Good morning. I hope you had a great weekend. It is Monday, and it is time to start your week with this edition of The Weather Desk where we tackle today's top weather headlines. I'm meteorologist Craig Mueller. I'm broadcasting from Norfolk, Virginia and Southeast Virginia serving Hampton Roads and Northeast North Carolina as well as eastern Virginia. Hope your weekend was a good one really we had some. Beautiful weather around here, but the temperatures starting to climb, and that is something we are finding across a good chunk of the eastern US. Most of the eastern US dealing with very warm conditions. Let's take a look at our weather headlines for today. Dangerous heat builds over the eastern US. It started over the last couple of days but really came in yesterday, and it's going to get worse. Over the next few days, so we're gonna talk about heat safety, the difference between heat exhaustion and heat stroke. We're gonna talk about some other important reminders as we navigate the next few days with all of this heat and humidity, and then I'm gonna answer a couple of questions here. How long could the heat last and is there any relief in sight at all? Maybe a little bit of fluctuation, but we're gonna be in this for a while. I will show you some extended outlooks and talk about how things are likely to work out now I've said this before and again this broadcast, what we do here on the weather desk, it streams on 13 News now plus we also put this out on YouTube a lot. So this has reached not only for Hampton Roads in Northeast North Carolina but across the entire country and really around the world. When we have a weather impact alert for the 13 news kind of traditional viewing area Southeast Virginia and North Carolina, we do want to start and talk about just how hot it's gonna be right here and then I'm going to broaden the scope and we're gonna talk about what's happening all. Across the country, you can see the dangerous heat is with us here in Hampton Roads Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we're talking feels like temperatures between 105 and 110 today, maybe 107 and 112 tomorrow and close to this again on Wednesday. So obviously you want to stay hydrated. That's pretty basic. You got to keep the water coming in. Your body needs that. And whenever possible, find some air conditioning. If you don't have access to working air conditioning where you live, try to find a public space that has AC and when there's no AC available, at least have a good fan or a way to to beat the heat during that peak heating. It's so important. There are cooling stations and there will be more provided as this eastern part of the country really suffers. Under this heat dome that we are experiencing, you can see we have numerous areas shaded in orange here. These are all under heat advisory where you have these dark reds. These are areas that are under heat warning and then there's a heat watch as well. So today with this much of the country impacted, millions of Americans are facing a dangerous start to the workweek with temperatures in some areas set to soar into the. Triple digits. They have to be ready to deal with this here in Hampton Roads, as I mentioned, we do have our weather impact alert and we're expecting air temperatures in the mid 90s, but the heat index values, they're gonna be so much warmer and that's gonna put serious stress on so many people and obviously a large chunk of the nation's power grid will have to deal with it as well. Here's ABC's Alison Kosik. This morning, more than 150 million Americans are on alert for extreme heat. It's 100+ degrees in Vegas, but I think I'm sweating more from the humidity here in Philly. From the Midwest to the East Coast. Feel like temperatures are expected to top 100 degrees. DC could feel like 109 today. Some school districts in the Northeast switching to half day schedules. The demand for electricity with ACs blasting is expected to. At the highest level in 14 years, PJM, the nation's largest regional grid operator, issuing a maximum generation emergency alert.sweltering temperatures forcing delays in Major League Baseball. Cincinnati Reds player Elie de la Cruz falling ill during a game against the Cardinals, and in Chicago, Mariners pitcher Trent Thornton and an umpire had to be treated for heat-related illnesses. New York's governor issuing a state of emergency for more than 30 counties after heavy rain and dangerous flash flooding slammed parts of the state. Outside Utica, at least 3 people were killed, including 6-year-old twins. The violent weekend of weather stretching across the country. 6 people are dead and 2 are missing after strong winds and large waves capsized this boat in Lake Tahoe. And in Florida, onlookers shocked as they spotted these double water spouts off the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, severe storms are possible later from Kansas to Northern Michigan. Alison Kosik, ABC News, New York. I just quickly mention you saw the uh the video from the Cardinals Reds baseball game in Saint Louis. I do the operational forecast, send it back to people that are doing things at the stadium, the field manager and some of the folks that deal with security around the station around the stadium as well in Saint Louis for the Cardinals. One of my sons, uh, well, two of them work for the organization, but one of them was actually on the field during that heat yesterday when, uh, when they had the issues with that extreme. Heat. So this is a serious situation even for professional athletes that are in peak physical shape. The heat and the humidity can take a toll. So very, very important that you take all of this very, very seriously. Now for Hampton Roads, we are under this heat warning, and again this is for Southeast Virginia and Northeast North Carolina. South of the Albemarle Sound we have a heat watch, same thing on the eastern shore, but most of Hampton Roads, all of the metro area Hampton Roads. and most of the region is under this heat warning. We're going to see the hazy, hot and humid conditions. You see that haze right now as we check out the sky view. It looks pretty when you look out there, but you step outside and you're gonna feel that heat. As we go past 10 o'clock, it'll be around 96, 100 by 11. These are the feels like temperatures this afternoon up around 105 at 1 o'clock, 106 at 2, and then up around 108 or so as we go through. 345 o'clock, so a lot of heat even into the evening here when you think, OK, you know, sun's getting lower on the horizon starting to get dark, it's still gonna feel like it's close to 100 degrees. So obviously a very serious situation here in Hampton Roads. Now as the temperatures soar here in Hampton Roads, so does the risk for dehydration. Doctors say dehydration is more common in the heat because our bodies sweat more to help us stay cool. And the more we sweat, the more fluids we lose. Now symptoms of dehydration typically include headache, fatigue, dry mouth, dizziness. You might lose your appetite and having dark colored urine. Dehydration can also put a person at risk for a heat stroke. Now a heat stroke happens when your body can't cool off fast enough, and in severe cases it can be fatal, but there are ways to avoid this. So you wanna limit outdoor activities, right? During the, the hottest part of the day, which is from 100 a.m. to 4 p.m. You know, you wanna drink water regularly, as I said, very important, avoid alcohol, caffeine, any kind of sugary drinks cause it can make the situ the situation worse. So heat illness symptoms can vary by person, and medications or underlying conditions can also make it harder to regulate body temperature. Very important. All right, we want to talk to you about what's going on here again over the eastern half of the country with the feels like temperatures. We're gonna see those temperatures feeling like it's up over 100, 104, 105, and this is just for areas here around Norfolk closer to the airport. Some of the downtown areas could feel. Even warmer like I said, close to 108, maybe 110 in some areas, but the heat is far reaching out to the west. Chicago, St. Louis, they're in for those hot conditions as well again today. Then tomorrow we do it again. We're back up over 100, and Wednesday is going to be sweltering as well for so much of the country. So this is very serious and we want folks to know when you get these types of heat index values you're going. You start feeling some of these effects. Now when it gets up between 90, we're talking about feels like temperatures when it feels like it's between 90 and 100, you start to get heat cramps. Heat exhaustion is possible. When you get into the 105 to say 129 range, this is where heat exhaustion is likely and heat stroke is possible. You might be wondering what's the difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion. Taylor Stefanson explains. are expected to rise to the 90s once again this week, and with the high heat comes with the risk for heat illnesses. Let's talk about the two types of heat dangers and similarities and differences between them. When exposed to high heat, people can experience heat exhaustion or heat stroke. During heat exhaustion, a person may become faint or dizzy, while during heat stroke, a throbbing headache may develop. With heat exhaustion, the person will sweat, but no sweating. Will occur during heat stroke. Cool, pale, and clammy skin are signs of heat exhaustion. Red, hot and dry skin are signs of heat stroke. In both cases, though, an individual can experience nausea or vomiting. A rapid heartbeat will be evident in both exhaustion and strokes, but a weak pulse is associated with exhaustion, while a strong pulse relates to strokes. Muscle cramps are also possible during heat exhaustion. A person experiencing heat stroke may lose consciousness. If someone you know is in the midst of heat exhaustion, get them into a place with AC. Make sure they're drinking water and put cool water on them using a shower or cold compress. On the flip side, if a person is showing symptoms of heat stroke, call 911. Remember that heat illnesses can happen at temperatures of only 80 degrees. 4:13 news now on meteorologist, Taylor Stephenson. All right, so we take a look now at the, uh, again, feels like temperatures. You've got air temperatures that are gonna climb into the mid 90s, but as you can see again, we've been talking so much about it, those heat index values, it's gonna feel a lot hotter than that. So you might be wondering how exactly do we arrive at these feels like temperatures. Meteorologist Hunter Force is here to explain the heat index. You step outside on a hot summer day, knowing the air temperature was a nice 85 degrees, but when you step outside, it feels more like the mid 90s. That's what the heat index is for. The heat index is a measurement that considers both the air temperature and the humidity to help determine how it actually feels to the human body. When our bodies start to get hot, that's when our bodies use the natural process of sweating to help cool us down. But if the air is already saturated, it's that much harder for our bodies to sweat and for the sweat to evaporate, making it that much harder for us to cool down, which is why it may be 85 degrees out but feels more like 95. When our bodies start to overheat, it can it can make us feel fatigued, and if it gets even hotter, we can suffer from heat stroke, heat cramps, and even heat exhaustion. That's why it's so important to stay hydrated during the hot summer months. And if you're curious on what the highest heat index ever recorded was, well, that was on July 8, 2003 in Saudi Arabia, which experienced a record high dew points in the 1990s and the mixing with the actual air temperature of 108 degrees, it felt more like 178 degrees. For 13 News now, I'm meteorologist Hunter Forrest. It's hard to fathom that a heat index value or feels like temperature in the 170s. Unbelievable. All right, here's one other thing we're gonna do and we're eventually gonna move past the heat, but this is such a big story. All right, we always stress look before you lock, and we're talking about closing your door, locking it, walking off, maybe you've got some shopping you're running some errands. All right, you can see with temperatures in the mid 90s, after 30 minutes those interior car temperatures could be up around 120 to 125. After an hour, some cars could trap the heat inside, making it up. Around 140 or so obviously dangerous in fact deadly heat inside those cars so it's very important you always look before you lock make sure you don't leave anything in the cars and the number one thing people and pets. I know it sounds so basic, but unfortunately it seems like every year we have a story of somebody that just forgot to check the backseat or was distracted and left a child or. Yeah, an animal inside the car and they succumb to the heat. So very important, no people and pets ever left inside a locked car, but especially when it's hot. Your medications, you want to get those out of there. They can be damaged, lose their effectiveness. Things can change with that high heat. Plastic bottles, you think about water bottles, a lot of times you take, oh well, I got a little bit of water left. I'll leave it in the cup holder. You come back, that water's hot. Plastic can break down sometimes. They've gotten better about the materials that they use, but sometimes some of the chemicals in the plastic can leach into the water, so you want to avoid doing that. Keep the plastic bottles, don't leave the water sitting in the car. Tech items, things like your cell phone or your tablets, you don't want to leave those chargers, those those batteries can get damaged and lose their effectiveness or there could be damage to the actual. Instrument itself. So again, you wanna take your tech items out of the car. Sunscreen loses its effectiveness if it gets too hot. Alcohol can become skanky if you leave beer in there and it gets super hot. It won't taste the same. Wine can also turn on you if, uh, you leave it out there and it gets too hot. Chocolate and crayons, no fun cleaning that stuff up if it melts, chocolate so hard to get out of anything like upholstery or whatever. But crayons just turns into just a messy goo again, both of those have relatively low melting points, so you don't want to leave those out in those hot cars. Inflated tires we're talking about pneumatic air, you know, the type that you pump up if you've got a bike tire or scooter tire, something that's got some air pressure in it, that air pressure is going to expand with the heat inside the tube and you could have damage to that. Tire or whatever it could literally pop and then uh glasses you think about that if you've got nice sunglasses and I, I leave my glasses in the car, but I've got special places to put it where they're protected from the heat, you need to make sure yours are protected as well because it can damage the frames. It can also actually in some cases damage the lenses. So none of that should you ever leave in a hot car. All right, we are going to move on from the heat and talk about some other issues going on, and that's a severe weather outlook across the north central US. While it is hot yesterday, we started this kind of venture into the super hot temperatures. It's going to continue as we go forward. It's not going away anytime soon. You can see again as we look out, the extreme heat is going to be with us, and these are air temperatures now. We're back into the mid 90s today, around 96 here. 101 in Washington. Temperatures hot out in Kansas City. Dallas is gonna be hot. We've got more heat that'll build back in for tomorrow. Temperatures in the upper 90s, maybe 103 up in DC, 101 around Boston, 96 in Charlotte, more humidity down here as well. Heat building out to the west. And then as we look ahead to our Wednesday, we've got one more really, really hot day. Temperatures will start to moderate a little bit. I think Tuesday is gonna be the hottest day of the week. Forest and Hampton Roads with a high in the upper 90s there, but you could see mid 90s Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday plenty of sunshine, slight risk of a few stray showers maybe for inland areas on Wednesday. I've bumped that up to about a 25% chance. Looking out beyond that, you could see more heat through the following week with better chances for storms maybe a week from Tuesday and Wednesday we get into some scattered wet weather there, but the heat goes on and Looking at 8 to 14 days. Check this out. We are still looking at above normal temperatures here in the mid-Atlantic for much of the eastern US. Also that heat is starting to build out across the Northwest, so a lot of the country will be expecting above normal temperatures through the first week of July. It'll be a little bit below average, most likely across parts of the Southwest. All right, let's get into the radar now. We've got some wet weather here northern central part of the country, parts of Minnesota. Just rain showers, not too bad right now. Later today though, stronger storms are going to be possible. You see the severe weather outlook. Level 2, slight risk across the upper Great Lakes. You can see from the upper peninsula of Michigan back through Mackinaw and back down across areas in the northern part of the lower peninsula there, uh, you can see Traverse City, for instance, so strong storms, Green Bay under the gun there and it extends. Back across Iowa and Nebraska, that area that's under that level 2 threat or slight risk also has this lowest level kind of elevated risk of tornadoes. So something that folks back in that part of the country need to be mindful of, there might be a couple of isolated rotating cells. There could also be some large hail and some gusty winds, the most likely threat from thunderstorms that develop in that part of the country. Now as we look ahead to tomorrow. The outlook kind of elongates a little bit from east to west here. We've got this area stretched out level one or marginal threat from Maine and you can see New England there, Vermont, New Hampshire back across New York State, across the lower Great Lakes and all the way back out into eastern parts of Wyoming, Northeast Colorado, western. Uh, Nebraska and into the southwest part of South Dakota here there's that slight risk or level 2. This is also where tornadoes again, not a tremendous chance for it, but a little bit better chance you might see some isolated tornadoes out in this part of the country as well. As we look at the other things, there's a better chance again for those gusty winds out there. And maybe a little bit of hail out there. You see some of those areas hashed again, larger hail, maybe 2 inch diameter hail for parts of eastern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. So we're gonna be watching that. That's for tomorrow, looking ahead to Wednesday. There's a marginal risk for some stronger storms down along the southeast coast, and we still have that same general area. Uh, under that level one or marginal risk for Wednesday, so we'll be watching that Hampton Roads in case you're wondering and watching from this local area, we're still not really outlooked for severe weather, but there could be a few stray showers or storms, otherwise a lot of heat and, uh, mostly sunny to partly sunny skies on Wednesday. Time for an update on the tropics, would you believe? We finally have something that we're watching in the Atlantic. Now it's not a threat to us. What we're looking at here, things still fairly quiet, but if you look out here in the central part of the Atlantic, so here's Bermuda, here's the east coast, you can see again way over here in Europe. This thing is way out in the middle of the central part of. The ocean. This area has a 70% chance of development for days and days well for weeks in fact, the National Hurricane Center said, oh no cyclonic development expected in the next 7 days and we kept looking at that, looking at that. Well, this little spin kind of held together and it started to look a little bit better. So now the hurricane center has a 70% chance of development. This will be a fish storm. It's if it develops, it'll churn things up out over the open waters, not a threat to land right now at all. And if it takes a name, it'll be Andrea, the first named storm of the season. That's the A name Andrea. So we'll keep you updated. Nothing going on across the Gulf. The Caribbean also very quiet as we look across the main development region. You just have your clouds along the inner tropical convergence zone, but nothing that's showing any real signs of development. Out here off the Mexican coast, would you believe another area that we've got to watch this one again with about a 70% chance of development over the coming week. Prospects aren't great for the next couple of days, but you get out 3 to 7 days and in this area we could have yet another system out there in the eastern Pacific. This is where all the action has been so far this summer. We take a look at the sky view. This is the Thompson Creek Window Company sky view over Norfolk again, hazy, hot, humid out there as we take a look at the airport conditions in Norfolk. We're already at 85 and that Dew Point up into the 70s, so it is a very muggy air mass out there. The, uh, rip current threat is low at all of our beaches, so that's good news. You can see the sunshine UV index very high today. Rip current threat, as I mentioned, will be low and continue to be low. The water's pretty flat, surf height only around 2 ft. As we check conditions in the Chesapeake Bay and just east of Virginia Beach, again, we're gonna find the winds fairly light, 5 to 10 knots for the bay and the ocean. The waves in the bay. Only a foot. Go out, did a little paddle boarding yesterday. I will say the waves built a little bit during the afternoon. It wasn't crazy, but we had a little bit of wave rocking with the paddle board a bit yesterday and again today it should be pretty flat. Ocean waters, the seas around 2 ft. We're coming up on a low tide this afternoon around 1:43. Right now skies are mostly sunny. It is hazy out there. The futurecast is going to show you the dry but very warm conditions across the area, just flat out hot as we get into the afternoon. Downtown Norfolk could see upper 90s, I expect mid to upper 90s at the airport, a little cooler in Virginia Beach heading into the evening, upper 80s there, but most areas still hanging in into the 90s and then eventually. Will cool down overnight back into the upper 70s to near 80. Still a lot of sunshine tomorrow. It's gonna be very hot again. Some areas may touch the triple digits. And then as we look ahead Tuesday night, we're still in pretty good shape. Temperatures cooling a little bit right along the beaches as you come inland there will be a little bit warmer heading into the evening. Now look at this early Wednesday morning. This is 20 a.m. So maybe late Tuesday or early early Wednesday, there might be a little wet weather inland out towards I-95. Don't think we'll see much here across Hampton Roads, but inland areas we could see a few spotty showers or maybe a few stray storms out towards I-95 and I-85 during the day on Wednesday. This is a graph model. It does project a few stray showers and storms. Again, most of the area will likely see most. Mostly sunny to partly sunny skies, but I am gonna mention that chance for a few stray storms. Some of the other models are drier. It is something that I'm starting to bump up the rain chances a little bit as we look forward to Wednesday. And if that looks like the other models start to trend that way, we'll bump them up a little bit more right now the graphs saying, hey, watch out, there might be a few stray storms on Wednesday. We'll see. Temperatures today mid 90s near. The coast we'll see upper 90s inland again. Temps will fall off a little bit when we get that sea breeze kind of coming in off the ocean. You'll see the temperatures in the mid to upper 90s for the peninsula. 96 around Gloucester, cooler to the eastern shore. Cape Charles with winds kind of coming in from the west southwest a little bit today. They're right on the bay there. They'll be slightly cooler. Winds are gonna shift around later in the afternoon. Low 90s. Kill Hills in Manio upper 90s Edenton, Hertford, Elizabeth City, and Curatuck in the mid 90s. Now remember, we've got this weather impact alert because even through the overnight it's gonna be very warm and muggy and when you get temperatures into the mid to upper 90s and then you just drop into the upper 70s to near 80, you don't really get much of a chance to reset. You're still dealing with the dangerously hot and humid conditions. 97 for a high tomorrow. Feels like temperatures 105 to 110 across the region, maybe even a little higher than that in some areas. On Wednesday, I mentioned that possibility of a few stray storms. I have bumped up the chances to 25%. Be sure and join Taylor Stefinson if you're here in 13 News now, the traditional viewing areas Southeast Virginia, Northeast North Carolina. We'll continue to look at this. Uh, we may bump this up to, uh, maybe 30% or so for Wednesday. We'll see as more modeling comes in. Beyond that, more sunshine and haze temperatures still in the 90s as we finish out through the rest of the work week. Really hot stretch, folks. You gotta take it easy out there again. Stay hydrated, take breaks and be a good neighbor and check on those that are maybe elderly or shut in. And make sure the kids that are out there running around, they take breaks from the heat as well. That heat will sneak up on you. All right, if you want to stay in touch with forecast, the best way to do that is by downloading the 13 News Now mobile app. You can scan that QR code. And it will take you to the mobile app. It's obviously free it's something we've provided and it is a great way to stay in touch with the forecast and with all of our radars. All right, I wanna thank you so much for joining us for the weather desk again. Tell your friends about us here. We're getting more and more viewership from all across the region and around the country, and that's why we do this each and every morning starting at 9 o'clock right here on 13 News now plus stay cool, stay hydrated, and I'll see you next time.
thanks well thank you for coming here today um that's not Chicago you probably noticed that already um that's that's New Orleans um after Katrina and it's there because a few weeks ago I was invited to give a talk uh at the University of Illinois Chicago which had a big event on the 20th uh anniversary of the Heatwave a kind of Reckoning event and I was walking to uh the the building and I got a little bit lost don't know it over there too well and I asked a a young medical student if you could point me to the building he said sure I'll you know in the Great Chicago Fashion I'll walk you over they don't do that in New York said so um so he walked me over and he said so what are you here for and I said I'm gonna I'm talking about this big you know the anniversary of this big disaster and he said oh yeah Katrina it's the 10th anniversary of Katrina and I said well it's true um but it actually this is about the the the Chicago Heatwave and he said what Chicago Heatwave and so here we are 20 years later um it was totally fine for him to say what Chicago Heatwave and completely predictable right I mean when's the last time you visited the big memorial for the Chicago Heatwave of 1995 you remember your last visit there or the reenactments right I guess the reenactments don't always go well here on disasters but no when it comes to the Heatwave um we've had a kind of will not to know what what went wrong and the work I've done on this is really about that will not to know and it's not just a will not to know about what happened during this one week in Chicago it's a will not to know about something much deeper about our city and that's what I want to talk about today so you know it gets hot in Chicago but in July of 1995 it got unusually hot the temperature hit 106° the heat index which is like windchill like what a person feels uh got to 126 and it lasted that kind of temperature for about 2 and 1 half days not a very long amount of time but long enough um meteorologists actually can track the extreme and dangerous heat as it moves up towards uh a city in the same way that they track dangerous hurricanes but if if you've noticed we treat those two events very differently which is to say we track we do track the hurricane but we don't track the heat until it arrives and that's interesting because in typical years heat waves actually kill more Americans than all of the other so-called natural disasters combined right but imagine what how we would react if we watched it as it approached and started to prepare that's not what we did what what what we did do instead is we Jam on our air conditioning right and so Chicago that's what we do in the summer we set a record for energy consumption uh during the heat wave we have since shattered that record of course uh and and crws had nothing to do other than go and try to spray down the generators to keep the power going that was that was the emergency intervention guess what didn't work about 250,000 households lost power some for a couple days now remember it feels like it's 126 and when the power's out elevators don't work right if you're in a high-rise building the water pumps can't get water up to higher floors obviously the air conditioning doesn't work either so the term water wars and the slides will the quality of the slides will get better these are just from old uh documents um but the term water wars came from the Chicago Tribune which reported that uh in some neighborhoods uh every water hydrant was open every fire hydrant was open 3,000 uh at the same time uh and in neighborhoods where a lot of the hydrants were open uh there were problems maintaining water supply even to low floors and so officers from the city were coming to close down the hydrants and people were saying that's how we're going to survive this we're going to open them back up uh and there were reports of you know people throwing rocks uh bottles uh even a shooting uh an attempted shooting at least uh around the hydrant so a fight for basic resources uh basic resources water is also what health officials were using to try to cool off uh kids in the city because a as you recall uh from your summer days in Camp the way that you get around the city uh as you jump on these old yellow school buses which tend not to have air conditioning and in Chicago that week uh roads were buckling and the plates on the bridges were expanding so we couldn't open and close Bridges normally train rails had become unstable because of the intense heat so this created a major Log Jam uh on the roads and there was massive traffic so you had kids who were stuck in these buses and the city just started hosing them down uh too and bringing water to try to relieve them that also did not work during the heat wave about half of the city's hospitals went on bypass status which means that they closed down they they closed their doors they could not take any new uh emergency patients okay so imagine you give thousands of patients in excess of the norm who are coming in seeking urgent treatment for heat related illnesses the faster you treat them the more likely you are uh that the person will survive or stay healthy unfortunately not only did the city have to close down the hospitals but the city had no system for monitoring which hospital were open and which were closed so an ambulance would come and be turned away and then have to hope that they could find the next hospital that was open there were reports of paramedics driving for up to 10 miles trying to find a bed where someone could get emergency treatment and of course that meant that there were delays in the system that kept other people from getting ambulances on time as well while this is happening um the City gets involved in this incredible debate uh because people start to die when they do um the mayor's taken by surprise uh it it didn't seem right to him it didn't seem right to City leadership and in fact one of the amazing things about about this event is say unlike a a hurricane where you have this advanced warning and you can track the system coming through if the heat just arrives and people aren't paying much attention to it um you don't do basic things to watch out the mayor turned out to be in his Beach House the fire commissioner who runs the paramedics in the beach house the health commissioner also on vacation now this can sound moralistic but I don't mean it that way I think of it sociologically right because in this city as in so many cities and so many societies when it gets very hot the leaders the elite leave town they go to cool off that's that's structural we'd say that's part of the way things work it's not a moral matter that people who run agencies go away on vacation when it's uncomfortable but it becomes a political issue when you don't have a system that recognizes risks and real dangerous and when people don't know that they should pay attention so one of the consequences of the leadership being gone uh is that people who were running the agencies that could have done more didn't know or didn't feel confident that they could say call in additional ambulances pay for more paramedics to be on the job they didn't feel comfortable making those calls because there was not an official City emergency as it happens the City of Chicago actually had a heat emergency plan on the books but no one remembered to use it for me one of the really strange things that started to happen in this story that captured my interest when I first started working on it uh is that rather than get into emergency relief mode right away when the medical examiner began to report on fatalities uh the mayor began to challenge the scientific validity of the death reports specifically there was a fight between the mayor and the medical examiner that lasted several days over whether the deaths were really real whether we were counting everything as a heat death and to give you a sense of the legacy of this debate a few weeks ago at the UIC conference Ed Donahue the the medical examiner here for many years came and gave a talk and still could not stop talking about this dispute it defined the experience for him to have his scientific claims that people were dying of the heat challenged by the mayor instead of having the mayor go into emergency mode and this is the consequence uh 739 people in excess of the norm died during the worst week between July 14th and July 20th of 1995 20 years ago 739 people a a massive disaster significantly more deadly uh than the fire for instance and what was really disturbing to so many people who followed the event is people in Chicago didn't just die hundreds died alone and were discovered hours or days after they perished um this is disturbing for all of us who care about the city right because we are a city of neighborhood we are a city that works um we're a city that is integrated um that doesn't let things like this happen and so I think part of the that will not to know I talked about in the beginning part of the difficulty we've had as a city coming to terms of what happened here is that this is not just a story of a mayor's failure or of a political breakdown this is a a story of a a sweeping set of social breakdowns in which we're all implicated in some way that's a little hard to get our hands around many people commented that one of the real tragedies of this event is that heat is actually pretty easy to defend against right once you recognize that the heat is dangerous you just have to immerse someone in an aircond conditioned environment or in water um and they will survive and hundreds of people did not get the personal attention and the refrigeration until after they died so a as this starts to play out uh Chicago's media got very involved in this story and this was the big question you know who's to blame whose fault is it when something like this happens where do we point the finger and I understand that impulse but I don't think that's the most productive way to approach this how do we think about who died and why they died well there were immediate suggestions that came from both journalistic organizations and from the city itself um the Tribune uh had this amazing headline for one of its major stories about the Heatwave um the casualties of the heat were just like most of us and that many of the victims rejected any kind of help that's an amazing story if you think about it right so it's got two big claims in it one is the the Heatwave just killed kind of a random sample of Chicago and just like you and me could have been us and the second is that what really happened is that people were going around knocking on doors of older and poor isolated frail vulnerable people saying please let us help you and they were saying no no no go away and you will still hear people in Chicago tell that story that they knocked on doors and people rejected the help there's another story which it goes in line with that that came from the commissioner of human C at the time which is basically people died because they neglected themselves it's their fault there's other views too one of the sources for my research on what happened inside the city was a a guy who was a high level person in in the paramedics group who has called this event Murder by public policy right because the city failed to do things that it easily could have done and should have done and knew to do had it been paying attention you shouldn't have to write a book on an event like this to answer those questions because we should live in a place that answers those questions on its own right so you would expect that um if 730 some people die in the city uh that what we would do is have City hearings right we would we have an open public inquiry to try to figure out what went wrong uh and yet the city of Chicago refused to hold any public hearings what happened here it's not just that we don't have a memorial it's that we would not hold hearings and when the Tribune reported uh deep inside the metro section one day that the city would hold no hearings that was the headline so I was about to start graduate school in 1995 at Berkeley uh and I thought I'd look look into this I came back to Chicago right before I moved to California to visit family and started having these conversations about the event and I couldn't believe the stories people were telling me it just sounded surreal and I started this investigation I called it a social autopsy because the idea was that in the same way that a medical examiner would open up a body and try to pinpoint the organs that broke broke down and caused a death that I would use the tools of social science to do that with the city and and and do a social autopsy and try to understand not you know whether it was murdered by public policy I was not involved in a trial not to see whether uh it was the mayor's fault I knew it was much deeper than that but what else was happening in Chicago that made that event so much more deadly than it had to have been and the first thing I did was to look at the neighborhoods right what places in Chicago were the most vulnerable where where were the deaths concentrated and this is a room full of people who know exactly what that map means right that's a map of poverty and a map of the areas with high heat related death and that's also a map of the black belt right that's what segregation by race in Chicago looks like more or less but it's more interesting than that I looked really closely at the neighborhoods that had high death rates and also the neighborhoods that had low death rates to try to figure out what conditions explain why some neighborhoods that look pretty similar on paper actually had very different death rates during the event not every neighborhood that looked vulnerable fared badly and not every neighborhood that looked resilient fared well that's Anglewood right which extremely poor high levels of crime decent number of older people living [Music] alone that's Auburn gram right across the street very similar levels uh of of poverty very similar levels of older people who are living alone slightly less crime uh than Englewood um but a neighborhood where on paper it looks like you would find a very high death rate as well and amazingly uh in the Heatwave the death rate in Anglewood was about 10 times higher than auburn gesan and what's happening there you know is it about the culture of the different communities it's about people caring for each other I don't think so and that's not what the evidence suggests what the evidence tells us is that it's not those things that matter so much as the social infrastructure what I've come to call the Social infrastructure the the physical layout of the neighborhood the sidewalks the streets the density of commercial establishments the density of community organizations that animate the social life of of a place right and if you live in a neighborhood like this which as it happens also has more commercial outlets um it's much easier to be drawn out into the streets for social life and for connection to go to public places where you'll find support whereas if you live in a neighborhood that looks like that no matter how much you care about your neighbors uh older people especially are much more likely to hunker down and stay indoors when they feel unsafe and so the neighborhoods that had high death rates in Chicago were neighborhoods that were depleted abandoned they weren't just poor they weren't just African-American they had this devastated social infrastructure and here's something that really surprised me that no one had looked at before I worked on this project if you look at the neighborhoods that had the lowest death rates in the city the places where residents were most likely to survive you find surprisingly a number of three entirely African-American neighborhoods there there's Auburn gram but also Cate Heights also Riverdale you wouldn't expect that from the way we conventionally talk about this but what all of the neighborhoods that had low death rates had in common is that while the city of Chicago was shrinking while the population was declining dramatically 22% of the population of Chicago declined in the decades leading up leading up to that every single one of them had a population decline level that was lower than the city average they were places that kept their social infrastructure intact and it's my view that that's what made the difference between life and death there's a few haunting images from this week that I still have trouble Reckoning with that I think also make it difficult for us collectively to to address what what happened and what it means for Chicago this image is one of them um after the disaster there were dozens of uh bodies that were never claimed by Next of Kin and that's how we buried them um and it turns out that that's how we buried them all the time uh every year there's hundreds of people who die alone and have no one to come to claim the body or the estate in Chicago uh and and and this burial took place not even in the city of Chicago but in Homewood um we had no place for them in Life or in death but in a way this is the more chilling image for me uh I'm guessing you've never seen this before um and and I said that the city of Chicago had no public hearings on what happened during the Heatwave um but the mayor did have a commission that looked into what went wrong and the mayor used that commission to generate some knowledge internally and to produce a a heat plan which is actually not a bad heat plan I'll talk about it in a little bit um but when they published it after the disaster this was the cover and and I find it chilling in a kind of orwellian way um for a few reasons one of them as you might have noticed is that the phrase Heatwave does not occur on this which is the major city report on what happened that week and the another as I'm sure you've noticed by now is that there's a snowflake publish to hide why does it matter that we didn't really tell the story well that we didn't do public knowledge that there was no large big conversation that moved out of Chicago into the world based on our soul searching process of coming to terms with what happened because when in 2003 a 3-we heat wve hit Europe and the death toll was somewhere between 35 and 70,000 in excess of the norm depending on how you measure it almost every single European political official said nothing like this has ever happened before how could we have known that the heat would be so deadly when I initially rode Heatwave um it was the early 2000s and the debate about climate change was not much of a debate in the social sciences there were other places that were taking it up but but that whole issue of global warming was did belong to other people not to us but of course the world has changed since then um you can't write a book or tell a story about a heatwave without referring to the weather that's coming and what I want to do now is talk a little bit about what comes next this is a chart that you're probably familiar with if not you will be soon it's you know Maps the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the global temperature um there's a strong relationship um and we can expect not just a gradual warming of the planet um but also more specifically hotter longer and more frequent heat waves right and this is not a controversial statement by by any means right so you've probably read a little bit over the last couple days about the big hurricane in Mexico and you've seen climate scientists saying there's that the the water is warmer and there's more evaporated water in the air and that kind of gives storms energy to be more powerful than they had been before um it's like the weather system on steroids it's a little bit like that for heat in Chicago so this is coming and every year in July it gets hot in Chicago and I start to get tons of phone calls from reporters uh this is the bane of my family's summer vacation plan uh and they want to know you know what does Chicago do now and so let me say to be totally clear that Chicago has one of the best heat emergency plans in the world I mean when you know when the city of Chicago is about to have a heatwave you hear about it on the radio and on television right everybody is on alert uh political officials work with local media uh we're told to check in on our neighbors uh and family members um they're very aggressive about monitoring the weather in ways we didn't before uh the city has done wonders to locate and to identify and to contact the vulnerable people older people people who live alone people who are most likely uh to to die in the Heatwave we do monitor the hospitals now so we know which ones are open and which ones are closed and of course we declare an official heat emergency right we would never never make that mistake again and so Chicago is in some ways a model for a heat emergency plan does it make you feel safe so the power went out in 1995 remember the heat wve just lasted a couple days whereas the heat wave in Europe that killed tens of thousands of people lasted 3 weeks how many of you feel very confident that on an extremely hot day in Chicago followed by another and another that you will have access to energy that your elevator will work that your water will run that your your air conditioning will work you feel good about the power grid in Chicago have we have we tackled that problem Chicago because when I was on this panel at UIC a few weeks ago there were several people who worked on the heat who came from the city who said Chicago we've got this covered we have a great heat emergency plan and I thought you do it used to be the case that to live here was to take for granted that we would have electricity when we needed it most right but I don't think anybody in any major American city feels that way now right we're running on a very old infrastructure that can't handle the load how about the public health in Chicago we feel good that people are not so vulnerable that if the extreme heat hits we'll be taken care of we'll be able to take care of each other kids will be fine older people will be healthy enough to resist the population we have of more than 100,000 people over 65 living alone um we've got them covered I'm guessing not the Health Care System more generally is it up to the demands of the 3-we Heatwave here's something chilling about a 3-we heatwave we learned a lot about France remember in 2003 it was the French Heatwave everyone talked about the 15,000 deaths were initially reported in France um and that was a heat wave that lasted 3 weeks and then I looked into it and I realized something St startling which is that the death rate in France from a heat wave that lasted 3 weeks was the same almost to the number as the death rate in Chicago from a heat wave that lasted 3 days so think about what would happen here if or when that 3-we heat wave arrives and think about how the hospital system would work to deal with those cases I don't think we've solved this problem either neighborhood inequality wouldn't you expect the same neighborhoods to have the same kinds of outcomes that they did last time but it's more than that because when I look closely at the numbers for places like Anglewood and Auburn gram again statistically not so dissimilar just across the street from each other it's not just that people who who live in this neighborhood are 10 times more likely to die in a heatwave it's that the life expectancy every day is 5 years lower than it is across the street that's the penalty and the change in Chicago since then is not such a happy story this is a study from the University of Illinois Chicago that just shows Community changes in in terms of uh poverty levels and unfortunately the places that are most vulnerable have either stayed the same or have gotten worse it's hard to see that right when you walk downtown when you go to Millennium Park when you see the skyscrapers the harbors the walkways I mean Chicago has never looked better Chicago has never looked better except for this what's the heat emergency plan and some bigger sense you know how is Chicago going to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases going to update the infrastructure um there's a plan you know there's a plan for doing it um but it's my sense that this is not a plan that's being attended to by citizens in the way that that it might be right we're here to talk about citizens today it's my sense that this is not a plan that's going to work unless this is an issue for Citizens an issue that citizens drive as well um and that citizens will need to hold the leaders of the city accountable because without it this this chart is going to be a fantasy document Chicago is not the only city struggling with these issues and I single out Chicago because we're here and I'm of it but when I moved you know the extreme weather came with me if you're planning to relocate you might want to call me first and get yourself a few thousand miles away very wise strategy that's that's Sandy um about a th000 miles wide as it was approaching the Northeast and um that's a neighbor neighborhood not too far from from where I live a very affluent neighborhood uh in lower Manhattan um after the water breached the city uh three years ago next week next week is a three-year anniversary you'll hear a lot about that anniversary Sandy uh was catastrophic uh in ways that are worth us paying attention to and not just because of you know this week's weather in Mexico um 8 million households lost their power during Sandy um there as in many other places we have this amazing technology for keeping the the power running that um we use a pole um and then we have local power lines go just below these giant trees with big limbs um and they fall down uh every time um and millions of people lose power uh in Long Island where this image was taken what's amazing is that the Power Authority had a a meeting a few days before Sandy hit um where they were dealing with all sorts of things except for not Sandy they spent 37 seconds discussing Sandy plans um and failed to prune trees and do a lot of other preparations they actually have now moved out of the region and there's a new contractor there a new utilities provider um the Subways filled up like bathtubs in New York City and what's incredible about this image is that um it's 86th Street and the flooding was nowhere near there right extremely vulnerable the built-in infrastructure of a place like New York um the city proved vulnerable in all kinds of surprising ways um as I think about the challenge that Chicago and other cities face for this world of of hotter Wilder wetter weather um I Look to examples from different places in the world um and also to some Innovations uh that I got to participate in because we are now in a situation where we have no choice but to rebuild our our cities and our infrastructures in anticipation of climate Extremes in the same way that we worked on homeland security after September 11th we are entering into a period where climate Security will be necessary we literally will have no choice um so for the last several years um I've worked on this project called rebuild by Design uh a project initiated by President Obama and his task force on Sandy and the idea was to to say we can't just build back what what what was destroyed in New York and in the region that was hit by Sandy uh we have to to rebuild and with more intelligent design right and so what I want to talk to you about to to conclude uh are some of the interesting things that that are happening in New York and that are starting to happen in cities everywhere to rebuild cities so that they can deal with the threats of of global warming um but not in the way that we dealt with the threats from Homeland Security which is to build up these massive walls and security systems that really do nothing most of the time and may or may not help when the next attack comes what they certainly do is they make life kind of uglier and less efficient every day if you've been to an airport or a high-rise building recently but we can't make that mistake with climate change right we can't we we have to make designs that improve the quality of our lives in our cities every day and also make us safer when the extreme weather hits so we tried to do that one of the um we got 148 plans or proposals submitted from um these big International Teams it was extraordinary um 10 were became finalists six were selected and got a billion dollars of funding from the federal government uh last year this is one of them called the big U which is to say um what could we do to provide some protection uh around New York that's short of having giant walls in the middle of the sea to try to block it out that that's the image of what happened when the power went out in in New York that there there is kind of an iconography of Sandy there there isn't really one for the Heatwave if you close your eyes and try to picture the Chicago Heatwave you can't do it but you can see this um so this group called The Big U uh has come up with a plan to try to um Harden the edge of the city with walls but walls that look really differently that look very different than the conventional wall uh I'm just going to take you through some of the design ideas um so you can see what it could look like to rebuild a Riverfront area so that you're safer as a resident there uh but that you also get benefits all the time right that's one of the proposals from the big U that was um it's it's it's funded actually on not on the this is the west side of Manhattan it actually interestingly got funded on the east side of Manhattan uh where there's a real thick concentration of um public housing uh and low-income neighborhoods and so we made a public decision that that would be the area that we fund because there's that's a more vulnerable place uh and the people are more vulnerable and they are have greater need for uh that kind of assistance um and that's a real problem when it comes to climate change adaptation which is once we start this effort of not only mitigating not only trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also trying to do climate security to keep some people in places safe there's an enormous risk that we will lock in inequalities and create new forms of environmental Injustice right that that the most affluent people and places will be able to protect themselves against the ravages of climate change while the poorest will be left In Harm's Way nothing nothing short of citizens working together to push governments not to let that happen right to invest in places that need investment most will will prevent that right so that's New York just a a a sample of a of a way for a city to take on this issue it's expensive it's difficult but it's necessary what's happened in Chicago since the big Heatwave in 1995 h how have we thought about Greening the city to cool it down right if New York needs protection from too much water Chicago needs protection from too much heat Chicago needs a way to integrate people in the most vulnerable neighborhoods to to make make sure that the City Works as it should that agencies deliver the support that they can uh that that we're helping each other out not not just in bad weather but all the time so by far the most high-profile green site of Chicago these last several years has been the green roof has anyone been here to the green roof on City Hall it's an amazing green roof um and it's a model you know people come from all over the world to look at the green roof um and it it was done with philanthropic dollars I don't think public money went into it um and it really is just kind of a successful Exemplar of how we can use new materials or old materials uh to absorb the heat to uh bring down especially those evening temperatures which are hotter in in the city than outside um so I applaud the green roof for Chicago but doesn't do much for the issues we talked about today the green roof and City Hall won't do all that won't do all that much for the neighborhoods where we know people are most likely to suffer so my fa favorite image for Chicago is not an image of a major infrastructure project it's not seaw walls it's not a multi-million dollar roof on City Hall I think about the small places in neighborhoods where there's been so much depletion so much abandonment over the last decades um that you could really use something to enliven the social infrastructure and bring people together it's striking you know how little we have invested collectively in things like Community Gardens and other small scale facilities that exist at the neighborhood level that that provide some green space that maybe make a little dent in the problem of food deserts right but that more crucially bring people together across Generations where they can establish relationships in the place where they live so that they have connections all the time but lifelines when they need the most could be a neighborhood Library could be some other community center that's relevant that works for people all the time could be a community garden but when we think about what cities like Chicago need to do to address this new world we're entering the story is we have to think large but we also have to think small most importantly we have to think together so thank you very much okay what was the ratio of children to adults and did the children survive at a much higher ratio yeah so um children were quite unlikely to die um the the fatalities were overwhelmingly adult uh and overwhelmingly elderly um roughly 70% of the deaths were people over the age of 65 um not to say the children weren't vulnerable in fact there's a heartbreaking story and it's actually one of the main scenes of this terrific local playwright Steve Sanic did a theatrical adaptation of Heatwave um it's run twice now most recently at um steepen wolf Festival um and I it's I think the first reported deaths were these two toddlers who um were left in a um a big uh van that their um daycare provider had put them in because they didn't have air conditioning and they wanted to get to a place where the kids could cool down so they drove to a movie theater and she had I don't know 10 kids or something and she forgot about two of them um and and you'll notice you know once you start to pay attention to these issues that in this often happens in summers that you know people forget children in cars but but the other thing that happens with kids is that they get very sick um because we think that they're fine and we don't recognize the danger of heat and so they play as if uh it's a cool day uh and wind up getting dehydrated and so the um hospitalizations of children were higher thanks I'm wondering whether you can talk a little bit about the global nature of the problem as opposed to the local and I'm just thinking in terms of right now we'll be talking about this later today too the Syrian crisis starts out as a global warming crisis as desertification and so forth you get these terrible migration flows but is it completely utopian and fantastical to imagine that one could help for example by having tens of thousands of the current Syrian refugees come to cities in America that have been depleted abandoned and so forth where there is housing stock that's empty that they could help to revitalize those neighborhoods and that one could think more imaginatively if one weren't kind of locked down the way we are as a country about that yeah so um that's um Ren westler by by the way who's the former artistic director of the humanities Festival um and clearly not going to be running for a republican candidate for Senator or for president anytime soon um so you know could could our City's uh Fair better uh if we were more uh welcoming uh if we lived up to our history of being a place where you know we would accept uh massive numbers of immigrants uh during times of Crisis where they live um I think that question pretty much answers itself um could we could we use that kind of imagination yes we could use it um so you could run for office in some other party perhaps um um and I think that issue is yet to play out but so so so let me um move to the first part of your question um which has to do with these bigger um security issues and issues of health and well-being that don't always appear to be about climate change but that in fact have a real uh relationship to global warming because you know we are seeing now um with the kind of extreme uh drought uh or flooding uh that's been hitting with more frequency uh the beginning of what climate scientists predict will be long waves of migration um right when Water Supplies run out right so we don't know how California or Nevada are going to get water but imagine conditions like that in much poorer regions of the world right our our food supply chains are incredibly vulnerable to the new weather extremes that we'll see um and just this issue of sea level rise generating Coastal inundation means that in the next Century up to a billion million people might have to leave the places they live because they will be uninhabitable right so you know we are looking at a world with huge changes I've written a lot about climate change adaptation and resilience because we don't have any choice you know if I had a magic button right now and I just turned off all greenhouse gas emissions globally we would still have have many decades of rising seas and hotter temperatures because of the carbon dioxide that's already in the atmosphere so we have no choice to adapt but I as you could tell from what I said earlier I do fear that this process of adapting to climate change is going to be extraordinarily unequal uh and will introduce all kinds of new issues for us to manage so um these are Lively matters for Citizens everywhere and I anticipate um that the humanity Festival will be addressing them again um I was wondering like in a city in uh like Phoenix Arizona they live with heat like this for months at a time and you kind of cherry-picked a problem in Chicago that's more of a an anomaly the converse of that is really the cold in Chicago that's a problem because it's much more frequent and so I was wondering if that perception that the problem is so uh um nonroutine that well you know we're more concerned about protecting us from from the cold as opposed to the heat is is is a reason why maybe uh the city itself is not prepared to really put the focus on something like this yeah thank you um totally fair question um so I have a couple different kinds of responses to it the first is um and I hope this makes sense to you um I'm not really here to talk about the heat I I mean I'm here to talk about the heat in a very explicit way and this is to talk about the heat wave 20 years later but one thing I want to convey to you today is that the issues that are really relevant the issues for why Chicago was vulnerable to this and why people in Chicago are vulnerable all the time uh is are not necessarily issues about hot weather some of them are social issues about isolation or about breakdowns and some some of them um are political issues about how we deal with vulnerability and address the needs of people who are really in trouble and some are about extreme weather you know whether it's heat or cold um I'm certainly not here to tell you that um don't worry about the cold very cold Winters we'll strangely wind up with more of those too potentially um if the weirdness um that climate scientists see in the weather really happens uh so I hope hope that I hope that um you you walk out of the room today feeling like the that what I had to say was about the heat wave but about something else as well on the heat though it does turn out to be the case that uh heat waves are growing more dangerous that we should expect to see more of them that we should expect them to be hotter that we should expect them to last longer uh as we move into this climate changed world and I think you know when we look at things like this hurricane this past weekend in Mexico we're already starting to see or or Sandy we're already starting to see signs of weather systems uh that are powerful in ways we hadn't hadn't seen before um where I think you're totally right is that we have long identified a climate risk of being in this region uh is coping with extreme cold right I grew up in enough Winters here to know that you know you've got to get that one addressed U and we're and we've built an infrastructure to make sure that people in the city um get heat so that we don't have people die in in blizzards and deep cult snaps um you know as it happens when you have a spike in homelessness you see a spike in cold deaths you also see it in heat deaths in Phoenix the other City you mentioned it turns out that they actually have a major problem with heat deaths that they hadn't recognized because people were dying when they were exposed and and homeless and no one was recognizing the relationship between uh spikes and mortality and the heat until epidemiologists went back and did it um so you know we have different kinds of vulnerabilities um but what we're seeing all over the world is that changes in the climate are making cities that never had to deal with one kind of risk uh suddenly have to deal with that in addition to all the old ones so thanks two of the neighborhoods that you studied uh Englewood and Auburn gesan have blocks with organized block clubs did the existence of a block Club make any difference in the number of fatalities and how did the vacant Lots affect it yeah unfortunately so so here's what we know we know that the neighborhoods that had a higher density we know that neighborhoods that have a higher density of community community organizations fare well Fair better generally than neighborhoods that don't unfortunately I don't have great data at the Block level of whether the existence of a blot Club was sufficient to bring down the likelihood of a heat death I just don't know the answer to that question um I do know the answer to the second question though which is uh what about the empty lots and there you know we actually have a really strong data from uh people who were able to to create a new data set that looked at physical conditions of different Chicago neighborhoods and they established a positive relationship between uh that levels of abandoned M and depletion specifically around abandoned houses uh and heat deaths is a paper published in the American sociological review kind of the gold standard of of Sociology journals um and I think that's important to note uh there have been real costs associated with the depletion of Chicago neighborhoods right the city shrunk uh over the last three decades for between 1960 and 1990 it shrunk quite dramatically but of course that shrinkage was not shared equally and at the same time that there were neighborhoods that were booming and prosperous uh the parts of the city that were most affected by this heat wve experien devastating losses that I think they're still struggling to get over I mean the situation in in Anglewood is maybe a little better but in in some ways not all that different than it was in 1995 um so this is a formidable project right it's a it's a project about remaking Chicago for the weather that is coming but it's also really a hard to project about remaking Chicago all the time um and so a a book about a heatwave is a very modest contribution to this um but if my I guess my deepest goal in doing it and continuing to talk about it and writing a new addition um is that it strikes me that this this condition this this will not to know just can't be sustained it's it's something we have to change so thank you very [Music] much
It's only 24 degrees but I'm sweating. "Oof, it's hot." Later this summer, the heat will be unbearable. The climate crisis is making hot days more common for a lot of people. And it's getting dangerous, especially if you live in a city. There are plenty of ways to keep cool, but this is one you've probably never heard of: climate shelters, like here in Barcelona. The city has created a massive network of places where people can go to escape the scorching summer heat. It's not only about comfort, but also about saving lives and reducing inequality. They're becoming a common part of dealing with hotter temperatures, and Barcelona is a city many look to for inspiration. I'm here to see how people are cooling down, "Wow!" what's not working, and what other cities can learn as our planet heats up. This map shows the Barcelona districts most vulnerable to heatwaves. We're here, at the Museu Frederic Mares, a museum that's been turned into a climate shelter. I'm spending the day with Dr. Ana Terra Amorim-Maia, "Hi, nice to meet you." "So nice to meet you too, Ana" a researcher at the Basque Center for Climate Change. "Wow, it's super beautiful in here!" "Yeah, right?" She did her PhD at the Autonomous University of Barcelona on the city's network of climate shelters. "What actually is a climate shelter?" "Actually, they're just places that are open to any citizen who might need it in a situation of extreme heat or extreme cold." "Why is that important for people to have a space like this in a city like Barcelona?" "So, Barcelona is very densely populated and many of the buildings don't really have good thermal insulation. So that means that when it's hot, it's very hot indoors and when it's cold, it's very cold indoors. So then the city council decided to start adapting their existing public spaces. So right now, the city of Barcelona has 98% of their population within a ten-minute walk from a climate shelter in the city" There are over 350 of them spread around the city. They're open to the public and have to maintain an indoor temperature under 27 degrees Celsius. Located on the coast and pushed up against the mountains, Barcelona is far from the hottest city in Spain. Unlike those in other parts of the country, buildings here aren't designed for extreme heat. The city is an architectural soup of sorts, and limited space has meant that it's been built and re-built again, and again. It used to be completely surrounded by a medieval wall, which got knocked down. Then it got its famous blocks as a response to poor living conditions of the city's working class. During Franco's rule, both social housing and unregulated buildings sprung up. Now as temperatures rise, Barcelona needs to find ways to cool down itself and its citizens. Climate shelters are a part of that. "Have you ever eaten any of these oranges?" "I have in fact. They're awful. I do not recommend, unless you want to have a traumatic experience of putting something extremely sour in your mouth. But they are more decorative. They look very pretty." "They do look very pretty." "They do offer some shade, but don't eat them." Climate shelters also have to offer water, as well as places to sit and bathrooms. "Could we have a glass of water?" "Sure." In Barcelona, tap water is safe to drink. "As much as you want." "Thank you." "And the glass is for you, you can take it with you." "Cheers." So you might think that actually 27 degrees is not that cool, and it isn't, but you're not going to perish. You know, you're going to be fine." That's one of the main aims here: to protect people from dangerous heat. A study estimated that in 2022, there were over 60,000 heat-related deaths in Europe alone. Spain is one of the countries with the most. And cities, like Barcelona, are heat traps. Full of concrete and asphalt, they can be around 10 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. Cooling them is really hard. So a benefit of the shelters is that they can be easy to set up. So turning this into a climate shelter was really low cost. It was already cool inside, and all they had to do was designate a space for the public. But we're going to head to a climate shelter now, that's kind of a climate shelter plus. They've actually adapted it to be a cooler place. Infrastructure adaptations come in three flavors: Gray means changes to anything human-made. Green involves trees and other plants. Blue adaptations have to do with water. The next shelter, a school, had all three. To see how they were applied, we met with Mar Campanero i Sala and Jaume Barnada, members of the city council. "The goal is that by 2030 we will already have a network with coverage of one hundred percent of the population that can have a shelter less than 5 minutes' walk from their homes." This one has been cooled using passive architecture: a way of building that controls temperature without using extra energy. We did this especially by creating a hot air chimney – the hot air rises and cools down this patio. So we had to do two things, first, that it was always ventilated on one of the two sides on the ground floor. The upper floor is also ventilated through the windows. When the air rises (from the courtyard), it sucks the hot air from the classrooms. And finally, what we did was raise the roof, 40 cm so that all this hot air comes out. In the courtyard of the school there were also blue adaptations, like this fountain. "Come, come here!" "Ready?"
"Wow!" "Oh, it's so nice!" And lastly, the green adaptations. We planted a tree, the trees we planted are small, but really what we did was this. We created all this green and shade space, which is a magnificent space, what we need now is for it to grow." "What have been the greatest challenges here, with this project?" "We have to expand the coverage of this network so that it reaches all neighborhoods. Another challenge we have is that the shelters can also open in August." This is a big hole in the network: many shelters are closed during the hottest month." "Here we have two options, we need to find shelters that because of their operations are open during the holidays. Or we need to find funds so that these places can stay open during this time of the year." "I think it's good that we go up to the patio, to the deck so that you can see the main example." "Compared to downstairs, the temperature here is way lower." "With passive method, what is called passive architecture, we can lower the temperature a lot without the need to spend energy, just greenery and humidity and that's it." An important aspect of passive architecture used for cooling is the roof. It can be painted white, or have greenery added. This one has been used to create that air chimney. In total, all of these changes cost around 250,000 euros and lowered the indoor temperature by 5 degrees. The adaptations from the school can also be extended into the city space. Barcelona has removed asphalt, banned cars in certain areas, greened streets and has a water fountain app. "We're here," "Okay." we can try walking this way and then right and hopefully pass two water fountains on the way." "Sounds good." Although the drinking fountains were working fine – "Nope. Not a button." the same wasn't true for the decorative ones. "Well, we are in a drought so." "Heat is the number one killer of all climate and weather events." Amy Buitenhuis manages a network of cities that are specifically focused on addressing extreme heat. "Around 14% of the world lives under extreme heat conditions. And we expect this to grow to 45% by 2050." Globally, many countries are already dealing with heat more extreme than we're seeing in Barcelona. "In informal settlements and homes with tin roofs, which can be really common in India, let's say, temperatures can get up to 50 degrees." And climate shelters, also called cooling centers, are part of many countries' heat action plans. Other aspects include greening streets, installing drinking fountains, and cooling roofs, just like in Barcelona. But these plans must consider that some are more vulnerable than others. "People who die of extreme heat are often seniors. They're often people living alone. They're people with chronic illness and disabilities. This really shows us that this is about building community and about having cities where people feel included and that this is actually something that's life saving." The importance of community can be seen at our next stop in Barcelona: La Prosperitat. This area of the city is lower income, which typically also means hotter. There's more concrete, fewer trees, which means less shade. The buildings are also older, which means it's way harder to keep them cool. People are also less likely to be able to afford air conditioning. So there are climate shelters in this neighborhood, but people don't really use them so much. Instead, they come to community centers like this one. Even though it's not an official climate shelter, this place fulfills all the requirements: it's cool inside, has drinks, water, bathrooms, and places to sit. Most importantly, it's where the community goes. "Here, besides being a home of the community, lots of activities happen here. We're a cooperative of 14 women here – almost all racialized women in Barcelona." "Do people come here to kind of escape the heat and to stay cool?" "Yes, yes yes, for sure. We, the members of the cooperative, we already tested it and kept it open last year. We did it and lots of people were thankful, We wanted to do it this year but for us, it didn’t work out financially." They say they would need a subsidy to be able to open in August. And that would help people in this neighborhood. "I don't use [climate shelters], Sometimes, I go to bars that have air conditioning, stay there for a while and then go home. Also the [community center] could be used. it wouldn't cost anything." "I've heard about [them], but have not yet been in any." "I know that the city hall has them but I don't know all. I look for places with air conditioning. The Casal for example, the community center, places like that where there is air conditioning, they are cooler." "So what kind of improvements do you think there could be to the climate shelter network?" "So I think the network needs to be accessible. And when I say accessible, I mean, it needs to be well distributed across the city, it needs to be accessible for people with disabilities, and it needs to be accessible also from a cultural point of view, so that everyone who needs shelter feels welcome and feels like they belong in that space. "So, for example, in a neighborhood like this, the government shouldn't necessarily make any random building a climate shelter, but instead really look at like, what the needs of the people are in the area." "Exactly. What the needs of the people are and the spaces that people are already using as a shelter without necessarily calling it a shelter." This is a really important consideration, as more cities around the world make plans to keep people cool. Because it's only getting hotter, and while climate shelters are a simple, cheap solution, the difference between one that people use and one that they don't could save lives. "Do you also need some blue adaptations in your life? If you like this video, don't forget to subscribe, we've got new ones every Friday."
Maiya: Throughout human history,
much of the globe has been surprisingly
hospitable. Humans, of course,
have lived in all kinds of extreme places,
but dense population centers have largely been concentrated
in the human climate niche. That's the planet's
Goldilocks zone, with average temperatures between 11 and 15 degrees
Celsius. But as the earth warms,
extreme heat is already threatening even
our most hospitable regions. In 2021, the Pacific Northwest
was struck by a heat wave so extreme that some scientists
believe it wouldn't have been possible
without global warming. And typically hot places
like Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida, may soon
become nearly unlivable. By 2100, these cities are
projected to see several months of dangerous heat every year. But researchers
may have a solution. I'm Maiya May, and I'm fascinated
by our dynamic planet, our weather, and our climate. What began as a career
in broadcast meteorology has become a mission
to figure out where we are... Woman: Oh, my God! and where we're going
as we leave this long stable climate period and enter the hockey stick era. So join me on
an international investigation as we learn what cities
can do to prevent heat deaths. We'll also learn how
extreme heat waves are formed and how a once war-torn city
in Colombia is turning the temperature down. On a hot day, there
isn't any shade at all. I just want to take
a whole pano of this. I've never seen anything
like this. Amazing. [thunder] ♪ So in 2021,
right where I'm standing, a neighbor's camera
caught the final moments of 36-year-old Ashlyn Maddox,
and she was dropped off here by a medical
Ride to Care service. Two hours after that, she went
back here, circling the area, disoriented, right before
she fell unconscious. And the high temperature
that day was 116 degrees, and this is nine degrees
above the previous record. Broadcaster: We are talking
an extremely dangerous heat wave, and the reason
for that is the folks in the Pacific Northwest
and British Columbia are not used to
this type of heat. Maiya: And Ashlyn died of
extreme heat exposure. She lost consciousness just 50 feet away
from her air-conditioned home. But there's more to
the story than extreme heat and heat-related illness. When Ashlyn died, she was
found with a McDonald's bag and a drink
that still had ice in it. That's a clue about
the last moments of her life. And what she did during those
moments actually tells us a lot about how to make
our cities more livable as temperatures
set record after record. So this is the route that
Ashlyn would've walked to go get food at McDonald's, and you can tell that there's
just a ton of asphalt, a lot of impermeable surfaces,
a lot of traffic, a lot of cars. We don't know
for sure what happened, but if she did walk
to that McDonald's, she would've likely been
walking for over an hour along a very busy,
very hot section of highway
with very little shade. At that time, it was
around 116 degrees at the Portland Airport. But in other parts of
town without many trees, Researcher
Vivek Shandas recorded a much hotter air temperature
of 124 degrees. We'll get into why that corridor
was so much hotter than other places in the city, but first, a bit more about
heat as the world warms. We can identify
two categories of cities-- first, the already hot places,
like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Miami. Rachel White: These places
that are already really hot and already sort of getting
close to the limits of some of the ecosystems
and people living there, we're shifting
those temperatures hotter, and so people have to
rely even more on things like air conditioning in order
to make these places livable. Maiya: But how does
the other category of more temperate places, like
Portland, suddenly transform into one of
the hottest places on earth? The answer is a heat dome. Normally, our weather systems
are pushed from west to east by the jet stream, but sometimes
the jet stream develops large wavy patterns
or meanders, essentially trapping
weather systems. White: What happens when
we get a heat wave is that we have one of these
high pressure systems that basically stops moving, so it stops propagating
towards the east, and it becomes
roughly stationary and just stays in one place. And if it's strong enough and stays in place
for long enough, you can get these
very extreme temperatures. Maiya: The trapped high-pressure
system acts like a lid, evaporating clouds
and bringing clear skies. Normally, the moisture
in the soil and plants moderates heat as it evaporates. But if the high-pressure system
stays stuck in place long enough,
this moisture gets depleted and the sun's energy goes
directly into heating the air, and temperatures skyrocket. The 2021 heat wave in
the Pacific Northwest was one of the most extreme
heat waves across the planet. There's a lot of scientific
disagreement about this at the moment, but some
estimates put it at an event that would, on average, happen
once every 100,000 years. It broke the Canadian
national record by 4.6 degrees Celsius. This was absurd. ♪ Maiya: There's growing evidence that climate change is
slowing the jet stream and causing more meanders, like the one that caused
the 2021 heat dome. What we do know is that we're
seeing more hotter heat waves, especially where
most of us live. Extreme heat is
especially deadly in cities, and that's because of
the urban heat island effect. And this is where our built
infrastructure amplifies warming by around two to five degrees
during the day and up to 22 degrees
Fahrenheit at night. That means heat trapping
aspects of our cities more than double the current
level of global warming, making heat waves
even more deadly. ♪ Hey, hey. Hi, Vivek! Researcher Vivek Shandas
has a fascinating perspective on heat,
especially in cities, and this gives us insight
into what's going wrong and how we can actually
cool cities down. Heat kills more people
than any other natural hazard, many other natural hazards
combined, in fact. Where we modeled out the health-related costs
associated to extreme heat
across the metropolitan areas of the country, and we're
finding that there's a eightfold to tenfold increase in the number of heat-related
illnesses by 2040. That's at the kind
of global scale. When we start getting
into cities a little bit more, we start seeing
these thermal anomalies, these differences in temperature
between one neighborhood and another,
one street and another. Back in 2021, Vivek revealed the shocking
temperature difference between a wealthy neighborhood
and a much lower income area in Portland, using
a weather instrument he and his team designed. Vivek:
Well, we found a temperature
difference of about
25 degrees, which is
the largest air temperature
difference I had ever recorded
in this city. This is
the intersection that recorded that 124-degree temperature that was the hottest
temperature recorded during last year's heat dome. There aren't a lot of trees
here, so there's not a lot of shade
in this neighborhood, and you got a lot of pavement. Let's actually
compare this neighborhood to the coolest neighborhood.
[snap] Here it is--
the coolest neighborhood, with an air temperature
of 99 degrees. There's tons of trees
in this neighborhood, and it's surrounded by forests. Vivek Shandas: So cities are
doing all kinds of things to try to return the temperatures down. You can do a lot of engineering, and you'll eventually
land on the fact that trees are probably
your best solution. It really comes down to that. ♪ Maiya: It doesn't
take a scientist to know that trees have
a dramatic cooling effect, but the mechanics of how this
works are pretty fascinating. First, and most obvious,
is shade. Trees block solar radiation
from reaching the ground, so heat isn't absorbed by
sidewalks and roadways. Second is transpiration. This is where water is
taken up by tree roots, eventually evaporating
through the leaves. Energy used in this
chemical reaction actually consumes heat energy that would otherwise
raise air temperatures. Transpiration can reduce heat
by up to eight degrees Celsius. ♪ Back east of Portland,
Ashlyn can be seen walking east on her neighbor's
security camera in the direction of McDonald's. We'll never know
for sure if she walked there to get the meal
she was found with, but if she did, it would've
been on this route. The lack of trees
in this area pushed temperatures from an uncomfortable 99 degrees to somewhere closer
to the 124 degrees Vivek recorded
in a similar part of town. So with the projections
of increasing fatalities from heat in the future and the proven cooling effect
of trees, I assumed that
cities across the U.S. would be actively
increasing tree cover, especially in vulnerable,
low-income communities. Vivek: Overall, we're seeing
a consistent decline of trees in our cities... in a world that's continuing
to heat up is a scary trend. Maiya: And Vivek and others
found that the neighborhoods with the fewest trees are almost always
lower income neighborhoods and communities of color. Vivek: You would think that with the clear
scientific evidence around the loss of
tree canopy occurring in not only Portland
but around the country, that we would be
bringing a lot more trees into those hot neighborhoods. We studied 33 cities
across the United States where we had really
defensible scientific data, and we were looking at,
Did trees--increase and did green space
increase in those areas, or did we see a decline? And in the hottest cities and in the hottest
neighborhoods, we found a consistent
decline of tree canopy. Those are the places
that are actually losing the most trees
in the region. They're losing trees? They're losing trees
in the hottest places. We have all
the information... Yeah. but we're just not-- the U.S. isn't
getting it right. Are there any other cities
outside of the U.S. that we can look to as an example of
how to do this right? One place that I've
been thinking about a lot is Medellin in Colombia, and that's one of these places
where they have attempted to reorganize transportation
networks, housing patterns in service to keeping
the tree canopy intact. How is a city
continuing to grow but yet maintaining large portions
of their tree canopy and keeping those old,
large trees that provide all of these benefits
in place? Maiya: So we invited Vivek,
one of the world's leading authorities
on urban heat, to go to Colombia
to try to figure this out. The city claims that their
Green Corridors program has cooled their
average temperature by two degrees Celsius,
but is that true? And if so, how did
a city mostly known for drug cartels
make this happen? Today, Medellin has
transformed into a vibrant city now known globally for its
innovative urban development, culture,
and breathtaking landscapes. Part of the city's
transformation has been their Green Corridors program,
started in 2016 to address air pollution. The program connects
green spaces in the city with tree-lined streets
and shaded avenues, a strategy we mostly
fail to implement in the U.S. [music] All right, so we're
here at City Hall, and behind me is a green wall, and this is one
of the many innovations that the city of Medellin
has implemented to help cool air temperatures
and to improve air quality. Everywhere we went,
we collected temperature data. Pequeño. SÃ. Maiya: We drove all over the
city, checking out their parks, transportation corridors,
and creative greening of public spaces. Vivek's done this work
all over the world to study urban heat, and he
seemed immediately impressed. I would walk to work
in this. Oh, yeah. Like, Oh, my goodness! This would be a great
place to get around. What's really cool
is they're able to integrate
multimodal transportation with green space
in the same street segment. Shaded bike lane,
shaded walkway, and then fast bus and car route. Maiya: The oldest
palm tree in Medellin. Vivek: Really? It's right here. Not a lot of shade,
so I understand why there aren't
more of those here. [music] Maiya: As we moved throughout
the city, it was clear that Medellin
had invested a lot of time and money in their
green corridors. But we wanted to see what
this investment looked like in Medellin's
poorest communities. ♪ Vivek: So I'm gonna be
really looking for green space-- presence, absence--in these
lower income neighborhoods. Wow. Look at this. Wow! Vivek:
Totally different scene than what we had
seen before. Maiya: Very different. Yeah. Very different. In an area like this,
what do you expect to see on
the temperature gauge? What I'm seeing around
me is a lot of brick, a lot of cinder block,
a lot of concrete and asphalt, and so what we'd see here
is a built environment that essentially traps
the heat and holds on to it. So this area is
actually going to be, in some ways, much warmer
than the lowland areas. The priority here
is clearly housing-- like, people need
places to live-- and so green space becomes
then, in some ways, a luxury. Maiya: But just on
the other side of the bridge, the city has invested in
revitalizing a green space. Squeezed between dense
development was a terrace garden with maintained plants,
trees, and shade. [music] It's a lot. And It's very cool
in here, too. It's cool.
You feel it, right? It's like just
that little drop. We're already
in a valley. It's like the water,
the trees, the breeze. The breeze is very nice. Vivek:
That's really nice. Maiya: Nearby, we visited
another pocket park, and we began to
understand that the city's greening every available space, even in dense, unplanned,
low-income neighborhoods. I just want to take
a whole pano of this. I've never seen
anything like this. Amazing, amazing. I keep seeing more and
more of these gardeners that are here actively
working on this space, and I have not seen anything
like this in a public space in a low-income
neighborhood, with this level of
concerted effort in my life. It's really, really
a phenomenal moment. We started to understand
just how aggressive Medellin is with adding green space, and it definitely feels
like it's working, but the only way to know
for sure is to measure it. Fortunately, this is
kind of Vivek's thing, so we met up with
a fellow heat researcher and Medellin local,
Carlos Cadena, to compare temperatures
along two contrasting routes. We'll hop on one car along
one of the green corridors, and then at the same time,
we'll do a non-green corridor in one of the other cars, and
we'll take some measurements. [indistinct chatter] Vivek: Let's go. You can definitely
start seeing the difference. In a couple of blocks, you'll
start seeing much more green. There is absolutely
no trees here. This is completely just
buildings and concrete. This is definitely one
of the most congested, lively areas with the least amount
of tree cover, for sure. Wow! There is
so many people. This kind of reminds
me of New York. And on a hot day, there
isn't any shade at all. Maiya: Back in Portland with
Vivek, we looked at our data to learn just how well
the city's interventions were working. Joey: Both of the vehicles
started down here in the southern end of the map, and it looks like they
took off different directions. Maiya: Even on
the relatively mild day that we drove those routes, what we saw was a roughly
7- to 8-degree difference between the greener, cooler
route that Vivek drove and the hotter one that I drove. And I was definitely
along this road here. Vivek: Mm-hmm.
Lots of red there. Maiya: And it looks like
the hottest temperature, so what is that,
a 7- to 8-degree difference? Vivek: Yep, yep.
That's right. Joey: I zoomed in here. This is actually
right along here in another one of
those hottest sections, and, yeah, you can see
a lot of people going out. I don't see any trees
in all four directions. Maiya: Medellin still has
a long way to go to be sure, but it's inspiring to see that they're actually
increasing tree cover and that it's working. So why aren't we? Well, Medellin has
one clear advantage when it comes
to growing trees--rain. Trees here grow faster with
less effort than drier places. Medellin gets over
60 inches of rain per year, but some of the hottest parts
of the U.S. are also the driest. These areas
in the Southwest are home to over 14 million people and receive less than 10 inches
of rain per year. Phoenix might be
the most extreme example, with 55 days over 110 degrees and 645 heat-related deaths in 2023 alone. So I wanted to find out what heat adaptation strategies are effective in
such a dry place. We visited the city in 2020
during the 110-degree heat wave to see what they
were doing to cope. Man: No large city faces
higher summer temperatures than Phoenix. As such, we're trying
to think of Phoenix as an innovation laboratory. The ideas for coping
with extreme heat may very well come
from here out of necessity. We need to find the solutions
before other cities as we head into a warmer future. Maiya: One relatively
simple solution is to use more reflective
surfaces, like white roofs, which can reflect
up to 80% of sunlight. This not only cuts energy bills
by keeping buildings cooler, but this also redirects
heat away from street level. Another reflective technology
where Phoenix really is a laboratory
is reflective pavement. David took us to check out
the city's pilot project. So we're here in
a residential neighborhood near downtown Phoenix, where some of this cool pavement
has just been applied. The sun's been up
for only three hours now. Traditional pavement is
about 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Plenty warm already. We'll come over
to this CoolSeal pavement, and it is 121. That's gonna grow over the day to be upwards
of 15 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we get to sunset. Maiya: But researchers
discovered a bit of a catch during an experiment while
using a robot called MaRTy. Ariane Middel: MaRTy measures
mean radiant temperature and mean radiant temperature
is the heat load that a body receives
when it's outdoors. Maiya: They used MaRTy
to measure the effects of the city's
reflective pavement. It turns out that heat reflected
by the new pavement bounces and warms the atmosphere at around the same height
as humans. So while it can help
in certain situations, it can also hurt in others. Now we're getting hit not only by the sunlight
coming in from above, but also from the sunlight being
reflected off the pavement, which could actually
make the conditions worse for our bodies. Maiya: Arianne showed us
one more shocking set of measurements
that helps to confirm the importance of urban forests. Arianne: The mean
radiant temperature here, what we just measured at 100, close to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's the temperature
your body experiences, the heat load your
body experiences. Maiya: We then moved
from the exposed asphalt to a greener part of town. So here we have
an air temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, which is about
104 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's much cooler
here in the shade with all the vegetation
in the surroundings. Maiya: That's around
a 66-degree less heat load than MaRTy measured on
the pavement in the full sun. This massive difference
helps us to understand what Ashlyn would've
experienced back in Portland before she collapsed. Vivek: Trees have to be
a part of the mix. There are a lot of trees
that are drought-resistant. I've worked in the Middle East in some of the hottest
environments in the world, and seen cities
bringing trees in that do really well in
these very arid environments. Maiya: But is it
worth the resources to grow trees in the dry desert? Just a couple of hours
down the road in Tucson, Brad Lancaster
may have the answer. Welcome! How are you doing? Good! Maiya. Great to meet you. Maiya: Good to meet you. Yeah! This is amazing. Oh, thanks. This is, I mean,
you've really cultivated this forest
in a dry place. Can you show me? Sure. Let's start out
in the street, see what
we've done out here. Maiya: We just got done
talking about trees and all the benefits,
why they're important, all the shade they provide, they help with improving
the air quality as well. And I think some people,
especially people who live in the Southwest,
may watch that and feel like, "Oh, that's
not really realistic for us "because we live
in a dry place that has water issues." But we're seeing here that this is
actually a possibility. Brad: Yeah,
this works everywhere. So let me just
show you over here. The average neighborhood
street in Tucson, like this one right here, drains over
a million gallons of rainfall per mile
per year. And if we direct that
water to plantings as opposed to storm drain, that is more
than enough water to create and freely irrigate
a continuous canopy of native food-bearing
vegetation-- trees, shrubs,
and understory. Maiya: That's amazing. Brad: So there used to be
a driveway here, and water, when it flows, will flow
along the street gutter. And then since water moves
downhill with gravity, it moves into here,
and this is the basin. And this whole basin,
all the way back there, fills up with water. It's up to two feet deep
back there. And the key thing, too,
is here, we're selecting
native species, the plants that are
native to this area, so they're the best
adapted to our climate, soil, and wildlife. And by selecting the natives
already adapted to here, they cannot just survive
but thrive on rainwater
and street runoff alone. Maiya: Ha ha! I love that! From Medellin's green corridors to Brad's permaculture forest
in the desert, I've learned that there's
so much that we can do to combat urban heat even
on our increasingly hot planet, and that trees are
a crucial part of the solution, no matter where you live. In the next episode,
we'll return to the hot, arid
Southwest to find out how climate change
creates dangerous flooding while the region's
water crisis grows deeper. As the climate warms,
a little known law of physics spreads this phenomenon
across the U.S. and the globe. So join us as we learn what
the future of water and food will look like
as the world warms. [music] ♪ You can watch the rest of Weathered: Earth's Extremes
on the PBS app. All six episodes are
available to stream now. ♪
[Music] we've had some hot days this summer but nothing like what we're going to get into starting tomorrow today the mercury hit a scorching 35° C temperatures are set to rise even further this week and could even break the all-time record right now we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years climate change for a long time climate change was something that scientists were predicting that would happen in the future but that's no longer the case what we're doing right now is we're so rapidly changing the climate for the first time in the world's history people can see the impact of climate change greater storms greater floods greater heat waves extreme sea level rise all of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible [Music] scientists across the globe are in no doubt that at the current rate of warming we risk a devastating future it's difficult to see how the population of the world will actually feed itself it's happening in your world it's happening in my world time is running short there's still time but there isn't much time left the science is now clear that urgent action is needed [Music] we are at a tipping point we can change history right now [Music] what happens now and in these next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years what can be done to avert disaster and ensure the survival of our civilizations and the natural world upon which we depend [Music] it's our future and we can't just let it slip away from us [Music] the climate is changing because of one simple fact our world is getting hotter we have temperature records going back over a hundred years there are dips and troughs there are some years that are not as warm as other years but what we've seen is this steady and unremitting temperature trend 20 of the warmest years on record have all occurred in the last 22 years it's not just Met Office records that are showing this trend data from the US climate center Noah the Japanese Met Office and NASA all show the same sharp rise in temperatures when scientists first became concerned about these increasing temperatures nobody could be sure exactly what was driving them four decades of research later on land at sea and in the far reaches of our atmosphere the evidence is now unequivocal what's striking is that warming trend cannot be explained by natural factors but is caused by human activities in particular by use of fossil fuels [Music] the problem is that everything we do our entire economy from the moment you wake up in the morning and turn on the light or look at your cell phone to the moment you go to bed at night and even then because your cell phone is still drawing power at night i mean we're all using energy all the time and in the industrialized world that energy is almost entirely fossil fuels we burn fossil fuels coal gas and oil to power our energy generation to heat our homes to drive our factories to power our cars and our trains and travel around the world and when we burn fossil fuels it produces carbon dioxide as a waste product carbon dioxide acts like a blanket it absorbs the heat radiation from the Earth's surface and that that keeps the surface warmer than it would be otherwise the problem is what we're doing now is we're adding extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases so we're increasing the thickness of this blanket before we started to burn coal the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million it's now over 400 parts per million it wouldn't be such a problem if carbon dioxide had a small life but the fact is carbon dioxide lives for over a 100 years and the planet gets warmer and warmer there is now so much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that our world is around 1° C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times this warming is enough to bring about the raft of effects we call climate change 1° C global warming may not sound like much but it's having a dramatic effect on our weather you warm up the planet well of course you're going to get more intense and more frequent heat waves you're going to dry out the soils so you're going to get worse drought we're seeing extreme heat in southern Africa Japan North America in the UK as well it is officially the hottest day of the year so far the heat has been causing health problems often the question is did climate change cause a certain event and you can never really answer that question but what scientists do is to look at whether climate change made a certain event more or less likely or more or less intense in the UK in 2018 we had a heat wave that was actually the joint warmest on record alongside 1976 and we've been analyzing this here at the Met what that showed us was that the chances of that heatwave had increased by about 30 times so it's now about 30 times more likely that we had that heat wave than we would have had without climate change today the mercury hit a scorching 35° C so it doesn't mean to say that every single weather event is due to climate change but what climate change does mean is that with the baseline climate having changed then the frequency of the extreme temperatures is increasing and that has a substantial effect in November 2018 when temperatures in Kes Australia hit 42° even creatures specifically adapted to heat were unable to survive [Music] and just everywhere when we got here in the morning that's the first time really we saw it there were just dead bats as far as the eye could see [Music] that is a deafening sound of babies crying and we just don't know where to start [Music] so we just started finding babies basically oh Bubba we have a little baby attached to his dead mom [Music] like all species flying foxes have ways of dealing with the conditions of their environment but it seems their usual cooling methods are no longer enough for the kind of temperatures Australia is now facing we saved about 350 the rest are dead so over over 11,000 died from that colony and if you have two more events like we had and the species is gone [Music] i need to wake up flying foxes they're often referred to as the gardeners of the rainforest we have a number of trees that are nocturnal flowering so you need a nocturnal pollinator to be able to actually do that job so they're a vital importance to the ecosystem [Music] in addition to the many other threats they face animals of all kinds are now struggling to adapt to rapidly changing conditions think of the equator as climate change occurs that kind of central part of the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable if climate change is too fast we're pushing them off the planet in effect we're causing extinction of species already and that's irreversible [Music] some scientists believe around 8% of species could be at threat of extinction solely due to climate change this isn't just about losing wonders of nature the loss of even the smallest organisms destabilizes the world's ecosystems the networks that support the whole of life on Earth [Music] what's been happening in recent years it's really showing us what 1°ree Celsius really means not just for wildlife but for people for their safety for their livelihoods and for their futures as temperatures rise the threats multiply 2018 saw record-breaking wildfires take hold across the globe well firefighters are working around the clock as we seem to be believed Australia is seeing some of its worst fires in years we've seen wildfires break out in Greece and even in the Arctic wildfire sweeping across some of the coldest countries on Earth we've seen a tripling in the extent of wildfire in the western US and California the fires that swept through California in 2018 caused $24 billion worth of damage 106 people lost their lives we're not just talking about an inconvenience we're be talking about people's lives their livelihoods and their communities being damaged we had driven to the end of this dead end road and then we realized that there was a small fire high up on the ridge it appeared the fire was getting larger at that point I thought we got to get out of here we decided we were going to drive out for us we need an ignition source maybe cigarette butts or lightning and then you need the weather conditions that are conducive to that fire and that fire spreading do I go you don't want to trap in here research has shown that the chances of having these very hot dry conditions has increased as a result of climate change easy easy oh my god keep going go keep going easy easy dad this is insane it was a dead end road so we knew that it was our only option to drive forward and all sides of the road just completely engulfed in flames the car is heating up it's going to explode he's going "Dad dad we're going to die we're going to die." And I said "No we're going to be fine." You know oh Jesus god help us you don't care i stayed calm oh I think being a father you're trying to keep your son calm too at that point in your sword so we can see we're good we're good we're good we could hear trees literally exploding falling all around us please God help us a large branch went right over the top of the car the whole top of the roof was burning and we didn't realize it and there was a tree down god we can't get out that was the moment when I really thought that we might die oh my god stop stop you can't get up you got to get out of here i decided to put the car in reverse i had to drive backwards through everything we had already passed through to the lake shore and this one little boat was down there watching the fire and we were able to wave them in to help us get out of there that to me was just a miracle [Music] it's not just through extreme heat events that climate change is having an effect it's changing the weather system in other ways this is a basic result of physics with a degree Celsius of warming there's more moisture evaporating off the oceans when there's more moisture in the air you're going to get more rainfall you're going to get super storms and force flooding events we are seeing the impacts of climate change now play out in real time they're no longer subtle [Music] [Applause] you've had the worst rain in China in in Japan you've had a deluge in Kerala the crisis deepens for hundreds of thousands in Kerala whilst they can't all be attributed to climate change last year's extreme weather events meant that millions of people needed humanitarian aid join the dots it's happening it's happening in your world it's happening in my world and let's be very clear about this it is going to get much worse climate change goes far beyond the weather thousands of miles away and out of sight of most people another threat is building earth's ice frozen for millennia is melting earth's temperature has risen by what most people would think is a small amount over the past century about 1° centigrade and that's too much for Earth's ice to withstand in Iceland there are more than 260 glacias families from across the country play a role in charting what's happening to these natural landmarks for the last 30 years myself my wife my family we have been part of a program monitoring the glaciers there are 65 other families all across Iceland that go out to different glaciers some of the glaciers like this one have been measured every year since 1930 this is where the glacier was 2003 then it was almost where we are standing now and we can see how far it has been retreating from that time the glass here moves into the the lagoon and then it breaks off and you can see the ice over there and today we are going to measure where the border of the glacier is today comparing it to last year we take GPS measurements on this spot come here then we measure with this rangefinder to the heads of the glacier you see the dark color of the cliffs here up to there was a glacier few years ago and if you continue on in this side here you can see the grass on the top up here just below was a glacier you see the line when we started it was up there the glacier has retreated about 1,200 m since 1997 [Music] [Music] okay since we started here the retreat has been around 50 m per year the preliminary research this year will have that retreated now somewhere about 1230 m this is a big change in one year this is a large amount of our glacier has melted away whilst this is just one example the data gathered is part of an extensive program that is revealing that nearly all the glacias here have lost volume since 1995 partly due to global warming collecting measurements of glacias are really really important things to do but we can't see all of the glacias on Earth there are 200,000 glacias to see what's happening on the rest of the planet you need satellites you need to look from space [Music] in the last year we've had a global assessment of ice losses from Antarctica and from Greenland and they tell us that things are worse than we'd expected the Greenland ice sheet is melting it's lost 4 trillion tons of ice and it's losing five times as much ice today as it was 25 years ago [Music] if you go to the southern hemisphere in the past most of the models predicted that Antarctica would grow that's not the case antarctica is losing three times as much ice today as it was 25 years ago [Music] in Antarctica really small changes in ocean temperature in particular melt a lot of ice the ocean is only about half a degree centigrade warmer than it should be but that's melting colossal amounts of ice from enormous glacias the water that melts from the ice sheets ends up in one place and that's the oceans and that's when it starts to affect people around the rest of the planet sea level has been stable for several thousand years but if the ice sheets lose icebergs faster and faster to the ocean and sea level goes up we know that sea level has already risen by about 20 cm in the last 100 years rising seas are displacing hundreds of thousands of people from already vulnerable coastal areas in the South Pacific Indonesia Bangladesh the impact on families is going to be something that I don't think we could ever prepare for in the United States Louisiana is on the front line of this climate crisis it's losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet at about the rate of a football field every 45 minutes the eel de Jon shal was once home to 400 people but subsidance caused by oil and gas extraction and now rising seas means that in the last six decades much of it has disappeared before this was all land but due to sea level rise slowly but surely it's washing away [Music] what we're looking at right here is uh where I was born and raised in uh 1946 we had a house right here we used to get firewood and put that in our wood stove i can see the smoke coming out of our chimney and it's not there anymore [Music] it's sad very very sad to see what happened to my mom and dad's home and where they they raised us at i want to finish my life as well over here for the people on Il Jean Charles they're running out of options and now what we see is just 10% of what used to be there in addition to sea level rise we have a lot of industry that extracts water oil and gas from underneath our land and when you extract the thing that's keeping it buoyant it will begin to subside [Music] we have been working with the state to move an entire community this is the first time the federal government of the United States has offered dollars for the relocation of folks due to climate change when it comes to relocation this is the only place I ever known as home i don't want to abandon it i don't want to forget it [Music] i wouldn't want to move it's not really my choice though you know I'd rather just stay down here i grew up here you know and it's just there's not really a lot of places like this place a lot of people say that this land that we're living on won't be here in 20 years from now and that's kind of hard to you know like think about like where you grew up isn't going to be here anymore nobody really wants to move i mean I guess you have to do what you have to do to have a future you can't stay on a place that's sinking i'd still be here if I could but uh I guess mother nature don't want us to keep our dream alive the residents of Il Jean Charles have been labeled as the first climate refugees in the United States and that may be true but what we know for sure is that they won't be the last sea levels are not only increased by melting ice the world's oceans are expanding because they are getting warmer over 90% of the increased heat trapped by our atmosphere has been stored in the oceans this is having an effect on one of the world's most iconic marine ecosystems [Music] coral reefs only cover a small fraction of the Earth's surface but despite their small footprint they are the home of close to a quarter of the species in the ocean and the Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef ecosystem it covers about 2,300 km it's so large that it can be seen from space it's home to 400 species of corals 1,500 species of fish turtles whales and dolphins so it's teeming with life [Music] i find corals really fascinating you could be mistaken to think that they're just rocks but they're really complex animals [Music] the thing about corals is that they live in a close relationship with microscopic algae and these algae capture the sun's energy the corals use this energy to secrete skeletons skeletons that build the physical structure that we know as a coral reef so the colors that you see on coral reefs are actually the microscopic algae that we know are very important for their health [Music] but corals are very sensitive they live very close to their upper temperature tolerance [Music] what this means is that it doesn't take much of additional temperature in the oceans for them to start feeling the effects of heat they really don't like it hot coal bleaching is a modern phenomenon the first major bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef happened in 1998 and I first saw coral bleaching in 2017 jumping in the water you could immediately sense that something was not quite right not only was the water very warm but you could see that the corals were sick they were turning white in front of our eyes what we now know is that bleaching events are not only becoming more frequent but they're actually also becoming more severe we've seen two global bleaching events extending in 2016 and 17 these affected reefs across the world these are massive events global warming is not a future event on coral reefs it's already happening the evidence suggests that if global warming reaches 2° by 2050 98% of the world's coral reefs could be at risk of severe bleaching the twoderee increase in temperatures that will lead to a loss of biodiversity like we've never seen before our generation is going to be responsible for the loss of one of the most majestic ecosystems on the face of the earth we're literally watching the death of this natural wonder [Music] much of what's now happening across the world is not unexpected scientists first warned about the impact of global warming over 30 years ago when people say we didn't know about the greenhouse effect that's completely wrong what I'd like to do today is to start with Dr james Hansen in the summer of 1988 I testified to Congress i had very strong evidence that greenhouse warming was occurring and it was detected dr hansen if you'd start us off we'd appreciate it james Hansen was a pioneer in trying to reach the public and politicians this was the opportunity to try to get some attention number one the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements [Music] the earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation [Music] i said I was 99% confident that this was a real uh physical effect of the increasing carbon dioxide the idea that this was a big problem affecting the world it seemed quite speculative at the time wasn't believed by everybody but they played a major role there's no doubt in putting climate change on the international agenda those who think we're powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect we are the Lord's creatures the trustees of this planet the short-term response was pretty good may we all be equal to that task politicians were saying the right things that we should avoid dangerous humanmade changes to climate it's just that the policies needed to achieve that were never adopted there are many reasons we haven't acted on climate change science is definitely part of the story the science is complicated it took scientists several decades to work out what was going on and then it took even more time to figure out how to talk about it effectively economists had to look at well okay so what are the costs going to be and then technologists had to work out well what actually can we do about it the technological solutions didn't look as easy and cheap as they do now and that's one of the reasons why it took a long time for governments really to put policies in place however there was also resistance let's be honest about this there are incumbent industries that then they knew about climate change but they didn't really want anything to happen net income grew 17% earnings rose to $10.9 billion the organizations that had the most to lose by act on climate change were the fossil fuel companies the most profitable industry possibly in the history of mankind making huge profits they wanted to continue that 11.7 billion profit many of those industries especially the oil and gas industry the fossil fuel industry they undertook a quite concerted campaign uh to confuse the science and confuse the message this is industry funded and industrydriven fossil fuel companies engaged PR consultants who used exactly the same tactics that have been used by the tobacco companies and there's ample documentation the basic strategy is to cast doubt on the science to promote the message that we don't really know there isn't a consensus and it will be too expensive to fix anyway in the US it was a real battleground and it still is frankly um and there is a sense in which the whole fake news thing that's come in in the last few years it isn't a surprise to anyone who's worked in climate change because we dealt with this 15 years ago the cycle of denial has clearly worked 2014 has been the warmest year on record it's a snowball and that's just from outside here so it's very very cold out very unseasonal so here Mr president catch this almost any public opinion poll you look at shows that a very substantial part of the American people about half are still confused about this issue and even the president of the United States says that it's not true all of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax it's a hoax i mean it's a money-making industry okay in the UK we have the Climate Change Act from 2008 which was the first law anywhere in the world to make a legally binding target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but what we've also seen here is a number of people in politics who have decided really to campaign against action on climate change there's plenty of evidence that warming in will have bring benefits as well as maybe disadvantages the arguments have been well climate change is happening but it may not be that serious what I'm concerned about is the extremely damaging and harmful policies which are being put forward ostensively to try and deal with the problem of global warming they say we should just adapt to it rather than try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so some of the contrarian arguments are really arguments for maintaining the status quo and of course that's very attractive to people because we like the familiar and it's attractive to politicians as well because to decide not to do something is much more comfortable i think that many of us were willing to hear that message because we too depend upon fossil fuels for our lifestyle so we're all implicated in this economic system but it's not like we're all equally responsible right there's no doubt that that seeding of doubt has slowed the transition to a clean energy economy we haven't entirely wasted the 30 years but it would have been so easy to solve the problem if we had started gradually to make fossil fuels more expensive and develop the technologies to replace them but we didn't do that another complicating factor here uh is that just as the climate issue was being understood greater and the stakes were being understood better uh other countries of the world which historically had not contributed to the climate problem developed their own racing economies they were putting more and more into the atmosphere as they believe that they were improving the lives of their own country let's be very clear this is where some very difficult issues come up and they are difficult there is no doubt in my mind they're difficult we have 1 billion people that still do not have access to electricity energy poverty is one of the biggest issues in the world the fact is we have a huge challenge we have a challenge of providing basic services in India we still have millions of people in darkness even today they do not have access to basic energy we have climate change happening today but you need energy security for the very poor across India the government is giving every household chance to take connection for most of us who are so used to energy we have no idea what it's like not to have it the injustice is the wealthier parts of the world to create the problem now want other countries with developing economies not to put greenhouse gases in when we ourselves have already done it and already enjoyed all the benefits of it these issues of climate injustice and who will accept historical responsibility for past emissions have been central questions in global climate negotiations since they began in 1992 20% of the world population are consuming 80% of its resources and are also responsible for the 75% of the emissions that pollute the atmosphere if the rich north expects the poor to foot the bill for a cleaner environment Rio would become an exercise in futility many of those who were at Rio governments and campaign groups alike argue that the developed world should have given much greater priority to tackling poverty because they say that's the only way to switch to sustainable development i'm not going to sign an agreement that does not protect the environment and the economy of this country the climate change issue is just an unbelievably hard problem in in the world of of law and and policym there are certain kinds of social problems which people have described in my world wicked problems and climate change has been aptly characterized as not a wicked problem but as a super wicked problem and the most fundamental reason why climate change is so hard to address is that cause and effect is spread out over time and space activities in one part of the world have consequences in another part of the world decades later that makes it really hard it makes it hard for people to understand makes hard people to feel responsible and it makes it really hard to pass laws since scientists first started warning about climate change successive summits have failed to bring about any significant reduction in global emissions instead they've continued to rise and the problem is becoming harder to solve [Music] the world's great forests play a vital role in determining the balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide using it to build their leaves stems and roots in this process of photosynthesis they have sucked up and stored nearly a third of our emissions the main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions forests are one of our ways out they are like the lungs of the planet [Music] they are big climate regulators at a global scale july 23rd 1972 [Music] my work has always been about monitoring the land surface and forest thrusting outward into space we gain new perspective on ourselves since 1972 till now LANCAD has been tracking and taking pictures of the Earth's surface circling the Earth it offers an ideal means to monitor change i mean it's hard to imagine how we used to do this but for the first 20 years of the mission people were tracking the land surface on essentially hard copy photos and drawing on them in 2008 the US government says it's open free of charge and accessible over the internet millions of images automatically it's just this huge leap in capability it was only then where we saw the whole planet and when you see the whole it was a bit of a revelation and yeah the the alarm bells go off these warm orangey tones that's forest disturbance that means forest was removed [Music] we didn't know that was going on colombia Peru Paraguay Bolivia we can go anywhere and see actual forest be cleared [Music] it usually starts with logging rainforests are cleared and burned they then replace it with soybeans rubber pasture for cattle but one of the big drivers is palm oil palm oil is like a a magical fruit we all have palm oil in our houses right now it's found in almost every good you can think about it's in soaps it's in shampoo it's in chocolate it's in bread it's even in crisps what we're doing accidentally and inadvertently is actually causing deforestation in other countries because our demand for this product that means the natural system is not working habitats are disappearing but also when these high carbon stock forests that are centuries old are cleared and burned CO2 is added to the atmosphere those emissions go up and warm the planet when you look at our maps our results are showing that it's a it's it's accelerating it almost looks like a contagion you know it looks like a a disease across the planet i mean the the the everinccreasing pattern if we continue this level of deforestation we'll take it all boom there goes the forest and our ability to mitigate climate change and turn the story around becomes really vanishingly small trees are now being cut down and burnt at such a rate that nearly a third of carbon dioxide emissions are caused by deforestation [Music] it sucks i'm a pretty light-hearted optimistic guy but just looking at these data you're just looking at the stories it's like uh you know uh I'd like to see some evidence of of really strong strong kind of unified political response that was more than an aspiration on a kind of piece of paper right that would be cool the evidence suggests that the impacts of climate change are already being felt around the globe in part two scientists explore what the future might hold if global warming continues we know that with increased storms increased floods droughts and heat waves production of food will be more problematic and they discuss solutions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions it's actually not that complicated we need to shift our energy system away from fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases and and towards renewable energies that don't we'll be replacing one of the engines with an electric motor driving a fan going to take these hybrid electric systems and test them in the air test them in flight at different altitudes and different temperatures scientists analyze what individuals can do to reduce their carbon footprint everything that we buy even if we can't see it has a carbon footprint from smartphones to clothes to furniture so we need to think about buying less physical products you actually can be far less wasteful uh and not affect the quality of your life at all and we explore the impact communities can have in the fight against climate change we discovered that we were on the pipeline route so we said "What can we do?" [Applause] We have to saying no to new fossil fuel infrastructure as people learned what we did they said "I want to do that too same old [Music] heat [Music]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwGv1PcqEzk
[Music] With a heat wave on, it is time to broach the politics of keeping cool. First day of July and already France and parts of Europe enduring uh their second spike in heat of this summer. From the shores of the Mediterranean, warmed by waters at 26 degrees Celsius on the French side of the Riviera waters uh to the rooftop of Europe, Mlong, where the mercury normally never goes above freezing this early in the summer. How to adapt to the new normal with poorly uh uh adapted schools forced to shut. The far right Min Leen advocates air conditioning for all that AC begets higher energy consumption. And with the same far right against wind farms and the pivot away from gasoline powered cars. Are we discussing here a basic necessity? Or do alternatives exist here on the planet's fastest heating continent, Europe? We'll ask about France's claim that nuclear power is the carbon-f free answer. Just look at the Gulfesh plant located between Tulus and Bordeaux in the southwest forced to suspend activity because at 28 degrees Celsius the Gahon River its waters are too hot to cool the reactors. Today in the France 24 debate, how do you adapt to the high heat with us Paris city councelor Alexon Front of the Green Party? Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Uh Yamina Na is president of the world sufficiency lab. Thanks for joining us your invitation. uh and climate and energy focused economist Ti Bro, visiting professor at the French political science institute. Good to see you again. Thank you. Uh he's escaped the heat of Paris for a different kind of hot spot. Uh architect Mandier who's working on how to build back better war ravaged Ukraine joins our conversation. Thanks for being with us. Good evening everyone. If you're on the go, this is a reminder you can always listen to the show wherever podcasts are streamed. Uh the Eiffel Tower shut through Wednesday, the top observation deck of the baking hot steel frame uh off limits since 2003 when 15,000 died in this country during a summer heat wave. Authorities tried to leave as little as possible to chance with air pollution peaking and more polluting uh models of cars banned from the French capital. the uh public transport network offering discount rates to commuters. The numbers of air conditioned cars has climbed in the last two decades. Still less than half of uh them on the Paris Metro. Though usually it's crowded and we try to sit down to avoid getting even more tired. There's a bit of aggressiveness a little more than usual and we're a bit crammed so there are smells too. Ah yes, the smells of the Paris Metro. Yamina, before it was every time it was warm. Now you It's kind of a lottery, right? Whichever whether or not your train car is is cooled or not. Well, starting from now, we know that it will be warmer, warmer and warmer in the future. And what we are experiencing today is just an um an an entry to what we will be experiencing in the future. And the temperature it's going to be to become a norm and not an exception to have this kind of temperatures earlier in the year and during a longer period and with higher temperature and we need we must prepare for that and there are two things we must do at the same time. We must work on reducing our uh emissions uh which we are not doing well in this and at the same time prepare our buildings our the way the society is organized. So for example this time uh I think they should have uh called for uh like they did for during the COVID that we stop everything we stop uh uh most of the activities because uh for example kids were still at school uh today in Paris. They closed only 200 schools out of more than 60,000 schools that we have in France. So this is not this is not the right thing to do because it's a health issue. The French president has promised Alex Florenta that uh there would be 40,000 schools in France that would be renovated. Government says they're on pace to do it, but they've only done 5,000 I believe so far. What's it been like in the Paris area on that score? How hot are the schools? Um so I I don't listen anymore to the promises from our president because he he made so many of them. I I I can't uh I I can't recall all of them. uh in Paris uh we have uh by the end of the year we will have onethird of our schools uh school yards refurbished so that it's more adapted to uh our uh uh hotter climate. Uh we are taking out bitumen, putting more trees, more vegetation, changing the color of the schoolyard. Um allowing different sort of um um um plays and um um rather than just having beachmen and a basketball, you know, this it already changed. Uh it's already one-third. It's just one/ird. We still have a lot to do. I was going to ask you, is it all the schools? because I know that uh in France it's the municipalities that pay for the primary schools, the region that pays for the middle schools and and the state that pays for the high schools. Yeah, this oneird number that I gave is uh for Paris uh because we invested we we we are a rich city so we could also uh do that. Um and also um we did not discover uh heat waves with this one. So this is something that we've prepared for the last at least 10 or 15 years. It's a long-term uh uh run. In other schools in France, you either have lack of understanding from from politicians or lack of means. And this is where the state uh should play a role so that uh because the promise of the French Republic is that every school will have access to the same knowledge and uh right now they do not have access to the same uh learning conditions. All right. Uh is it easily uh done or not? Martan Duplontier. Uh, keeping schools cooler. Well, that that requires uh quite a lot of uh quite a lot of work uh to be honest. Um, we're talking about um low tech uh techniques, low tech um um um solutions. uh as um we mentioned about the courtyards and about um the greenery and the green canopy um uh but we uh should also mention the fact that cities like Paris for example have a um a cold loop uh going through um the business uh the central business uh district um that could also link uh probably the um the schools um and um because I'm working a lot on on on schools in Ukraine for another kind of reason and another kind of crisis. Uh we discovered that um underground um spaces are also very um resilient um compared to the climate uh change and that's also a source of um of economy and uh and and of fresh air for for for these buildings. So, one I would say uh the shells that means insulation and um and and um and lighter colors. Uh two, greenery um on on on these spaces and on the courtyards. And then three, how can we be actively uh uh refreshing uh the the the the air in in in these spaces? and they are uh let's say carbon-f free solutions such as uh geothermal energy or as we said in in like the cold loop in Paris. Yeah. So this uh I want to get back to that concept of the cold loop but first let's talk about the reality uh this Tuesday. You know, in the Netflix series Emily in Paris, the aspiring young heroine lives in a top floor maid's quarter made in Hollywood. It seems reality not as rosy for those like 22year-old student Rishar uh who lives uh in cramped quarters under the zinc roof of a building that's uh in 40° Celsius heat outside. But under that zinc, it feels hotter. This is zinc. This is what we have on top of our apartment. So, here it's burning. It's 72° C, so it's very, very hot. You can see we have an apartment under the roof, so it's just above our heads. It makes it hot in the apartment, and of course, very hot out here, too. Now, among the uh possible suggestions, uh those of growing vegetation on Parisian rooftops. What we see here is a roof that has been adapted. It's a roof that's shaded, so it's not going to overheat. It's not going to contribute so much in the urban heat island effect, and it's not going to conduct so much heat inside the buildings where it creates uh discomfort for the inhabitants. It's also um a roof that um welcomes green spaces that are going to uh do water retention and increase biodiversity. Terry Bros, does that an idea that that that excites you there? Well, well, I think all ideas are good. I mean, we are in front of a climate emergency and we need to adapt. Uh, but I think that discarding technology is not the right way. I mean, air conditioning should be also available for everybody. And I differ with one element. I mean, remember in France, we have one of the decarbonized electricity in the world. Uh, and we have plenty of it. And so air conditioning doesn't emit so much CO2 at the end of the day. So again I think we are in this emergency and it's all of the above. I would said to somebody else in Washington DC you need to take all of the above. So you need to take all the technology and discarding one is the wrong way to uh to do politics. All right let let's talk about this because the farright leader Marin Lupen announced her party's drive to install air conditioning in all the public buildings. uh she uh she uh put out uh a statement over the social medium formerly known uh as uh Twitter uh where she says, "I think of all the workers uh suffocating in buildings without AC because leaders have decided that the French should suffer from the heat while they of course enjoy air conditioned cars and office." Uh uh with the so-called French elites, sobriety is always reserved for the middle and working classes. Now uh for all the worry about data centers to power artificial intelligence commuting computing uh there was an alarm bell raised by the Paris-based international energy agency. It seems to contradict the far right. It sees a far bigger demand from air conditioning uh than it does uh from uh than it does uh from uh uh the uh uh computing uh facilities. um 7% of energy demand right now for air conditioning which the IAEA expects to double by the year 2050. While countries like India get equipped, experts and policy maker warn of a vicious cycle that will heat the planet even more. When you cool a room, you need heat to generate the cold. So, you're necessarily heating another space. And you know that in housing, particularly when it's vertical and mineral housing without trees or prairies, the urban heat island effect will boost by four, five, up to 8° the feeling of increased temperature. said so our need is on cooling. We need a cool space. We need comfortable space to leave to move etc. It's not an air conditioning need. To address the cooling need there are different options. Air conditioning is one of them. It is the extreme part of it. Uh and in air conditioning you have different options. So for example in Paris we have this uh uh cooled loop that is not that is only in the northwest part of the city. This is something that should be extended everywhere. These kind of solutions uh you use uh it it uses the water because if it's water ground water then you don't have uh emissions related uh to that in in air conditioning you have different type of air conditioning. The most sold ones are what we call airto-air air conditioner. This is what she was explaining. So air to air this means that your air conditioner that is cooling you here is connected to the ex the air that is uh outside. So when it is uh 40 uh 45 degrees you in the case of the the air conditioners you sold in Europe they are designed to work for 35 degrees of outside temperature. So this means that today the air conditioners that are running in Europe are their performance is is lower because the the external temperature is higher. This is the worst uh case scenario for cooling our buildings because this uh emits uh requires uh high energy demand and uh electricity demand sorry and it emits also uh gases that are beyond carbon the what you have because everyone talks about decarbonized electricity. You do have emissions related to refrigerant that are within within the air conditioning system. The good solution is to use water ground solutions. water ground solutions that instead of using the external air to cool or to heat we can use it reversible you you would use the water and in Paris we could do that the question is why it's not done and in this case you will not have you will be able to cool Paris you will not have emissions related to air conditioning you will have an increase of electricity consumption but this electricity consumption this increase in electricity consumption is something that we need to consider because uh cooling is question is a health issue. Before before I turn luxury, not a luxury before I turn back to the architect in this conversation. Terry Bros, you agree with that? Not completely. I mean uh the I agree. I mean it's a heat pump so it works on both ways. I mean today the efficiency of those are very good at minus temperature to plus temperatures. I think I think we operate them in Norway to warm houses. So it works both ways. First element. Second element uh yes perhaps the water would work but if it takes 20 years for the town hall to bring you the cold water to your place there is a question of people want some solution now they I mean global warming is not something that we are discovering today it has been there for many many years we know that France is now above 1.5° C and we know that France is heating faster than the rest of the of the planet Martin you uh helped design uh the athletes village uh for the Olympics and uh there you did not at the level of the water loop which we'll describe again in further detail in a moment but on a smaller scale a system where uh you have uh the water running through the pipes and the theory was that they heats the building more in the winter and cools it more in the summer. Now that uh the Olympics have come and gone, is it working? The uh old athletes village. That's that's a very good question. Um I'm I'm I'm not in Paris to to check it or in Santo to to make sure that works, but we we do not have um bad feedbacks uh from them. I think today the the we have all the techniques to adapt our cities um to these uh urban heat effect that will come u over and over. Um we know that uh there's a lot of investment private investment and public investment to be done. Um I think the route is quite clear. uh now we just have to get together and and and look not only at the shortterm solutions but on the mid and long-term ones and that's where actually the the political um decisions uh lie and uh we see that that brings a lot of uh a lot of debate um and I would also like to raise a cultural uh debate um when we look at Paris or at Venice or at Milan O which is one of uh the most critical cities in Europe as well facing this uh heat effect. We're talking about heritage. We're talking about uh buildings that are protected and we have to uh adapt as well our regulations on that. You know the roofs that we've seen in zinc uh they need to be covered by greenery. They need to be uh uh we need to to use the textile uh architecture. We need to actually use all the the the the solutions that the Mediterranean has already uh set over centuries. H how expensive is it to uh in the case of those those uh buildings in the old athletes village uh to uh install more pipes uh to be able to run what is it the water from uh from showers for instance uh to uh help keep the building warm in the winter and and cooler in the summer? Uh well that's it's it's it's hard to to say when when we're um um considering new buildings then it's easy and not so expensive to integrate. when we're talking about renovation and about rehabilitation of of older buildings then that requires more work and um I think today's challenge is really to adapt the existing uh to reduce the new constructions uh because um I mean there's there's also the carbon linked um um um strategy um and we have a lot of empty spaces in Paris all of these empty offices around the city um and and we need to renovate them and that's that's the critical thing. Every let's say era of architecture has its own um has its own slabs has its own ways of uh tectonics um and so there's no one solution for all unfortunately that requires a lot of work from our part as well from the engineering and from the architects parts. Alexon Florent, you you heard Martan Plante say it, you know, it's easy if you're building something new. It's much harder when you have uh in the central district of Paris lots of buildings from the 17th century. And I totally agree um this is going to be uh a new hostmanian revolution that we need uh right here and now. And I agree as well that uh our citizens who do not understand why the school closed uh from one day to another, they are willing to know why was it not anticipated while um we we knew it from almost two months ago that there was going to be heat waves in in in this period. So there's a lack of anticipation, a lack of reaction. So that's why we were in crisis mode in the last few days. In crisis mode, AC is not going to solve the problem. We need to have this discussion about which technology to use, where, what techniques, how to change our designs, our architectural designs, how to save our uh patrimon that we love so much in in uh in Paris. And um while we were in crisis mode, the question was who are the most vulnerable person and how to help them have access to fresher places and those fresher places in Paris. We have many of them. We have um we have the churches that are quite empty right now. We could uh open them up 24 hours for believers, non-believers. We could have uh given a wider access uh to uh to museums because they are using one of the very lowcarbon technology that you mentioned before. We could have used the parks. That's the case because this is controlled by the city. We open them up uh 24 hours and and uh you have so many also private buildings who are who use AC. You could have opened up the halls, but you're going to have more and more of these incidents. Are you going to send people like right now in Spain, they've they've they we've had two heat waves in a row. They've had just one continuous one. Mhm. You can't send people to the to the church or the park. No, of course. That's why we need to talk both on about crisis mode right now about this summer and uh school are not going to be uh a problem uh from next week on because they are going to be closed. Um so we need to work on the other vulnerable persons. For example, the people living in the streets right now. Do you imagine living in the streets with those temperatures? So that's the that should be the focus for this summer and we can have the discussion about the longer uh uh term solutions that like we are having right now. Yeah, just one point the there will be a cooling need that's for sure because the planet is warming and Europe is warming. The the question is so far we knew policy makers knew at least for 20 years because we had the heat wave we had the heat wave in 2003. So since 2003 they knew that we are going to have more heat waves. However they have done they have not done enough or from my perspective they have done nothing. They have done just a bit of bolage uh from time to time. That's all what they have done because in 20 so this means 22 years in 22 years it was possible to uh adapt to transform our cities. So when it comes to renovation what bothers me is that in this last two decades this is where we had the highest most important renovation programs for buildings. When we renovate buildings we do not take into account the cooling needs. So all the buildings that are renovated, we could have already these buildings, they should have been all connected to uh to the to the loop to the to the cooling loop in Paris and we should have had we we still we still think our buildings uh our design our use of our buildings only for winter time. We are we are only we are uh wired only for winter time while actually the world has changed the planet has changed. And one last point about architect etc. This period is the period for innovation because when you look at the construction industry they did not the history of innovation in construction industry and they put them all together including architect etc. Um and I I am building engineer that's why I put myself in in this in this uh in this bubble. So the only period where there has been innovation real innovation was after the second war when Europe was destroyed and they had to build all the buildings the ugly buildings that we have. This is where the period where they innovated and then after that there has been no innovation. When you look at investment in innovation in in research and development in the construction industry, it's it's one of the lowest uh investment uh in research and development. So this period is a period for innovation especially uh for Europe uh for countries for uh the for countries where uh the the construction of new square meters uh is lower because you mentioned India and they we come back to developing countries but architects are not trained or engineers are not trained to innovate they are trained only to do new buildings exactly the same design they just make few modifications and that's it without taking into account that the planet is warm. Can you imagine that even today for the to calculate your uh energy needs they do consider the temperature for the last the last two decades we know that in the future the temperature that we will have will be different from the last two decades but we still consider the same methodologies to do that in our countries. Regarding developing countries, regarding developing countries, one last point. In developing countries, the building challenge is different. In our countries, it's about renovating the existing ones. And that's why we need to innovate. In in developing countries, the challenge is to build new square meters. There is a huge need for building billion of square meters in developing countries. The question is, are we going to continue to impose through development aid in these countries to build their buildings in the way we did built after the second war? Because if this is this is what we do. So for example when you see uh buildings uh still we do uh with glazing and even here in Paris we see glazing uh we see the material that is used is not is no longer the material no longer no longer adapted to so we are creating we are amplifying the construction industry altogether is amplifying the problem. Terry Bros uh Yamina mentioning there 2003 which was a major trauma for France there was a big summer heat wave 15,000 people died and uh nothing has been done nothing has been done and again there I think there is another uh crisis which was the Ukrainian starting of the war I mean at this time the commission came out and said put heat pumps yes good it was a very good idea but we should have said to the people those heat pumps works on both sides they works for the heating and they works for the cooling. We have some dogmatic green ideas that it cannot work on the other side. No, heat pumps are very good and on on top of it remember we want to put more solar panel. Solar panels are working exactly at the time where we need them for um heat pumps for air conditioning. So I think you have to look at it in a holistic way. Not stating this is good because my morals think it's good and this is bad because my morals think it's bad. I mean we are facing global warming. We need to adapt. We need to understand there will be more cooling and so therefore air conditioning, heat pumps will help. It's one of the tool but it has to be on the table. Let let's bring up that that water uh loop concept that's been uh uh uh put forth by uh practically all our panelists in in this conversation. Uh here in Paris, authorities hoping to double a distribution network that already uses the river sends waters to help uh cool buildings without cranking the AC. Buildings produce heat. They transfer this heat to a distribution network. It's 110 km long in Paris. This distribution network arrives at the power station. The temperature of this network is 12°. In this power station, the water is lowered to 5° by these large machines, these chillers. It returns to the distribution network to cool the buildings. Again, the role of the send in a power plant like this one is to cool the chillers. There is part that will emit heat and the send will capture this heat and therefore cool the power station. All right. So the these water loop systems, Cherry Boss, you said nothing's been done since 2003. They're going to double those. By the way, it's not enough. It's not enough. I mean, we we also had the heat loop and again, how many people are connected to the heat loop? I mean, the question is if you're facing an emergency, are you going to wait for the town hall to provide you an answer or are you going to buy it on shelf? Alexand Fa, what's the question? The question is to answer what Terry Bros just said that uh how do you get this how do you make this available to more of the general public faster? We do have to work on a different time scale. I mean uh you've noticed that I'm among the younger uh politicians uh and um this is we are paying for the uh not totally I do not agree that nothing has been done. I think we have to be very clear on that and I'm very critical with what has not been done but some stuff have been done regarding this technology that we have here. It's uh initial business model was to provide uh uh cooling for luxury hotels, business centers and museums because you also had the geographically speaking those were the the sort of buildings which which are closer to the sand river. Now the question is because there is no technology that do not have a temperature limit. Okay. All cooling technology that we have have a maximum uh uh uh temperature of good functioning. This is the case also for this loop because if we keep on changing climate uh the sand river is going to be hotter. There will be less water in the sand river. So the question is how are we going to use for which case for which use are we going to use this uh this loop. This is why for the next 20 years the focus is going to be connecting this loop to uh school to hospitals because those are critical points for our society to work. Unlike um if tomorrow uh in an emergency uh we use luxury host to uh house uh people from Sandney or from uh uh neighbors in Paris who are under 45 48° which is above the the the working temperature from uh AC that you can buy on the shelf that that's a problematic. I agree we need to work on reversible heat pumps but this is not accessible to poorest people right now. The poorest people when they have when they can buy it, they will buy on the shelf uh AC that are very uh um low have a very low efficiency. Low efficiency. Low efficiency. So this is this is like a putting a uh of course some are buying. We we we can't be hypocrites. Uh we are not here. We are telling that people are buying it. We need to uh to help these people have uh buying the good stuff and the good stuff for the right use because this is not the same thing if you're buying an AC for example for a shop that sells stuff like goods like uh clothes that are not perishable during heat waves. Okay, this I think this is questionable wi-i which is not the case for schools for example because this is a health issue. Yeah, just one point about the the warming planet. What what is what is going to happen anyway is that the society will be organized differently. So, uh regarding the schools, uh that's why I said they should have decided to close the schools earlier. So, the the the way the schools the way the society is organized is going to be different because if uh the schools it is unlikely parents work and uh it's difficult for them to uh to drop their kids off. You need you need this means that you need to modify as well the labor law. This is what it means that in if you are a parent and uh the school is closed this means that you can take days off and you are paid for your days off as well. You see why why we need to do that? Because when you have 30 kids in the classrooms today in the primary schools you have 30 kids per classroom. 30 kids what we have is the latent uh heat. So 30 kids in uh space even if you open the windows in these schools uh the temperature will be anyway high and they are all uh increasing the the temperature in contributing to the increase of the temperature. It's different then if you have two or even if you have a family of five kids in an apartment then the the the health impact will be low the health risk will be lower. Of course, this means that parents will be will have to stay home and this means that we need to revise uh the labor law the labor relationships and for example when I was coming here I saw several people working in the street doing renovation work. It it is just crazy that you have people under 40 degrees working people are dying because of that today. It is a problem. We heard conuh construction workers on Monday saying how uh yeah they have a right under French labor law they already have a right uh to to not show up but they don't dare do it because they know that that's a ticket to not getting the job next time. Yes. But but on school I mean closing down school as we've done via COVID was not a great success. I mean we know that the level of the French people are declining very very fast. So I mean closing schools is I think the opposite of what should be done. We should have schools that are uh that are currently in the emergency situation we don't have the schools. Yeah. But it's been 10 years or 20 years we should have thought of this. Yeah. But the reality check is that our schools in France are not adapt to those heat waves. um in Paris decision the decision was to keep the school opened because we considered that we've done part of the work not 100% of the work but we've done part of the work so there was would be less social and health issue to keep the kids there even if it's hot because we don't know in which condition they would be at home that's for Paris in uh I want to check the temperature in schools in in Sandi uh in their apartment and uh AC working class northern suburbs of Paris. Yes, thank you. Um AC is just one very very very tiny discussion about the problem. If we want to keep the same society in a different climate, we are going to fail. That's what was shown by the transportation mission that I presided called Paris at 50° which looked very closely about all the the problems that are linked to each others. Uh for example, let's say we decide now, we do all agree that we need to cool uh our public transport so it's more uh enjoyable, less sufferable, let's say, to be inside those metro like you you you showed in your uh uh reportage. This is not going to change the fact that the the rails are made out of steel and they were not uh um but there are different cooling systems for the for the metro. They're not all air some of other kinds of cooling systems. The metro is unsufferable because of what's happening in inside the where you are. But the machinery is not designed for higher temperatures. The rails are going to be distorted. Uh the electricity network that you need for uh railway is not designed for that. And um so AC is part of the discussion but I would say it is 1% of the discussion and we will not be able to keep the same society in a different climate. That's why I keep saying it's an organizing principle of the society that is changing. Our societies were organized around the world where the temperature was uh around 20° in June and this is over. This time is over. What what is missing is that is to have policy makers acknowledging that this time is over and to prepare for different organization of the society and this means it goes also to infrastructure but also to organizing schools etc. energy differences. Uh it uh uh is warm in the sea right now in the Mediterranean. It was 28 degrees on Monday in the Gahon River in the southwest of France. Enough to shut the Gulfesh nuclear power plant uh warming rivers uh uh which are enough to raise alarm bells uh elsewhere in France. Most of the nuclear power plants are located next to rivers or next to the sea cherry nuclear power. The French see it as a silver bullet, but it's not in case when there's a heat wave, is it? No, it's not. But it's again part of the solution. I mean, we have those solar panels and those solar panels are going to help us. And so this is perhaps the only place where solar panels makes maximum sense. It's to have them and to be able to balance when a nuclear plant has been offline. But remember, we are net exporter of electricity. we are producing a lot and we have one of the cleanest uh on the planet. So it's not a question about electricity, it's a question about how we how we want to uh design the cooling of our spaces and and yes I agree with you. It's it's a change in society where I disagree with uh the others is I don't think it should be implemented by policies that have a dogmatic view. It should also be up to the people that can have the solutions that can have the choices. That's that's the difference that I have and it's why I'm saying all of the above. So you need to consider all the technologies and leave the people the state can select the one they believe is is good for their uh for for for the uh Okay. So so here's a question for you then Terry. uh because of the uh high temperatures, it's also created uh a spike in pollution. Uh Paris restricting access to the capital for those who have polluting cars, older models, uh combustion engine models. Now, that punishes a lot of times the poor people. But are you for against this measure that well I mean this measure restricting access when when the temperature goes too high? My field is energy. So I'm I'm I'm I'm outside this measure but I think this measure we know it ahead. It's it's not something that has been come as an emergency. We know that when there are heatwave there will be those pollution. I mean this is something that has been known and the uh Paris town hall has decided to put this. It's it's not up to me to decide if it's good or bad. What I'm saying is when we are looking at cooling spaces, we need to look at all the solution and again in the last 20 years perhaps not nothing has been done but let's say not enough has been done. I think we can agree on that. We can agree on this one. Now there's the final problem not the final problem but one one final problem for us because we're running short on time and that is the money for all of this. Uh there is this state subsidy that individuals and companies can have uh uh uh which is called my bonus renovate my yeah my in French uh it's been put on pause for the summer for an audit and that's also because France has a huge budget deficit right now and we have a government which is completely um one day they say we are going to cut to cut uh this bonus for uh re refurbishing your uh your house or your buildings and the next day they are complaining that we have a heat wave. But isn't that all politicians? You have you have a situation where you had two summers in a row where the temperature in Paris, yes, there were a couple of heat waves, but it wasn't like three summers ago when it was sweltering. I do not represent the syndicate of old politicians. No, but I'm just saying it starts to fade from memory. No, but it starts to fade from memory. And we see in the in the National Assembly some of the green legislation being rolled back right now. Yeah. There's a a an attack uh uh uh they the they they are using a technique called floods floating the zone you know they are like every day there is a bomb against uh uh against environmental measures. Is it a tactic or is it just that they think that people have a short memory and they it's a tactic and they and they and it's because when when you are fighting climate change when you are fighting climate change you are trying to change the statue because you cannot have even with all the cleanest energy uh in the world uh you cannot have uh a lowcarbon society with this this the other parameters not changing. So this is a fight. Uh so people who are earning a lot of money from um the oil industry for example uh or from the chemical uh industry they are against those regulations. So far left also is against the low emission zones. They said it punishes the poor. Yeah. Exactly. For a different reason. And that was the case for example that where we knew that uh this uh measure was a good measure for people living around uh our peripheric our ring uh um in the suburbs around Paris. Yeah. So this was also a social measure for them and we need to we we we we would need to give to help the people the poorest people who have older car to uh have uh to be able to change and there was a lack of uh continuity in in policym that's obvious yeah Dennis say we're almost out of time go ahead yeah yeah uh so the budget deficit is that we have is not due to uh the good investment for the future it's due to all the taxes that the government decided Emanuel Macon decided to not consider for the richest ones. This is one of the drivers of this. So the the argument of the budget deficit is a wrong argument because the question today is how do we live together in warmed planet and an aging population. We did not talk about it but it is an issue with the aging population. And the point is in the the the examples that you have given and why the extreme right is jumping on them is that we we have we had several laws that are uh that consider only the environmental impact but do not consider the societal impact. It's not possible to design environmental policies that are not that are not socially just. And that's why the transition sorry my last point the transition we're out of time. Yeah, the transition, it's either a just transition or there is no transition at all. And that's I like to finish saying, well, we've done a transition on CO2. We've put a price on CO2. There've been what I call green inflation instrument. So, everybody has is paying more. All right, we'll have to have everyone back for more. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Terry Bus, I want to thank you. I want to thank y I want to thank as well Alexandra Florent for being with us and thank you for being with us here. Martan was with us from Ukraine. Thank you for joining us here in the France 24 debate. [Music]
[Music] Europe is sizzling right now. From Paris to Rome, Seville to Athens, an extreme heat wave has put governments on alert. Blistering temperatures can be deadly for the most vulnerable. And in a rapidly warming world, the divide between the halves and the have nots will become increasingly stark. How do heat waves reveal social inequalities? Climate change is pushing Europe to the brink. Heat waves like the one we're seeing now are going to become hotter, longer, and more frequent with deadly consequences. In 2023, more than 47,000 people in Europe died of causes related to high temperatures. And a study from the Lancet last year found that that number could triple in Europe by the end of the century. Of course, it depends where you are in Europe. Hotter southern countries are more at risk. Greece had the highest mortality rate that year with 393 deaths linked to the heat per million inhabitants. In comparison, France had 85 heat related deaths per million inhabitants and the UK 40. Social factors make some people more vulnerable than others. Your job, your home, your age, and your health all have an impact on how you cope as the mercury rises. [Applause] [Music] These construction workers in Bordeaux can't just move their work to an air conditioned room. Working outside in 40° heat puts their health at risk. Even indoors, heat waves can make working unbearable if the space isn't properly insulated. In this bakery in Paris, temperatures can reach 50° C. Heat waves put real stress on our bodies. And if you can't call your home, you put your body under additional stress. Last summer, France recorded 3,700 heat related deaths. In France, 35% of homes are poorly insulated and become almost impossible to live in during a heat wave. [Music] Heat waves are even worse for people without a roof over their heads, like here in Frankfurt or in Madrid. A major challenge for elderly and vulnerable people. It's vital that they stay cool and drink plenty of water. Europe is the world's fastest warming continent. It's heating at twice the global average according to the EU's Capernacus Climate Change Service. EU countries are creating measures to better protect people who have jobs outside like gardeners, builders, and street cleaners. France recently brought in a heatwave law that obliges companies to keep temperatures at a reasonable level and provide their workers with cold drinking water. And more than half of Italy's regions have banned work outdoors during the hottest part of the day. Arte went to Madrid, a city that's used to soaring temperatures in summer to see how outdoor jobs can be adapted to help beat the heat. In the summer in Madrid, it's not unusual for temperatures to already be well over 30° by 10:00 in the morning. As a postal worker, Alio is particularly exposed to the vagaries of the weather. Even more so as he delivers post along the Grand Via, a densely paved avenue with little shade or greenery. [Music] Because of the extremely hot weather at the moment, Emilio is working in shifts. By starting his rounds at 7:00 a.m., he avoids the worst part of the day. During heat waves, companies in Spain are required to adjust working hours, increase the number of breaks, and provide protection for their employees. People [Music] who have jobs that require them to be outdoors are more likely to come from lower income households. And the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have health problems related to heat. According to the European Environment Agency, 19% of Europeans are unable to keep their homes cool enough in summer. An aggravating factor is the level of poverty where they live. According to a study, wealthier cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Oslo are investing in greenery and better insulation and are adapting more easily to climate change than poorer cities like Marseilles and Naples. In low-income urban areas, the heat island effect is getting worse. In France, for example, 37% of low-income households suffer from excessive heat in summer, compared with 18% of wealthier households, according to France's Environment and Energy Management Agency. A Spanish study has found that lower inome households are more at risk. Poorer people are more likely to live in overcrowded, poorly ventilated housing in urban areas full of concrete. The study concluded that income was the main indicator of heat related mortality. We spoke to Marlene Sakon about this. She's a professor at the University of Geneva who's looked into how your social background affects how you deal with heat waves. She explained for us the concept of thermal justice. Certain distribution. Fore the World Health Organization says that over 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas and that will increase to 68% by 2050. We're becoming a more urban society and our cities are already heating up to unbearable levels. For example, Portugal and Spain have broken temperature records with this current heat wave. Bea in Portugal hit 43° C on the 1st of July, and Seville in the south of Spain has been hovering above 40° C for days. Cities are more likely to be hotter than rural areas because of a phenomenon called an urban heat island. In dense urban areas, heat is absorbed and stored by buildings and roads. These structures block the circulation of air, which is also warmed by traffic. The result is a dome of hot air known as an urban heat island or UHI. This effect intensifies at night when buildings release the heat they absorbed during the day. Temperatures in areas affected by heat islands can be 2 or 3° higher than in the countryside. And this difference can reach up to 10° during a heat wave. There's a natural air conditioner in cities, creating more green spaces. One idea in urbanism is the 330300 rule. If you live in a city, you can try it right now. You should be able to see three trees from your window, have 30% tree cover in your neighborhood, and you should live within 300 m of green space. So, is any of that true for you? And if not, you're not alone. The European Environment Agency says that less than half of people living in European cities and towns live close to a green area. Let's look at some of the solutions to extreme heat being triled across Europe. To combat urban heat islands, the French city of Liil has transformed school playgrounds into gardens. [Music] In Berlin, the city has set up support centers where homeless people can get help during heat waves. [Music] And in Athens, possibly Europe's hottest city, older people can cool off in specially airond conditioned shelters. Foreis material comfort. media longchant. [Music] And if you don't think your government is doing enough to help citizens deal with heat waves, well, you can always take them to court. The first time this happened was in 2015 in the Netherlands when an environmental group sued the government to force it to do more to prevent climate change. There was a similar lawsuit in France in 2021 and last year 2,000 Swiss women took the government to court for not doing enough to combat climate change and won. Right now, a group of French citizens and NOS's including Greenpeace are suing the government for failing to adapt to climate change. We spoke to one of the people behind the case. Foreign [Music] [Music] Well, that's all from us this week. Stay cool, drink lots of water, and remember to check on your neighbors. We'll be back next week with more news from around Europe. Goodbye. [Music]
The frequency and intensity of extreme heat events is increasing in Europe. By 2050, about half the European population may be exposed to high or very high risk of heat stress during summer. I'm not handling it well. It's really hot. Too too hot. and it just wears you out. [Music] Welcome to the day. A day that was the hottest of the year here in Germany, peaking at nearly 40° C in some places. Europe's been baking under unusually high temperatures for the time of year. Officials in France say two people have died of heat related illnesses and hundreds have been hospitalized. In Spain, authorities said a wildfire broke out during a fourth day of stifling temperatures, sending out a huge cloud of ash and smoke. Two farmers died, apparently trying to flee the blaze. Attractions across the continent, including the Eiffel Tower in Paris, had to be closed because of the heat. Relief, however, is in sight, but long-term temperatures are trending upwards. The EU's climate change service says Europe is now the fastest warming continent. As the church bells ring in Seville, the Spanish authorities are sounding the alarm, a heatwave warning. It's morning here and already 31° C. Temperatures could rise to 43° during the day. We have to be constantly looking for shade. The air conditioning in the car, whoever has it, and look, we wear a bracelet that beeps for the heat. It's terrible for me. I mean, I don't sleep well. insomnia and then I get heat stroke. I stop eating and I can't concentrate. And it's not only Spain. Across Europe, people are struggling to stay cool as extreme temperatures hit in regions from north to south. For scientists, this comes as no surprise. They've been warning for years that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming, making heat waves more likely and more severe. What is exceptional for Europe, the continent is warming twice as fast as the global average. Scientists from the Copanico's climate observatory program think this is linked to various factors. Like Europe's proximity to the Arctic, the more ice that melts there, the fewer sun rays are sent back into space. The result, the region heats up even more. Another factor is Europe's shrinking rivers and lakes caused by severe droughts in recent years. Since land warms up faster than water, it gets even warmer in summer. And there might be a contribution of aerosol reduction too. We clean our air. Our industrial processes and transport are cleaner than before. And this clean the atmosphere. So there is a a positive trend in terms of radiation in Europe. So it's more more sunshine hours every year. Um so all this combined can play a role. Then there is a super fast warming of the Mediterranean Sea which is contributing to heat waves and more extreme droughts in the south. The dark red colors on this map show areas that are more than 5° above the seasonal average. Heat known as the silent killer is a serious health risk for everyone, but particularly for elderly people, those with illnesses and children. As the hot weather continues, civil authorities keep warning residents. Meanwhile, in Italy, some regions have put restrictions on outdoor work during the peak heat hours. Brenda Ecquzle is a leading authority on climate change. She's senior director of scientific excellence with the Union of Concerned Scientists and joins us from Washington DC. Welcome to DW. How concerning is it that Europe's increased temperatures are happening so much earlier in summer? Uh it's it's quite concerning. I think it's one of the fingerprints of climate change. For example, looking at the data, March to May in the boreal spring season was the second highest on record and that was only broken by the highest on record which happened the prior spring. So, are we seeing a shift in temperatures or are we seeing an extension of the the the the warm temperatures? Are summers getting longer or is everything just being shifted forward? Summers are getting longer and unfortunately for human health, the heat waves are more severe under climate change. at this level of climate change. Europe is now the the world's fastest warming continent. Why is that? Uh there are a couple of really important physical science reasons. Partly because the Arctic region to the north of Europe is warming several times faster than the global average. Also, the oceans are warming up and we saw that just recently uh in the northeastern North Atlantic Sea. Surface temperatures on May 23rd, the peak of a marine heatwave uh was the highest since recordeping began in 1979. And combine that with drought conditions and high temperatures. These are preconditions for the heat wave that people are experiencing across many parts of Europe in u the recent days and weeks. Okay. So now we have the EU revealing its climate targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by uh 2024. Is that going to be enough? It's really really important to have severe reduction in emissions of heat trapping gases and coal, oil, gas, uh cement manufacturing. These are really really important. So 90% is a lotable target and as fast as possible is what we need. Okay. But we have at the same time uh the Trump spending bill which is going to deliver a huge blow to renewable energy. He has an administration full of climate deniers. How much does that does it matter that the world's biggest carbon poller is so out of step with the rest of the world on this issue? It it matters greatly because the United States, if you look at historical cumulative emissions, is the largest contributor to global warming today. and therefore the great strides that were taken to uh reduce emissions through spending at the federal government level, energy projects, infrastructure projects that are uh underway. It looks like these uh bills that are recently before the Senate and and the House in Congress, uh a lot of them are looking to slow or reverse some of those advances. However, there is a note of hope. A lot of members of Congress want those uh contracts that are in their districts, which many of them are in especially rural areas and many uh many members of Congress, they want the ones that were committed to go forward. So we think that might survive the current round of negotiations. Okay. Of course, when I I mentioned the European targets, that was by 2040 rather than by last year, as I think I said, um, every year we see lives lost because of extreme weather and climate related events, and the financial costs are huge. Does the lack of urgency to tackle climate change and global warming, does that still surprise you? It would if I were just wearing my climate scientist hat. And in fact, I was quite uh surprised by the continued lack of action. However, I have learned through social science and other areas of his science history that many people have been deliberately misinformed about the facts and therefore uh we see that the the impacts of climate change are awakening many people because they see it, they experience it. these heat waves are more severe than they remember as children or that their parents or grandparents experienced. So, it's hard to deny the facts that are on the ground. Yet, there's also misinformation about the power and momentum of solutions such as the actions you say uh Europe is taking to reduce 90% of the emissions. We would like it to be sooner. 2040 is an ambitious target on the way to 90% reductions. a lot of innovation, a lot of jobs, support for the economy are also going to be benefits of taking action on climate change. Okay, thank you so much for talking us through that to Brenda Ecquzle uh from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thank you so much. Well, Carl Friedrich Schoer is a scientific adviser to climate analytics and an honorary professor at the Humbult University here in Berlin. Welcome to DW. Should Europe have been better prepared for this heat wave? Well, this is the science of the climate crisis and unfortunately we see that even a a world region like Europe that has a high adaptive capacity and generally good foresight and some of the best scientific advice in the world is not prepared for events like this. So you can imagine how the climate extremes are hitting countries around the world at this time of the day. Yeah. But it may have the the the high adaptive capacity. It might you can have all the science you like, but if your politicians, if the people in charge of the money are sitting on their hands, then none of that counts for anything. Well, um, first and foremost, we are battling the climate crisis by bringing down emissions on the race to net zero to stop the climate crisis forever further intensifying. So, I think that's the first and foremost priority that we need to keep in mind. And then yes indeed uh we are seeing that the climate crisis is very much upon us. It's not a question of the future and we are not prepared. We haven't experienced anything like that in that extent and magnitude even in Europe. Uh and we are seeing that our systems are being pushed to limits and it's uh we really need to step up our game also when it comes to climate adaptation and dealing with those crisis. Let's talk about the stepping up of of that of the game for climate adaptation. Where do you see it being done? Well, it's very tricky to say where it's being done well because societies around the world are being uh faced with new and different challenges. If you just recall, for example, our neighboring country of Germany and Switzerland had a massive landslide in relation to to uh uh its mountainous environments just a couple of weeks months ago. Um other countries are battling tropical cyclones, massive flooding, wildfires that we also now seeing here, massive heat. The climate crisis has many faces and many many perils and societies around the world are experiencing unprecedented extremes. Uh and um we are all in this together. So so okay but talk to us about the what's going on here in Europe. Where do you look around Europe and say right they have the right idea that was a good thing to do. That's good policy. I think it's very tricky to say what is good policy. I think there are obvious things that we need to do. We need to have cooling rooms. We need to see how we uh um uh reduce urban heat island effects in cities. We need to know green spaces. We need uh um to look after elderly. We need to identify vulnerable populations and in particular focus on them. But we also need to appreciate the fact that our infrastructure hasn't been built for a climate that we are experiencing today. H and that it's going to take us a lot of time and investment in order to adapt. And we are going to see the economic impacts of it. as we've also seen in the clip that you've just shown how for example in the building sectors workers are uh workers capacity is drastically reduced um because of the extreme heat stress so it is a challenge it's a challenge that we all in together in some countries in particular those that have more experience with extreme heat waves for example like France that had a terrible heat wave in 2003 has slightly better early warning systems and also adaptation systems in place but I wouldn't say anyone in Europe is prepared for what is here and what is yet to come thank you for talking us through that. Carl Fredick Schlloer uh from Humboldt University. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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