New Republic - Eric Margolis
A new era of heat waves is here. We aren’t ready.
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A man cools off in the spray of a fire hydrant during a heat wave in Philadelphia. Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
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As
the coronavirus pandemic continues throughout the United States,
another deadly pandemic comes out to strike in the summer: extreme heat.
Year after year, more people are dying because it’s simply too hot. As
of right now, both this country and others lack even an accurate way of
counting those deaths—let alone a comprehensive plan to reduce them.
Thanks to climate change, it’s about to get much worse.
For the past week, the American South and Southwest have been
experiencing record-breaking temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has
predicted above-average heat for nearly the entire U.S. this summer. Unprecedented, early-summer heat waves roasted the
Middle East in May and
Siberia in June, setting the latter
on fire. Arizona had its
earliest-ever hundred-degree heat wave in April—and another 110 degree heat wave in May. Spain endured
105 degree heat this month.
When
the heat index, a “feels-like” combination of temperature and humidity,
reaches 104 degrees Fahrenheit indoors or out, human body temperature
risks rising above the typical roughly 99 degrees Fahrenheit. When body
temperature rises above 104 degrees, the consequences can be
fatal within 30 to 60 minutes.
“Heat-related
deaths are notoriously difficult to track because the role of heat
isn’t always obvious. One 2017 study found that extreme heat can kill
people in 27 different ways,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate,
climate and health at the National Resources Defense Council, told me.
“If someone dies of a heart attack during a heat wave, there’s a good
chance that’s how their death will be recorded by officials, even if
high temperatures were the trigger.”
Many scientists argue that
official heat-death counts underestimate substantially. According to the
World Health Organization, 166,000 people
died
due to heat waves between 1998 and 2017, but the true figure may be far
higher. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
only count deaths where heat illness is explicitly noted, so the
official CDC count of heat-triggered deaths
sits at just around 600 per year. Epidemiologists
estimate that the
real figure may be closer to 12,000—20 times higher than the official count.
Climate change is making heat waves
longer, hotter, and more deadly. Scientists
estimate
that 80 percent of record-breaking heat waves would not have occurred
without human-caused warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. And urban
areas, in particular, face special risk of heat deaths because of the
heat island effect,
in which dark pavement, roofs, and concrete absorb additional heat,
making temperatures much hotter than the reported weather in any given
city.
In the U.S., heat deaths have more than
doubled in Arizona in the last 10 years. Last year, a
dangerous heat wave
hit while storms left residents in the D.C. and New York City metro
areas without power. Power outages can be deadly in a heat wave because
without air conditioning, many people can’t cool off. In two heat deaths
in a 2018 Arizona heat wave, the deceased were
found indoors with a broken air conditioning unit that they couldn’t afford to fix.
“Some
people won’t use their air conditioning because they’re afraid of the
bills,” Patricia Solís, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for
Resilience at Arizona State University,
told National Geographic. “They think they’re OK without it, but that’s how people die.”
“There
are huge policy gaps in the U.S. with respect to extreme heat
protections,” Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist at the Union of
Concerned Scientists, told me. “We found that without real action on
climate change, by midcentury more than 250 cities across the U.S. are
projected to experience 30 or more days with a heat index above 100
degrees Fahrenheit. This includes many cities that historically haven’t experienced this level of extreme heat.”
Low-income communities are especially vulnerable. A
2020 study in
Environmental Research Letters
found that residents in low-income census tracts were less likely to
use air conditioners when temperatures got hot. Heat wave exposure also
disproportionately
affects communities of color that have faced housing discrimination.
Researchers at Portland State University and the Science Museum of
Virginia
found
that urban neighborhoods denied municipal services during the
mid-twentieth century are now the hottest areas in 94 percent of the 108
cities analyzed.
Extreme heat is a labor issue, as well. “One of
the most urgent needs is an enforceable heat health standard for all
workers from the [Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” said
Constible. The current rule “has too much wiggle room for employers.”
Licker pointed to the proposed Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and
Fatality Prevention Act of 2019, which has yet to get out of the House
Committee on Education and Labor, as a potential solution. The bill,
sponsored by Democratic Representative Judy Chu of California, is named
after Asuncion Valdivia, a California farmworker who died of a heat
stroke in 2004 after
picking grapes for 10 hours
in 100 degree weather. The U.S. Postal Service has also received
criticism for its role in workers’ heat deaths, for example in a
troubling report from HuffPost this past week.
But killer heat is a worldwide phenomenon. In Europe, heat waves killed as many as
70,000 in 2003 and
more than 1,500
last year. Good heat wave adaptation measures—such as handing out water
at train stations, asking people to check on the elderly, and opening
air-conditioned shelters for residents—likely
contributed to the substantial reduction in deaths from 2003 to 2019. Accurate weather forecasting also allowed for greater preparedness. Still, just
5 percent
of European households are air conditioned and scientists estimate that
three degrees Celsius of warming could kill an additional
86,000 people each year in the EU.
While
China and Japan are used to some sweltering-hot summers,
record-breaking heat waves have nevertheless proved deadly. Consecutive
heat waves in 2018 and 2019 in Japan hospitalized
tens of thousands
and killed hundreds. Japan doesn’t use excess mortality to calculate
heat-related deaths like Europe does, which means that, as in the U.S.,
these numbers may be huge undercounts. In China, extreme heat combines
with poor air quality to
produce harmful ozone. Scientists estimate that three degrees of global warming could kill an additional
30,000 people each year in China.
Meanwhile,
the impact of extreme heat on the global south remains underreported in
Western media. Since developing countries tend to lack the cooling
infrastructure present in North America and East Asia, regions in India,
Bangladesh, and Pakistan could soon face regular summer heat waves that
are
impossible to survive.
A recent Tokyo Institute of Technology study shows that heat-related deaths in Jakarta are expected to increase by
15 times by 2060. And while some regions of Africa are
used to heat waves as a regular occurrence, the heat island slums of large cities such as Nairobi
can create fatal conditions. A 2017 John Hopkins study found that temperatures in Kibera, one of the largest “
slum” settlements in Nairobi, were typically 5 to 10 degrees higher than the official weather report.
The
dual threat of extreme heat and the coronavirus makes for an especially
challenging summer for policymakers and city-dwellers. Many cities this
year and for each additional year that the pandemic persists will have
to choose between opening public cooling centers and risking
transmission of Covid-19 or keeping them closed and risking
preventable heat-related deaths.
And
the coronavirus also complicates the labor aspect of extreme heat. The
current U.S. heat standard, for example, which is only a recommendation
that employers take precautions when temperatures reach a certain
threshold, was created in pre-Covid times. “A heat standard is
especially important this summer because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said
Constible. “The masks and other protective gear needed to slow
transmission of the virus have the potential to trap heat and increase
heat-health risks to some workers.”
Faced with record
temperatures, many cities in the U.S. have taken aggressive adaptation
measures. “Dozens of cities and some counties and states have mandatory,
incentivized or city-led initiatives using features such as cool roofs,
cool pavements, and trees,” Laura Brush, resilience fellow at the
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told me. “However, funding is a
significant barrier for many communities, especially during the
pandemic.”
“More
diverse funding sources and innovative finance mechanisms are needed to
invest in resilience projects. These could include a national
infrastructure bank, loan programs, and tax incentives for companies and
individuals,” Brush said. Brush points to Louisville, Kentucky’s
regional climate and health assessments and
cool roof rebate and installation programming as one effective example of a city taking action.
The
tragedy of heat-related deaths is that they are almost always
preventable. Distributing free air conditioners, paying residents’
summer cooling bills, and simply encouraging people to check in on
vulnerable relatives or neighbors can save lives. All of these are
extremely feasible policy measures.
At the same time, nothing will slow
the urban heat-death pandemic like climate mitigation and reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5
degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), for example, could save
2,700 lives per year in New York City alone,
according to recent estimates. What’s known for sure is that ignoring
either approach—the immediate or the long-term—will come with a body
count.
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