How Phoenix Is Working to Beat Urban Heat

Summers in Phoenix pose a daily health threat to Leonor Juarez and her family. She and her five children have asthma, and struggle to breathe the ovenlike air that ripples off the sidewalks when they walk their neighborhood’s shadeless streets. The sun beats down on them at uncovered bus stops during the five-hour round-trip to the doctor, leaving them suffering headaches, dehydration and chest pains. “It feels like I’m having a heart attack,” Juarez says. “It feels like you’re drowning in a swimming pool or you have a pillow over your head.”

In downtown Phoenix, investments in urban greening
have been made to reduce the impact of heat waves. 

Stories like Juarez’s are not unusual in Phoenix, the nation’s fastest-warming big city, which hit triple-digit temperatures on 128 days last year — and where at least 172 people died of heat-related causes in 2017. With the urban heat island effect acting in concert with global warming, U.S. cities could be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the afternoon and 14 degrees warmer at night by the end of the century, according to a recent study in Nature Climate Change. As temperatures spike, researchers and urban planners worry heat deaths will rise across the country.

Read the story from Scientific American by Keridwen Cornelius - “How Phoenix Is Working to Beat Urban Heat.”

Enough tiptoeing around. Let’s make this clear: coal kills people

Coal kills people. This isn’t even slightly scientifically controversial.

‘How can journalists and editors report on the politics
of coal on one page and bushfires around Sydney in
September on another without making the connection?’

From the mines to the trains to the climate disruption; from black lung to asthma, heat stress to hunger, fires to floods: coal is killing people in Australia and around the world right now.

Yet we are once again having what passes for political debate about extending the life of coal-fired power stations and, extraordinarily, building new ones. The conversation is completely disconnected from the fact that two-thirds of Bangladesh was reported to be underwater, record-breaking hurricanes were battering the US, and wildfires were roaring in both the northern and southern hemispheres at the same time.

Read Tom Hollo’s comment in The Guardian - “Enough tiptoeing around. Let’s make this clear: coal kills people.”