Phoenix initiative helps residents stay safe in extreme heat

Blazing hot days are common in Arizona and they can be deadly. On average, extreme heat causes more than a hundred deaths in the state each year.

To provide relief in the city of Phoenix, community organizations offer residents air-conditioned spaces to cool off. Some also provide water, and donated items such as sunscreen.

Hammett: “Some examples here are Salvation Army, churches … our libraries, our senior centers.”

Michael Hammett oversees the Heat Relief Network. He says the network has existed for years but many people do not know about it.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story - “Phoenix initiative helps residents stay safe in extreme heat.”

Inertia on the pathway to decarbonisation

One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are far longer than most people are used to thinking about.
Garvey points out that this makes climate change different from any other ethical question, because both the causes and consequences are smeared out across time and space:

Steve Easterbrook.

“There is a sense in which my actions and the actions of my present fellows join with the past actions of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and the effects resulting from our actions will still be felt hundreds, even thousands of years in the future. It is also true that we are, in a way, stuck with the present we have because of our past. The little actions I undertake which keep me warm and dry and fed are what they are partly because of choices made by people long dead. Even if I didn’t want to burn fossil fuels, I’m embedded in a culture set up to do so.” (Garvey, 2008, p60)

Part of the problem is that the physical climate system is slow to respond to our additional greenhouse gas emissions, and similarly slow to respond to reductions in emissions. The first part of this is core to a basic understanding of climate change, as it’s built into the idea of equilibrium climate sensitivity (roughly speaking, the expected temperature rise for each doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere). The extra heat that’s trapped by the additional greenhouse gases builds up over time, and the planet warms slowly, but the oceans have such a large thermal mass, it takes decades for this warming process to complete.

Read Steve Easterbrook’s report on Serendipity - “Inertia on the pathway to decarbonisation.”

Oceans Reaching Limit of Soaking up Global Warming

A new IUCN report, entitled “Explaining ocean warming: causes, scale, effects and consequences”, sets out the most recent and comprehensive review to date on this topic and shows a complex story of change in the ocean.

This change is underway, often already locked in for many decades to come, and has already begun to impact people’s lives. 

This is no longer a single story of ocean warming challenges to coral reefs, but a rapidly growing list of alarming changes across species at ecosystem scales, and across geographies spanning the entire world.

It is pervasive change, driven by ocean warming and other stressors already operating in ways we are only beginning to understand, where essential gaps in marine data, systems and capabilities are leaving the world poorly prepared to cope in the future.

Read the UN Climate Change Newsroom story - “Oceans Reaching Limit of Soaking up Global Warming.”