough to cool the human body. And once this threshold is crossed, it doesn’t matter how much shade or water you have: you won’t survive without environmental cooling like air conditioning.
In this episode of Weathered, we break down: What wet-bulb temperature actually means, why it’s so dangerous, what areas will be affected, and why air conditioning, while essential, isn’t enough.
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Transcript
The new era of extreme heat
0:00 · Most of the deadliest heat waves to date have been dry heat waves. But as our climate warms a possibly even deadlier heat is on the rise.
0:08 · It doesn’t matter how breezy it is, it doesn’t matter how much shade you’re under. It doesn’t matter how much water you’re drinking.
0:14 · These are extreme humid heat waves, often referred to as wet-bulb events. And these are, in my opinion, one of the scariest byproducts of climate change. They’ve been relatively rare historically, but a new study shows that by two degrees Celsius of global warming, many of the most populated places on Earth are likely to experience them. And the only way to protect ourselves from these dangerous wet-bulb temperatures is to cool our environment.
0:42 · But what happens if that’s not possible?
0:45 · The time of year that always has the highest stress on the grid is always just the hottest day of the year because so many people are using AC and so then the AC is liable to go out.
0:55 · What happens if there’s another extreme weather event?
0:57 · If you have a tropical cyclone that comes in, wipes out power?
1:00 · Stick around as we break down why these temperatures are so deadly and how we can prepare for a world that’s so warm, our bodies literally can’t handle it. Let’s start by talking about dry versus humid heat. Dry heat waves are usually driven by large high pressure systems that trap hot air near the surface. These systems push air downward, and as the air compresses, it heats up in a process called adiabatic heating.
Dry vs. humid heat waves
1:33 · If the high stays stuck in place, the heat builds day after day with no clouds or wind to carry it away. And that’s exactly what happened during the 2003 European heat wave and the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. Now let’s take a look at humid heat.
1:49 · As temperatures rise, we can hold a lot more moisture in the atmosphere. And so this means that if a given location has air temperatures going up with ongoing climate change, it’s likely that if they have a moisture source, humidity’s also going to increase.
2:02 · We just saw how dangerous this can be in 2015 when one of the most extreme humid heat events on record struck Karachi, Pakistan. Temperatures up to 45 degrees Celsius combined with oppressive humidity, power outages and water shortages made conditions even worse. At least 1200 people died in just 10 days most from heat stroke and dehydration.
2:26 · Humans primarily cool down by sweating, but when the air is humid, sweat can’t evaporate as easily, so we don’t cool off as well. This is where wet-bulb comes into play. wet-bulb temperature combines heat and humidity into a single number, which helps us understand when conditions become dangerous or even lethal.
Understanding wet bulb
2:46 · You can imagine taking a normal thermometer. If you take that thermometer and you cover the bulb in a little sock that is then placed into a container of water, so it’s constantly wetted. Evaporation’s going to take place off of that little sock and it’s gonna have a net cooling effect.
3:03 · The wet sock at the end of the wet-bulb thermometer functions similarly to human skin. Water evaporates off the wet sock while sweat evaporates off our wet skin. In both cases, evaporation carries away heat into the surrounding environment.
3:18 · But the more humid the ambient air is, the more difficult and less efficient that evaporation is to take place. And so that makes any cooling through evaporative cooling, less efficient at high temperatures and high humidity.
3:31 · Which is why humid heat feels so muggy and uncomfortable for us and why it can be so dangerous. There have been a number of attempts to better understand how humid heat affects the human body, in particular where our physical limits are, but it’s not easy to identify dangerous wet-bulb thresholds because well, they’re dangerous.
Physiological limits of heat
3:53 · So obviously you can’t put someone in a heat chamber and truly cook them. That would be unethical. But what you can do is increase temperature and humidity and measure someone’s core temperature and see what’s the point at which their core temperature starts to increase. And that’s the limit of compensability.
4:11 · The human body generally does a good job of regulating its core body temperature through sweat. But once we cross the limit of livability or compensability, as scientists call it, our core body temperature starts to increase uncontrollably. And this wet-bulb temperature range is actually a lot lower than we previously believed.
4:33 · So this paper is really trying to summarize the most state-of-the-art estimations of these thresholds. And so what we see is that there is a range. So uncompensable wet-bulb temperatures range from about 19 to 32 degrees Celsius.
4:46 · And you might think the lower end of this range, 19 degrees Celsius sounds really low. But it’s important to understand that a 19 degree wet-bulb does not equal 19 degrees on a regular thermometer. So 19 degrees Celsius wet-bulb is actually more like 46 degrees Celsius with low humidity or 32 degrees Celsius with higher humidity.
5:09 · And the reason there’s a range is because this threshold depends on a number of variables including activity level, exact air temperature, and humidity levels and age.
5:22 · Older adults thermo regulatory responses are worse, they sweat less efficiently, they also have higher risks of comorbidities, so things like cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
5:31 · So according to their study, where on earth are we likely to cross these thresholds?
Future global heat impact
5:37 · Well, at two degrees Celsius of global warming, which could come in as little as two decades for older adults. It’s about a third of Earth’s land area, but that only tells part of the story.
5:47 · It’s 35% of the land area, but it’s also many of our most populous places on earth. Most of India, most of the populated area of China. This is most of the eastern portion of the U.S.
6:01 · And if we let global warming get really out of hand or if climate sensitivity is just on the higher end of our projections at four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, over 60% of Earth’s landmass could see these dangerous wet-bulb temperatures. Heat is the deadliest weather disaster in the U.S. in many parts of the world, and it’s projected to get a lot deadlier.
The necessity of cooling
6:26 · During the 2003 European heatwave, up to 3,400 people died in Paris alone. At two degrees Celsius, which is again only a couple decades away, scientists found that Paris will see deadly heat waves like this once every few years rather than once a century. And though this heat wave in 2003 was among the deadliest in recent history, it didn’t get close to the dangerous wet-bulb thresholds we’ve been discussing in this episode.
6:54 · But the 2015 heat wave in Karachi did it passed the uncompensable wet-bulb threshold for older adults for something like eight to 10% of the time. But at two degrees Celsius of warming, we can see that the uncompensable threshold is crossed for younger adults as well. And at four degrees, models show that the same event would cross the uncompensable threshold for older adults for about 90% of the heat waves duration.
7:22 · And the thing to remember about these critical wet-bulb threshold is that once you cross one, the only way to bring your internal temperature down is by cooling yourself or your environment.
7:33 · It doesn’t matter how breezy it is, it doesn’t matter how much shade you’re under, it doesn’t matter how much water you’re drinking. The only way you can protect yourself from these conditions is by cooling your environment. And so that is why air conditioning is really the major adaptation measure and protection measure that we have.
Risks of relying on AC
7:51 · And although AC is one of the most important tools for surviving extreme heat, it’s far from perfect. First of all, it’s expensive. AC is energy intensive, and as our climate gets warmer, many people won’t be able to afford to stay cool. And due to its financial inaccessibility, many people in places most vulnerable to deadly heat don’t have access to AC. Second, air conditioning doesn’t eliminate heat, it just moves it.
8:20 · Cooling the indoors means transferring the heat outside, which warms the surrounding air. And in cities, this added heat can worsen the urban heat island effect. Now, let’s imagine that everyone could afford air conditioning. It still wouldn’t automatically solve the problem. Our power grids in the U.S. and globally weren’t designed for everyone to crank up their units at once. During heat waves, widespread outages become more likely leaving the most vulnerable at even greater risk.
8:53 · If AC units were our only way of protecting people as soon as the power system fails, whether that’s from the grid being overloaded, or if we have another weather driven sort of infrastructure damage that’s going to put people immediately at risk.
9:07 · And these compounding hazards like a heat wave after a hurricane are a growing concern as we head towards unprecedented levels of warming for humans. And as weather across the board just gets more extreme, but there’s one more catch. The more we rely on ac, the more we could be fueling the base problem of global warming.
Sustainable cooling solutions
9:29 · If you tried to just build out air conditioning to deal with heat risk, how much would that contribute to carbon emissions across the world?
9:38 · And how much would that positively feed back on global temperature making the temperature even higher?
9:44 · Right
9:44 · now, air conditioning accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And according to the International Energy Agency, the number of AC units worldwide is expected to nearly triple by 2050 leading to a massive rise in energy demand.
10:01 · So what do we do about this paradox?
10:04 · Well, I think it’s a powerful argument for transitioning as quickly as possible to clean energy. The only way to meet the growing need for AC without accelerating climate change is to power our grids with renewables. And of course, there’s a lot we can and should do beyond just air conditioning. We can rethink the design of our cities by installing white or green roofs and planting trees.
10:30 · We can also build more cooling centers, upgrade our electrical grids to be more resilient and prioritize protecting the most vulnerable during heat waves. The truth is that we are headed into uncharted territory, but it’s also true that we still have time to choose how bad it gets.
Conclusion and resources
10:48 · So do you live in an area that’s already experiencing dangerously hot and humid conditions?
10:54 · What strategies have worked for you to handle the heat?
10:58 · Let us know in the comments and we’ll see you next time on Weathered. Oh, and before you go, we also wanted to let you know about something special PBS and the BBC have teamed up to Bring You Walking with Dinosaurs Unearthed. An amazing show about the prehistoric beast that ruled the Earth before us and experienced some pretty extreme weather of their own.
11:19 · The premiere episode just published earlier this week on PBS Terra, and we think it’s something our viewers will really enjoy. Click the link on screen or below to check it out and tell ’em Weathered sent you.
Why cities should plant more trees
Vox, 12 22, 2016
Video (3:10)
Description
Over 3 million people die annually from air pollution. Planting trees can help lower that number.
Read more: http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/11/4/13510352/planting-trees-pollution-heat-waves
Check out The Nature Conservancy report, “Planting Healthy Air”: https://global.nature.org/content/healthyair
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Trees help improve public health by cleaning and cooling the air around them. As the threat of climate change steadily increases, planting trees is a fairly simple way city leaders can help stem the negative consequences of rising temperatures and increasing population density.
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Transcript
Intro
0:00 · Search Google Earth for China and you’ll see this.
0:03 · But an unedited satellite photo might look more like this.
0:08 · That gray smudge is air pollution and it’s coming from Chinese cars, factories, and power plants.
0:13 · But it’s not only here.
0:14 · In cities around the world, air pollution is a big problem.
0:18 · A majority of humans now live in cities and that number is only going to rise, which means more cars, more factories, and more power plants.
0:25 · As officials explore options for fighting air pollution, there is one tool that is often overlooked: trees.
Air pollution
0:35 · Cities are centers of industry, but the resulting pollution is filling our lungs and making us sick.
0:41 · One major culprit is particulate matter: airborne particles of dust, soot and smoke that are released when we burn fossil fuels or kicked up during construction and farming.
0:49 · When we inhale them, they can cause asthma and they can also enter our bloodstream to cause strokes and even death.
0:54 · Experts estimate that outdoor air pollution kills over three million people a year and as cities grow, leaders are funding creative—and often expensive—solutions for the problem.
1:04 · In London, the mayor spent over a million pounds spraying city streets with an adhesive that was supposed to glue pollutants to the road.
1:10 · and in the Netherlands, designers have created a giant air purifier they call “The Smog Free Tower”, which is cool, but there is another, simpler solution… A new report from The Nature Conservancy shows that planting trees can be a cost-effective way to improve public health, which they do in two ways: First, a tree removes particulate matter when polluted air blows through its branches.
Planting trees
1:31 · The particulate matter settles on the leaves and when it rains the dust is washed down the gutter so we don’t inhale it.
1:37 · Second, trees cool temperatures by providing shade and releasing water through photosynthesis, which cools summer temperatures by about two to four degrees fahrenheit.
1:46 · But there is a catch!
1:47 · Trees can only clean and cool the air within a close radius: about one hundred feet, so city officials need to be careful where they plant.
1:54 · Officials can maximize pollution reduction by planting trees where population density and air pollution overlap.
1:59 · The Nature Conservancy report uses data from Washington D.C. to create a map showing where planting trees will have the highest return on investment.
2:06 · And some trees work better than others: trees with larger, stickier leaves, like maples and elms are more effective, but they also need to be considered within the larger ecosystem.
2:15 · Compared to DC, many cities around the world have even more to gain from planting trees: this map shows where return on investment is highest for reducing particulate matter.
2:23 · With proper targeting, planting trees can be just as cost-effective as other strategies like converting public transportation to use less diesel fuel.
2:30 · But there is one major limiting factor: water access.
2:34 · What might work in Boston, will be less feasible in a city like Doha, Qatar, where water is a scarce resource.
2:39 · And on top of that, many mayors don’t yet think of trees as a public health resource.
2:44 · Trees might not look like giant air filters, but that’s exactly what they are, and the sooner we start thinking of them that way, the sooner the air we breathe might be cooler and cleaner in cities around the world.
Why It’s Usually Hotter In A City Let’s Talk NPR
NPR, 08 14, 2018
Video (2:29)
Description
The way cities are designed and inhabited can make actually make them hotter. So what’s the solution? We explore a few ideas for beating the urban heat.
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Transcript
0:04 · There’s a reason that summers in the city are so hot, and it’s probably easiest to explain why with thermal vision.
0:11 · It shows the heat all around me and also the coldness of this ice cream cone.
0:16 · Cities are often hotter than their suburbs due to a phenomenon known as “the heat island effect.”
The Heat Island Effect
0:24 · All of that asphalt, concrete, dark rooftops and tall buildings— they absorb and store heat.
0:31 · And there are a lot of people using a lot of energy— driving cars, riding subways, running the AC.
0:38 · All of these materials and activities either create or retain heat.
0:44 · And all that stored heat causes steeper nighttime highs … when people would otherwise have a chance to cool down.
0:52 · The way all these heat-storing elements are laid out matters quite a bit.
0:57 · In cities laid out in grids, like Phoenix, Chicago, or Washington, D.C., the buildings are closer together, like closely packed coals in a fire, keeping heat in.
1:07 · More space between buildings creates more circulation.
1:11 · Another way to combat this heat island effect is through green space.
1:15 · Parks, trees, plants— they don’t absorb as much heat … they actually send water back in the atmosphere.
1:21 · Between all those hot buildings, that cools things off.
1:25 · Another solution is color.
Color Light
1:27 · Light colors reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere instead of storing it as heat.
1:31 · It’s easiest to see in crosswalks, and it’s true for the color of buildings and other urban surfaces, too.
1:39 · And one long-game way to combat the heat island effect is to avoid using air conditioning when you don’t need it.
Avoid Using Air Conditioning
1:45 · AC uses a ton of electricity and creates a feedback loop.
1:49 · When we get that electricity from coal or natural gas, that puts more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere … which warms the planet … making cities even hotter.
2:00 · But this isn’t just about comfort.
2:02 · Today, heat waves kill more people than any other extreme weather event.
2:07 · More than tornadoes, hurricanes and even floods.
2:11 · City populations keep growing, and those cities are only getting hotter.
2:17 · This is Let’s Talk, NPR’s news explainer show.
2:20 · Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out other shows.
2:25 · I’m Christopher Joyce, and this is NPR.
Films
A New Inferno
Jonathan Pickett, 09-13-2026
Documentary Film (00:15:42)
Description
Filmed during the hottest days of Phoenix, Arizona’s summer heatwave, A NEW INFERNO follows paramedics as they race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment: ice immersion therapy. As featured on the NY Times Op Docs — We Are Living in a New Inferno World Premiere SXSW Film Festival, 2026 Featuring Jason Smith, Jake West, Roy Lewis, & Colter Fosdick Directed & Produced by Nita Blum-Reddick & Jonathan Pickett Executive Producers Sam Osborn, Alejandra Vasquez, & Jesse Ray Sheps Cinematographer Ryan Dent Editor Jonathan Pickett Composer Jack Gillette Production Sound Mixer Daniel Reddick Grips Stephane Strande & Brian Osback Sound Design & Mix Hansdale Hsu Colorist Keyhan Bayegan Production Assistant Camden Smith Title & Poster Designer Jason Cryer Weather Consultant Jorge Torres Advisors Dr. Charles Finch, Medical Director, Phoenix Fire Department & Maki Lloyd, Deputy Chief, Phoenix Fire Department For The New York Times Op-Docs: Associate Producers Ingrid Homquist & Rebecca Shaid Producer Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo Senior Producer Andrew Blackwell Executive Producer Alexandra Garcia Please consider supporting the ongoing work of Circle the City: www.circlethecity.org Festivals: • Tribeca x NYT Op-Docs • Mountainfilm • Rooftop Films • Palm Springs International ShortFest • Indy Shorts Film Festival • HollyShorts Film Festival • Nashville Film Festival • Bend Film Festival • Mill Valley Film Festival • Sidewalk Film Festival • deadCenter Film Festival • Ouray International Film Festival • Cinema Columbus • AfterImage Film Festival • Coast Film Festival
Transcript
- film A New Inferno
- podcast Climate - Fighting Extreme Heat In 2026
- slide Heat Islands - Infrastructure & Health
- video Heatwave What is the urban heat island effect
- podcast How The Current Heat Dome Can Affect Human Health
- video How Urban Heat Impacts Communities of Color
- video What Does Extreme Heat Do to the Body