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Tag: Heat waves

  • In a rural California region, a plan takes shape to provide shade from dangerous heat

    In a rural California region, a plan takes shape to provide shade from dangerous heat

    MECCA, Calif. — When Limba Contreras moved to the desert community of Oasis, California, about 50 years ago, her family relied on a water cooler to keep temperatures inside their home comfortable. Other times, they sprayed each other with a hose outside.

    But when the heat topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 38 Celsius), the cooler was futile, and the hose was a temporary reprieve.

    “We suffered because of the heat and because we didn’t have any other resource,” said Contreras, a retired elementary school librarian.

    Contreras and her family now have air conditioning, but she worries about the lack of shade in playgrounds and fields in the few parks they have.

    “In the midst of extreme heat, the children can’t play because there’s no shade,” said Contreras on Saturday in the Eastern Coachella Valley, where elected officials, community leaders and others gathered at a park for the inauguration of a shade equity master plan.

    The Eastern Coachella Valley, an important agricultural area in Southern California, is a hot and arid place, with summer temperatures frequently rising above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Residents in this rural desert in Riverside County are mostly Latinos, Spanish speakers and low-income, and many live in mobile homes without air conditioning and work in fields under the sizzling sun.

    But trees, green spaces and buildings that could offer refuge from the sun are sparse, and that can increase dangerous heat stress on the body.

    From 2013 to 2023, heat was a contributing or underlying cause of 143 deaths in the Coachella Valley, according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. They had no statistics for Eastern Coachella Valley, the area where this shade equity plan is in play. Across the United States, heat was a factor in nearly 1,960 deaths in 2023.

    Every year, heat kills more people than floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined, and experts warn that extreme heat will become more intense, frequent and lethal with climate change.

    Studies have shown that shade can reduce heat stress on the human body between 25% and 35% throughout the day. Shaded areas can be 20 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than surfaces without it, according to an estimate by the EPA.

    Many cities across the U.S. — including New York, Miami and Austin — have adopted climate action and resilience plans that use trees as a defense against the broiling stone and asphalt that raise temperatures in urban areas. But fewer have taken the idea to less developed regions.

    “Heat is often talked about through the lens of cities, and that’s an important issue. But what was sort of being left off the table was how heat is affecting rural communities,” said V. Kelly Turner, assistant professor of urban planning and geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    The Eastern Coachella Valley plan aims to address this issue by recommending ways and places to create more shade via policy changes, smart building choices and input from community members. The plan would cover the unincorporated communities of Mecca, Thermal, Oasis and North Shore, near the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, and not far from the desert resort city of Palm Springs.

    “This area has been neglected for a long time, and it’s unfortunate,” said Victor Manuel Perez, the Riverside County district supervisor who represents the communities. “You have hard-working people here that deserve better.”

    Bringing more trees and shade structures to parks, schools and other areas will “ultimately ensure that youth and their families have somewhere where they can get out of the heat because we are talking about 115 degrees” in July and August, he said. “It’s pretty bad.”

    The shade master plan is the latest effort in the U.S. to increase climate resilience in Latino and other marginalized communities, which are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat in part because they have fewer resources like air conditioning and access to green spaces.

    Mariela Loera, regional policy manager for the nonprofit Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, said that low-income and communities of color are “easy to ignore,” and are often excluded from decision-making. That means they often lack basic amenities.

    In the Eastern Coachella Valley, where Loera works, dilapidated homes are common, and other poor infrastructure adds to the heat burden for residents.

    “It’s not just that it’s hot. It’s like it’s hot, and then there’s nowhere to go,” she said. “So having any kind of shade structure anywhere is helpful.”

    The project is being financed by a $644,411 grant from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in California, and is a collaboration between the Kounkuey Design Initiative, the Oasis Leadership Committee, the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and the Riverside University Health System.

    But the grand vision for the initiative won’t come without hurdles. It’s not always clear who has the authority to implement projects in unincorporated communities, and when the plan is finished, it will take more money to execute it.

    It will be one of several shade plans in the world. Phoenix has one. So do Tel Aviv in Israel and Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

    Turner, whose work focuses on cities adapting to hotter conditions, said she wanted to get involved in the project because she had never seen a shade master plan for a rural area.

    People who work outdoors, such as farmworkers — who are overwhelmingly Latino — and those working in construction are vulnerable to heat. About 40 workers die annually because of it, but the government says the number is likely higher because of the lack of reporting.

    Elidio Hernández Gómez, 59, was one of them. In 2023, the farmworker and father of two collapsed and died on an August day when temperatures in Fresno, California, peaked at around 100 degrees.

    As part of the project, members of the Oasis Leadership Committee, composed of community residents, are paid to take a virtual class about heat with Turner and master’s degree students in urban and regional planning at UCLA. On a recent Wednesday night, the class broke up into subgroups focused on spaces where residents experience heat: agriculture; transit; mobile homes and emergency shelters; and schools and parks.

    Some committee members said they need robust shade in parks and public areas. They described trees that had collapsed after heavy rain and wind.

    Silvestre Caixba Villaseca, through a translator, talked about inadequate and poor shade structures in fields.

    When temperatures exceed the 100s, the low, plastic rolling structures absorb heat and don’t cool, he said, and workers often seek shade in their cars or under trees.

    At the end of the day, many fieldworkers return to a hot home with no air conditioning.

    “None of us go to a place to cool off after work,” he said.

    But Villaseca also worries about his children, particularly his 6-year-old son.

    On Saturday, under a cloud-dotted blue sky and before a dust storm rolled in, he spoke of the lack of shade at Silvestre Jr.’s elementary school. Every day after class, he lines up with his classmates outside waiting to be picked up.

    “They are out in the direct sun,” he said. “They don’t have any shade in the form of trees or structures … it can be dangerous.”

    Despite the heat, Contreras, the Oasis resident and retired librarian, finds the desert beautiful. The mountains. The sunsets. The endless palms and orchards.

    “It looks really pretty here. But the people here need help and need to protect themselves from the sun, the heat,” she said. “We can’t change the weather. But we can change how we live. We can protect ourselves.”

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    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • How climate change contributes to wildfires like Chile’s

    How climate change contributes to wildfires like Chile’s


    At least 123 people have been killed by wildfires in central Chile, leading its president to declare two days of national mourning. The devastation comes soon after Colombia declared a disaster over wildfires. Scientists say climate change makes the heat waves and drought now hitting South America more likely — and both contribute to wildfires by drying out the plants that feed the blazes.

    WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CHILE?

    The fires in Chile came amid a heat wave that pushed temperatures in the capital city of Santiago to about 37 degrees Celsius (nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit). Extreme heat bakes moisture from wood, turning it into ideal fuel. Fires take hold more rapidly, and also burn with more intensity. Just a few extra degrees can be a tipping point that makes the difference between a mild fire season and a severe one.

    Edward Mitchard, a forests expert at the University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences in Scotland, said climate change “makes the world hotter, which means that plants evaporate more water through them and soils get drier.”

    It only takes a few days of very dry, hot weather for leaves to feel crisp and dry, he said. “That’s fuel that burns very well,” he said, adding: “Drier soil means fires are hotter and last longer.”

    A Nature study showed that fire seasons are an average of 18.7% longer in length due to climate change. That means an increased window for disastrous fires to start.

    WHAT ROLE DO GLOBAL WEATHER CYCLES PLAY?

    The increased number of droughts as global rain cycles are interrupted means whole regions can be left unusually parched and more vulnerable to ignition.

    “Climate change has made droughts more common,” said Mitchard. “And that’s especially happened in South America this year.

    “We’ve had the most extreme drought ever recorded in the Amazon basin, and if you have droughts in the Amazon basin, you also get less rainfall in the south of South America.”

    In Chile’s case, some unusually heavy rains last year are thought to have increased the growth of brush that makes perfect kindling for fires.

    On top of this has come the El Niño weather pattern, the natural and periodic warming of surface waters in the Pacific that affects weather around the globe. In South America, it’s meant increased temperatures and drought this year.

    Climate change makes stronger El Niños more likely, said Mitchard, and droughts caused by it are likelier to be more intense. Last month, Colombia’s government declared a disaster over dozens of wildfires associated with the weather phenomenon.

    And the huge amount of carbon released by forest fires itself increases global warming.

    ARE FOREST FIRES GETTING WORSE?

    The World Resources Institute used satellite data to calculate that wildfires now destroy about 11,500 square miles of forest annually (30,000 square kilometers), an area about the size of Belgium and about twice as much as 20 years ago.

    And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that globally, extreme heat waves happen five times more often because of human-caused global warming. Fire seasons are thus drier with higher temperatures. These are ideal conditions for forest fires to take hold.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.



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  • Extreme heat, wildfire smoke harm low-income and nonwhite communities the most, study finds

    Extreme heat, wildfire smoke harm low-income and nonwhite communities the most, study finds


    LOS ANGELES — Extreme heat and wildfire smoke are independently harmful to the human body, but together their impact on cardiovascular and respiratory systems is more dangerous and affects some communities more than others.

    A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances said climate change is increasing the frequency of both hazards, particularly in California. The authors found that the combined harm of extreme heat and inhalation of wildfire smoke increased hospitalizations and disproportionately impacted low-income communities and Latino, Black, Asian and other racially marginalized residents.

    The reasons are varied and complicated, according to the authors from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Structural racism, discriminatory practices, lack of medical insurance, less understanding of the health damages and a higher prevalence of multiple coexisting conditions are among the reasons.

    Infrastructure, the surrounding environment and available resources are also factors. Homes and work places with air conditioning and neighborhoods with tree canopy cover are better protected from extreme heat, and some buildings filter smoke from wildfires and insulate heat more efficiently. Areas with access to cooling centers, such as libraries, also offer more protection.

    “Even if you’re very susceptible — you have a lot of comorbidities — you may have many opportunities to not be impacted, not being hospitalized, not having to go to the ER, but if you live in a place that is quite remote that does not have access to a lot of social services or amenities, … it may be more trouble,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, a study author and climate change epidemiologist at UC San Diego.

    Experts warn that climate change — which is worsening extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and wildfires — will increase the frequency and intensity in which they occur simultaneously.

    While the study focused on California, similar patterns can be found in other parts of the western United States such as Oregon and Washington state, in parts of Canada including British Columbia, and in regions with Mediterranean climate, said Benmarhnia.

    Researchers analyzed California health records — broken down by 995 ZIP codes covering most of the state’s population — during episodes of extreme heat and toxic air from wildfires. They discovered that between 2006 and 2019, hospitalizations for cardiorespiratory issues increased by 7% on days where both conditions existed, and they were higher than that in ZIP codes where people were likelier to be poor, nonwhite, living in dense areas and not have health care.

    California’s Central Valley and the state’s northern mountains had higher incidences of both hot weather and wildfires, likely driven by more forest fires in surrounding mountains.

    Residents in the Central Valley agricultural heartland are particularly vulnerable to the adverse health effects of both because they are likelier to work outdoors and be exposed to pesticides and other environmental hazards, said Benmarhnia.

    Beyond the health risks, being hospitalized has other significant consequences, such as losing hours of work or school, or being left with hefty medical bills.

    During extremely hot days, the human body has a harder time cooling itself off through sweating, said Christopher T. Minson, professor of human physiology at the University of Oregon, who wasn’t part of the study. The body can become dehydrated, forcing the heart to beat faster, which elevates blood pressure.

    “If you’re dehydrated or if you have any kind of cardiovascular disease, … you’re going to be less able to tolerate that heat stress, and that heat stress can become very, very dangerous,” he said.

    Some particles found in wildfire smoke can enter easily through the nose and throat, eventually arriving at the lungs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The smallest particles can even enter the bloodstream.

    The combination of heat and smoke can cause inflammation in the body, Minson said, which is “going to make all your cardiovascular regulation worse, and you’re going to be at even more risk of heart attacks and other problems like long term, poor health outcomes from that. So it’s definitely a snowball effect.”

    A 2022 study by the University of Southern California found that the risk of death surged on days when extreme heat and air pollution coincided. During heat waves, the likelihood of death increased by 6.1%; when air pollution was extreme, it rose by 5%; and on days when both combined, the threat skyrocketed to 21%.

    When Dr. Catharina Giudice worked at a hospital in Los Angeles, she noticed an uptick of emergency room visits from patients with various health conditions on extremely hot days. When wildfires blazed, she saw more people with exacerbated asthma and other respiratory diseases.

    As climate change fuels the intensity and frequency of heat waves and wildfires, Giudice worries about the low-income and minority communities that are less adapted to them.

    “For a variety of reason, they tend to feel climate change much worse than other non-underserved communities, and I think it’s really important to highlight this social injustice aspect of climate change,” said the emergency physician and fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not part of the study.

    The authors noted that agencies like the National Weather Service and local air quality districts issue separate advisories and warnings on days of extreme heat and toxic air. But they argue that “issuing a joint warning earlier considering the compound exposure would be beneficial.”

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    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment



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  • Extreme heat represents a new threat to trees and plants in the Pacific Northwest

    Extreme heat represents a new threat to trees and plants in the Pacific Northwest

    PORTLAND, Ore. — From June 25 to July 2, 2021, the Pacific Northwest experienced a record-breaking heat wave that sent the normally temperate region into Death Valley-like extremes that took a heavy toll on trees as well as people.

    Seattle and Portland, Ore., recorded their hottest-ever temperatures, reaching 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42.2 Celsius) and 116 Fahrenheit (46.6 Celsius), respectively. In British Columbia, the small town of Lytton reached 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius).

    What become known as the “heat dome” is estimated to have killed hundreds of people in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

    As this human tragedy unfolded, a lesser-known ecological tragedy was happening, one that scientists warn has grim repercussions for the world’s plants and the many animal species that depend on them.

    In a matter of a few days, the 2021 heat dome turned many of the green leaves and needles on the region’s trees to orange, red and brown.

    But, as recent research suggests, tree foliage didn’t simply dry out in the heat. Instead, it underwent “widespread scorching.”

    “A lot of this reddening and browning of leaves was just that the leaves cooked. It really wasn’t a drought story,” said Chris Still, professor at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry and a leading researcher on the effects of heat on trees.

    Still is part of a growing number of scientists investigating what they say is a new, woefully underestimated threat to the world’s plants: climate change-driven extreme heat.

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    EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Columbia Insight, exploring the impact of climate on trees in the Pacific Northwest.

    ——

    In recent years, scientists in the Pacific Northwest have linked the decline of 10 native tree species to drought.

    In many cases, conditions that have brought about the decline are known as “hot droughts.”

    Driven by above-normal temperatures, hot droughts can be far more damaging to trees than droughts that result simply from a lack of moisture. Hot droughts not only dry out soil; they also dry out the air. This stresses trees, and can cause water-carrying tissues inside them to collapse — a process called “hydraulic failure.”

    In a paper earlier this year in the journal Tree Physiology, Still made the case that damage to the region’s trees during the heat dome was triggered primarily by direct damage from heat and solar radiation rather than indirectly by drought caused by the extreme heat.

    “I’m not trying to say that drought is not a huge and important factor,” said Still. “But I think with events like the 2021 heat wave becoming more common and intense, it’s important to look at the response of trees and other plants to these events and not just at drought, which has been the dominant paradigm.”

    Still’s argument includes the observation that “foliage scorch” was primarily found on the southern and western sides of trees and forests — a pattern that follows the track of the sun across the summer sky.

    “Basically, it was like a sunburn across the entire forest. It was quite disturbing,” said co-author Daniel DePinte, U.S. Forest Service aerial survey program manager, who observed the phenomenon from an airplane.

    Multiple tree species were scorched, DePinte said, noting that the role played by the sun became clear when the same trees were viewed from an orientation not exposed to direct sunlight.

    “It almost appeared as if the forest damage disappeared,” he said.

    The paper was written in response to an earlier study published in the same journal that argued a different position: that the heat dome led to widespread drought stress and hydraulic failure in Pacific Northwest trees. “Overall I agree … that heat damage played a big role in the damage caused to trees (during) the 2021 PNW heat wave. But in my view, hydraulic failure was as important, if not more,” wrote that study’s lead author Tamir Klein, professor of plant and environmental sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

    Exactly how hot is too hot for trees and other plants is the research focus of William Hammond, a plant ecophysiologist at the University of Florida.

    Hammond called the scientific community’s current understanding of extreme heat’s effect on plants a worrying “blind spot.”

    “One thing is for sure, we know a lot more about how dry is too dry for plant survival than we know about how hot is too hot,” he said.

    What scientists call “thermal tolerances” have been established for just 1,028, or less than 1%, of the world’s 330,200 recognized land-based plants, according to a frequently cited 2020 paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    No single thermal limit fits all plant species, but in general extreme damage to plant tissues occurs around 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 Celsius), Hammond said.

    “With those temperatures you might think ‘wow, the air doesn’t get that hot,’ but that’s the temperature of the plant, not the temperature of the air. And those things can be quite different,” he said.

    Just how different is something Still has been tracking.

    During the heat dome, he and colleagues recorded air temperatures around a Douglas fir tree reaching 112 degrees Fahrenheit (about 44 Celsius), the hottest ever recorded in the forest where the measurements were taken. The needles of the tree, however, reached 124 Fahrenheit (51.1 Celsius) due to exposure to direct sunlight.

    Still says observations like this and similar ones in forests around the world dispute a common misconception even among some scientists that plants can withstand extreme temperatures and stay cooler than air around them, especially when given access to water.

    “Plants can control their temperature to some degree, but if the heat is extreme enough, some plants won’t be able to get through it even if they have a ton of water,” he said.

    Hammond has reached the same conclusion based on work in his lab. “If temperature gets high enough, heat stress can kill living plant tissues even if they have water,” said Hammond.

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    Nathan Gilles is a science writer and journalist based in Vancouver, Washington.

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    Columbia Insight is an Oregon-based nonprofit news website covering environmental issues affecting the Pacific Northwest.

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    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Extreme heat might have been the ‘nail in the coffin’ for these critical Florida coral | CNN

    Extreme heat might have been the ‘nail in the coffin’ for these critical Florida coral | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    This summer’s record-breaking marine heat wave may have been the “nail in the coffin” for an iconic species of coral that serves as a building block of marine life around Florida. Still, scientists see other “signs of hope” in the state’s reefs.

    Elkhorn coral populations – which had already been teetering on the brink of local extinction in Florida – have been “decimated” by the extreme ocean heat, according to Liv Williamson, a coral expert and assistant scientist from the University of Miami.

    “This heat wave was the nail in the coffin for these populations,” Williamson said. “There were already so few elkhorn coral individuals on Florida’s reefs that various genetic rescue plans were underway, but now almost all the corals we would have used for such efforts have died.”

    Elkhorn and staghorn coral are some of the only so-called branching corals found in the Carribean. They were also the first coral species to gain protected status under the Endangered Species Act, Jennifer Moore, a threatened coral expert for NOAA told CNN.

    The branching part of these corals is key; their tree-like appendages grow faster than other coral and spread out like a rainforest canopy, providing protection for fish and other vertebrates, which helps the overall ecosystem thrive.

    Both coral species are slightly more heat-tolerant than other corals to begin with, Moore told CNN, but more likely to die once they bleach – a process in which they turn white as they expel their algal food source in response to heat stress.

    This summer’s die-off happened to both wild elkhorn and to corals bred to be more heat-tolerant. Coral conservationists have been trying for years to use those varieties to restore the disease-ravaged population.

    Some of the planted corals were bred to withstand ocean temperature up to 2 degrees Celsius above normal. But the water around Florida and the Caribbean this summer was up to 3 degrees Celsius above normal, causing mass bleaching and the die-off, Williamson said.

    As the world continues to warm because of human-caused climate change, marine heat waves are becoming more common and extreme, scientists say.

    “This summer has just illuminated how extreme things can get so quickly and I just don’t think we are prepared for that,” Williamson told CNN.

    Back in the 1960’s and 70’s elkhorn and staghorn corals “were so common it was like blades of grass,” Moore told CNN, but have become so rare “you cry in your mask when you see a live one on the reef.”

    A 2020 study of the elkhorn coral population in the upper Florida Keys found it was “functionally extinct,” or unable to reproduce effectively on its own and contribute to the ecosystem, and may face local extinction over the next 6 to 12 years. The researchers said the trends likely applied to all of Florida’s elkhorn.

    “There are simply too few, too far away from each other,” Williamson said.

    Staghorn coral are bleached near Key Largo. When coral are stressed, they expel their algal food source and slowly starve to death.

    “Although there are a small number of individuals still alive, the species has dwindled so much that they no longer play an effective role in the ecosystem in the way that they once did, and they no longer have a viable population,” Williamson said.

    Any deaths would have a “dramatic impact” at restoration sites just starting to see enough coral density to make an ecological impact, Moore said.

    Staghorn coral may have faired slightly better than elkhorn this summer, Williamson said, but still faces similar long term challenges.

    The grim news comes despite other signs of hope at the region’s reefs. Florida reefs are only just able to start recovering now that ocean temperatures have dropped from bathtub-like 90s to levels the heat-sensitive corals can better tolerate.

    Scientists fear this summer's ocean heat was the
    Elkhorn coral used to be widespread around Florida.

    Scientists have known since the summer that a mass bleaching event and die-off was happening, but they still don’t know the full extent of it or how bad it will be in the long run. Bleached coral may still be alive and recover now that water temperatures are cooler. Conversely, more coral could die because of vulnerability to disease in the months that follow bleaching, coral experts said.

    “We are definitely looking at a major mortality event, we just won’t know the extent of it for a couple more months,” Moore told CNN.

    For now, some coral scientists like Moore are hanging their hats on “shockingly fast” signs of recovery at reefs recently surveyed and on the prospects of using science learned from this event to give the species a better chance to survive the next heat wave.

    “To see corals that were 100% bleached two or three weeks ago regaining their algae and regaining their color also shows there’s resilience in the system,” Moore said. “That gives me a lot of hope. I don’t really know where it’s all going to land, so I can’t really tell you if it’s worse or better than I feared in July, but I am cautiously optimistic because of these little glimmers of hope. We just need to figure out how to maximize it so that we can help this system recover.”

    Others are still struggling to cope with the loss and the prospect of what feels like a Sisyphean effort to save such a vital species, especially in the face of climate change. Scientists like Williamson are left feeling “heartbroken” after witnessing their life’s work obliterated in a matter of weeks.

    “It’s hard to express the loss that my fellow coral conservationists and I feel, watching the pillars of this vital reef ecosystem collapse and the fruits of our labors destroyed,” Williamson wrote on Instagram.

    “Even if we do plant these nursery fragments back onto the reefs, what’s to say they will survive next summer, or the one after that?” Williamson told CNN.

    The prospects for coral recovery lie in a herculean rescue effort this summer. Coral conservationists moved corals to deeper water, cooler nurseries and harvested diverse genetic specimens and then put them in a “living gene bank” on land. Scientists like Moore plan to use the specimens to plant corals yet again.

    “Emotional fatigue was across everyone, because in some cases these were corals that they grew from babies and put out on the reef,” Moore said. “To see them bleach and potentially die is really, really emotionally draining. Yet, because we didn’t just sit there and watch them die – that’s what give me hope.”

    “I think we have lots of tools to prevent extinction and I’m not going to quit,” Moore told CNN.

    Scientists are cautiously optimistic that some of the coral can recover.

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  • Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi

    Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi

    This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.

    Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.

    And valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are becoming more dangerous for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease.

    For a long time, fungi have been a neglected group of pathogens. By the late 1990s, researchers were already warning that climate change would make bacterial, viral, and parasite-caused infectious diseases such as cholera, dengue, and malaria more widespread. “But people were not focused at all on the fungi,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s because, until recently, fungi have caused humans relatively little trouble.

    Our high body temperature helps explain why. Many fungi grow best at about 12 to 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 54 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit). So though they find it easy to infect trees, crops, amphibians, fish, reptiles, and insects—organisms that do not maintain consistently high internal body temperatures—fungi usually don’t thrive inside the warm bodies of mammals, Casadevall wrote in an overview of immunity to invasive fungal diseases in the 2022 Annual Review of Immunology. Among the few fungi that do infect humans, some dangerous ones, such as species of Cryptococcus, Penicillium, and Aspergillus, have historically been reported more in tropical and subtropical regions than in cooler ones. This, too, suggests that climate may limit their reach.

    Today, however, the planet’s warming climate may be helping some fungal pathogens spread to new areas. Take valley fever, for instance. The disease can cause flu-like symptoms in people who breathe in the microscopic spores of the fungus Coccidioides. The climatic conditions favoring valley fever may occur in 217 counties of 12 U.S. states today, according to a 2019 study by Morgan Gorris, an Earth-system scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.

    But when Gorris modeled where the fungi could live in the future, the results were sobering. By 2100, in a scenario where greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, rising temperatures would allow Coccidioides to spread northward to 476 counties in 17 states. What was once thought to be a disease mostly restricted to the southwestern U.S. could expand as far as the U.S.-Canadian border in response to climate change, Gorris says. That was a real “wow moment,” she adds, because that would put millions more people at risk.

    Some other fungal diseases of humans are also on the move, such as histoplasmosis and blastomycosis. Both, like valley fever, are seen more and more outside what was thought to be their historical range.

    Such range extensions have also appeared in fungal pathogens of other species. The chytrid fungus that has contributed to declines in hundreds of amphibian species, for example, grows well at environmental temperatures from 17 to 25 degrees Celsius (63 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit). But the fungus is becoming an increasing problem at higher altitudes and latitudes, which likely is in part because rising temperatures are making previously cold regions more welcoming for the chytrid. Similarly, white-pine blister rust, a fungus that has devastated some species of white pines across Europe and North America, is expanding to higher elevations where conditions were previously unfavorable. This has put more pine forests at risk. Changing climatic conditions are also helping drive fungal pathogens of crops, like those infecting bananas and wheat, to new areas.

    Read: We’re giving up on the (frog) pandemic

    A warming climate also changes cycles of droughts and intense rains, which can increase the risk of fungal diseases in humans. One study of more than 81,000 cases of valley fever in California from 2000 to 2020 found that infections tended to surge in the two years immediately following prolonged droughts. Scientists don’t yet fully understand why this happens. But one hypothesis suggests that Coccidioides survives better than its microbial competitors during long droughts, then grows quickly once rains return and releases spores into the air when the soil begins to dry again. “So climate is not only going to affect where it is, but how many cases we have from year to year,” says Gorris.

    By triggering more intense and frequent storms and fires, climate change can also help fungal spores spread over longer distances. Researchers have found a surge in valley-fever infections in California hospitals after large wildfires as far as 200 miles away. Scientists have seen this phenomenon in other species too: Dust storms originating in Africa may be implicated in helping move a coral-killing soil fungus to the Caribbean.

    Researchers are now sampling the air in dust storms and wildfires to see if these events can actually carry viable, disease-causing fungi for long distances and bring them to people, causing infections. Understanding such dispersal is key to figuring out how diseases spread, says Bala Chaudhary, a fungal ecologist at Dartmouth who co-authored an overview of fungal dispersal in the 2022 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. But there’s a long road ahead: Scientists still don’t have answers to several basic questions, such as where various pathogenic fungi live in the environment or the exact triggers that liberate fungal spores out of soil and transport them over long distances to become established in new places.

    Helping existing fungal diseases reach new places isn’t the only effect of climate change. Warming temperatures can also help previously innocuous fungi evolve tolerance for heat. Researchers have long known that fungi are capable of this. In 2009, for example, researchers showed that a fungus—in this case, a pathogen that infects insects—could evolve to grow at nearly 37 degrees Celsius, some five degrees higher than its previous upper thermal limit, after just four months. More recently, researchers grew a dangerous human pathogen, Cryptococcus deneoformans, at both 37 degrees Celsius (similar to human body temperature) and 30 degrees Celsius in the lab. The higher temperature triggered a fivefold rise in a certain type of mutation in the fungus’s DNA compared with the lower temperature. Rising global temperatures, the researchers speculate, could thus help some fungi rapidly adapt, increasing their ability to infect people.

    Read: The bigger this fungus gets, the worse we’re doing

    There are examples from the real world too. Before 2000, the stripe-rust fungus, which devastates wheat crops, preferred cool, wet parts of the world. But since 2000, some strains of the fungus have become better adapted to higher temperatures. These sturdier strains have been replacing the older strains and spreading to new regions.

    This is worrying, says Casadevall, especially with hotter days and heat waves becoming more frequent and intense. “Microbes really have two choices: adapt or die,” he says. “Most of them have some capacity to adapt.” As climate change increases the number of hot days, evolution will likely select more strongly for heat-resistant fungi.

    And as fungi in the environment adapt to tolerate heat, some might even become capable of breaching the human temperature barrier.

    This may have happened already. In 2009, doctors in Japan isolated an unknown fungus from the ear discharge of a 70-year-old woman. This new-to-medicine fungus, which was given the name Candida auris, soon spread to hospitals around the world, causing severe bloodstream infections in already sick patients. The World Health Organization now lists Candida auris in its most dangerous group of fungal pathogens, partly because the fungus is showing increasing resistance to common antifungal drugs.

    “In the case of India, it’s really a nightmare,” says Arunaloke Chakrabarti, a medical mycologist at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. When C. auris was first reported in India more than a decade ago, it was low on the list of Candida species threatening patients, Chakrabarti says, but now, it’s the leading cause of Candida infections. In the U.S., clinical cases rose sharply from 63 in the period from 2013 to 2016 to more than 2,300 in 2022.

    Where did C. auris come from so suddenly? The fungus appeared simultaneously across three different continents. Each continent’s version of the fungus was genetically distinct, suggesting that it emerged independently on each continent. “It’s not like somebody took a plane and carried them,” says Casadevall. “The isolates are not related.”

    Because all continents are exposed to the effects of climate change, Casadevall and his colleagues think that human-induced global warming may have played a role. C. auris may always have existed somewhere in the environment—potentially in wetlands, where researchers have recovered other pathogenic species of Candida. Climate change, they argued in 2019, may have exposed the fungus to hotter conditions over and over again, allowing some strains to become heat-tolerant enough to infect people—although the researchers cautioned that many other factors are also likely at play.

    Subsequently, scientists from India and Canada found C. auris in nature on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. This “wild” version of C. auris grew much slower at human body temperature than did the hospital versions. “What that suggests to me is that this stuff is all over the environment and some of the isolates are adapting faster than others,” says Casadevall.

    Like other explanations for C. auris’s origin, Casadevall’s is only a hypothesis, says Chakrabarti, and still needs to be proved.

    One way to establish the climate-change link, Casadevall says, would be to review old soil samples and see whether they have C. auris in them. If the older versions of the fungus don’t grow well at higher temperatures, but over time they start to, that would be good evidence that they’re adapting to heat.

    In any case, the possibility of warmer temperatures bringing new fungal pathogens to humans needs to be taken seriously, says Casadevall—especially if drug-resistant fungi that currently infect species of insects and plants become capable of growing at human body temperature. “Then we find ourselves with organisms that we never knew before, like Candida auris.”

    Doctors are already encountering novel fungal infections in people, such as multiple new-to-medicine species of Emergomyces that have appeared mostly in HIV-infected patients across four continents, and the first record of Chondrostereum purpureum—a fungus that infects some plants of the rose family—infecting a plant mycologist in India. Even though these emerging diseases haven’t been directly linked to climate change, they highlight the threat that fungal diseases might pose. For Casadevall, the message is clear: It’s time to pay more attention.

    Shreya Dasgupta

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  • The Calendar of Human Fertility Is Changing

    The Calendar of Human Fertility Is Changing

    As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.

    Her hospital isn’t alone in this trend. For decades, demographers have documented a lift in American births in late summer, and a trough in the spring. I see it myself in my own corner of the world: In the past several weeks, the hospital across the street from me has become a revolving door of new parents and infants. When David Lam, an economist at the University of Michigan who helped pioneer several early U.S. studies on seasonal patterns of fertility, first analyzed his data decades ago, “we were kind of surprised how big it was,” he told me. Compare the peak of some years to their nadir, he said, and it was almost like looking at the Baby Boom squished down into 12 months.

    Birth seasonality has been documented since the 1820s, if not earlier. But despite generations of study, we still don’t fully understand the reasons it exists, or why it differs so drastically among even neighboring countries. Teasing apart the contributions of biology and behavior to seasonality is messy because of the many factors involved, says Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, who has been studying seasonality for years. And even while researchers try to track it, the calendar of human fertility has been changing. As our species has grown more industrialized, claimed more agency over reproduction, and reshaped the climate we are living in, seasonality, in many places, is shifting or weakening.

    Read: The pregnancy risk that doctors won’t mention

    There is no doubt that a big part of human birth seasonality is behavioral. People have more sex when they have more free time; they have less sex when they’re overworked or overheated or stressed. Certain holidays have long been known to carry this effect: In parts of the Western world with a heavy Christian presence, baby boomlets fall roughly nine months after Christmas; the same patterns have been spotted with Spring Festival and Lunar New Year in certain Chinese communities. (Why these holidays strike such a note, and not others, isn’t entirely clear, experts told me.)

    In addition to free time, family-focused celebrations probably help set the mood, Luis Rocha, a systems scientist at Binghamton University, told me. Cold weather might help people get snuggly around Christmastime, too, but it’s not necessary; Rocha’s studies and others have shown the so-called Christmas effect in southern-hemisphere countries as well. No matter whether Christmas falls in the winter or summer, around the end of December, Google searches for sex skyrocket and people report more sexual activity on health-tracking apps. In a few countries, including the U.S., condom sales rise too.

    But cultural norms have never been able to explain everything about the Homo sapiens birth calendar. “It’s pretty common for mammals to have a specific breeding season” dictated by all sorts of environmental cues, Martinez told me. Deer, for instance, mate in the fall, triggered by the shortening length of daylight, effectively scheduling their fawns to be born in the spring; horses, whose gestations are longer, breed as the days lengthen in the spring and into summer, so they can foal the following year.

    Humans, of course, aren’t horses or deer. Our closest relatives among primates “are much more flexible” about when they mate, Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier, in France, told me. But those apes are not immune to their surroundings, and neither are we. All sorts of hormones in the human body, including reproductive ones, wax and wane with the seasons. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that couples hoping to conceive via in vitro fertilization have a higher chance of success if the eggs are retrieved during the summer. At the same time, summer conceptions appear to be less common, or less successfully carried to term, in some countries, a trend that sharpens at lower latitudes and, Lam told me, during hotter years. The subsequent spring lulls may be explained in part by heat waves dissuading people from sex. But Alan Barreca, an economist at UCLA, suspects that ultrahigh temperatures may also physiologically compromise fertility, potentially by affecting factors such as sperm quantity and quality, ovulation success, or the likelihood of early fetal loss.

    Read: Life can’t get much hotter than this

    No matter its exact drivers, seasonality is clearly weakening in many countries, Martinez told me; in some parts of the world, it may be entirely gone. The change isn’t uniform or entirely understood, but it’s probably to some extent a product of just how much human lifestyles have changed. In many communities that have historically planted and harvested their own food, people may have been more disinclined to, and less physically able to, conceive a child when labor demands were high or when crops were scarce—trends that are still prominent in certain countries today. People in industrial and high-income areas of the modern world, though, are more shielded from those stressors and others, in ways that may even out the annual birth schedule, Kathryn Grace, a geographer at the University of Minnesota, told me. The heat-driven dip in America’s spring births, for instance, has softened substantially in recent decades, likely due in part to increased access to air-conditioning, Lam said. And as certain populations get more relaxed about religion, the cultural drivers of birth times may be easing up, too, several experts told me. Sweden, for example, appears to have lost the “Christmas effect” of December sex boosting September births.

    Advances in contraception and fertility treatments have also put much more of fertility under personal control. People in well-resourced parts of the world can now, to a decent degree, realize their preferences for when they want their babies to be born. In Sweden, parents seem to avoid November and December deliveries because that would make their child among the youngest in their grade (which carries a stereotype of potentially having major impacts on their behavioral health, social skills, academics, and athletic success). In the U.S., people have reported preferring to give birth in the spring; there’s also a tax incentive to deliver early-winter babies before January 1, says Neel Shah, the chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a women’s health and fertility clinic in New York.

    Humans aren’t yet, and never will be, completely divorced from the influences of our surroundings. We are also constantly altering the environment in which we reproduce—which could, in turn, change the implications of being born during a particular season. Births are not only more common at certain times of the year; they can also be riskier, because of the seasonal perils posed to fetuses and newborns, Mary-Alice Doyle, a social-policy researcher at the London School of Economics, told me. Babies born during summer may be at higher risk of asthma, for instance—a trend that’s likely to get only stronger as heat waves, wildfires, and air pollution become more routine during the year’s hottest months.

    The way we manage infectious disease matters too. Being born shortly after the peak of flu season—typically winter, in temperate parts of the world—can also be dangerous: Infections during pregnancy have been linked to lower birth weight, preterm delivery, even an increased likelihood of the baby developing certain mental-health issues later on. Comparable concerns exist in the tropics, where mosquitoes, carrying birth-defect-causing viruses such as dengue or Zika, can wax and wane with the rainy season. The more humans allow pathogens to spill over from wildlife and spread, the bigger these effects are likely to be.

    Read: One more COVID summer?

    Children born in the spring—in many countries, a more sparsely populated group—tend to be healthier on several metrics, Barreca told me. It’s possible that they’re able to “thread the needle,” he said, between the perils of flu in winter and extreme heat in summer. But these infants might also thrive because they are born to families with more socioeconomic privilege, who could afford to beat the heat that might have compromised other conceptions. As heat waves become more intense and frequent, people without access to air-conditioning might have an even harder time getting pregnant in the summer.

    The point of all this isn’t that there is a right or wrong time of year to be born, Grace told me. If seasonality will continue to have any sway over when we conceive and give birth, health-care systems and public-health experts might be able to use that knowledge to improve outcomes, shuttling resources to maternity wards and childhood-vaccination clinics, for instance, during the months they might be in highest demand.

    Humans may never have had as strict a breeding season as horses and deer. But the fact that so many people can now deliver safely throughout the year is a testament to our ingenuity—and to our sometimes-inadvertent power to reshape the world we live in. We have, without always meaning to, altered a fundamental aspect of human reproduction. And we’re still not done changing it.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Sydney Marathon runners hospitalized as Australia swelters in unusual spring heat wave | CNN

    Sydney Marathon runners hospitalized as Australia swelters in unusual spring heat wave | CNN



    Reuters
     — 

    A sweltering heat wave in Australia took its toll on runners in the Sydney Marathon on Sunday, with 26 people taken to the hospital and about 40 treated for heat exhaustion by emergency services.

    Large parts of Australia’s southeast, including Sydney, are experiencing a spring heat wave, the national weather bureau said, with temperatures Monday expected to peak at up to 16 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit) above the September average.

    The rising heat wave has been building in the country’s outback interior over the weekend and is likely to last until Wednesday across the states of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.

    The Bureau of Meteorology said it expected several early spring records to be broken over the next few days, calling the heat “very uncommon for September.”

    “A reprieve from the heat is not expected until Wednesday onwards, as a stronger cold front crosses the southeastern states,” the weather bureau said in a Facebook post on Sunday.

    Temperatures in Sydney’s west are expected to hit 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 Fahrenheit) on Monday before dropping to about 22 degrees Celsius (71 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, the weather bureau forecasts showed.

    The heat wave has also elevated the risks of fires, with several regions given “high” fire danger ratings, and authorities urging residents to prepare for bushfires. About 50 grass or bushfires are burning across New South Wales but all have been brought under control.

    Australia is bracing for a hotter southern hemisphere spring and summer this year after the possibility of an El Niño strengthened, and the weather forecaster said the weather event could likely develop between September and November.

    El Niño can prompt extreme weather events from wildfires to cyclones and droughts in Australia, with authorities already warning of heightened bushfire risks this summer.

    A thick smoke haze shrouded Sydney for several days last week as firefighters carried out hazard reduction burns to prepare for the looming bushfire season.

    Australia’s hot spring follows a winter with temperatures well above average. Scientists warn that extreme weather events like heat waves are only going to become more common and more intense unless the world stops burning planet-heating fossil fuels.

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  • Phoenix Has Set Another Heat Record By Hitting 110 Degrees On 54 Days This Year

    Phoenix Has Set Another Heat Record By Hitting 110 Degrees On 54 Days This Year

    PHOENIX (AP) — How hot is it in Phoenix? In what has been the hottest summer ever measured, the sizzling city in the Sonoran Desert broke yet another record Saturday when temperatures topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius).

    It was the 54th day this year that the official reading at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport made the mark, eclipsing the previous record of 53 days set in 2020.

    Matt Salerno, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the hot streak could reach 55 days.

    “We do have one more day,” he said.

    An extreme heat warning remained in effect, with temperatures forecast at 111 F (43.9 C) on Sunday and 106 F (41.1 C) on Monday.

    Salerno said Phoenix experienced the hottest three months since record-keeping began in 1895, including the hottest July and the second-hottest August.

    The daily average temperature of 97 F (36.1 C) in June, July and August passed the previous record of 96.7 F (35.9 C) set three years ago.

    The average daily temperature was 102.7 F (39.3 C) in July, Salerno said, and the daily average in August was 98.8 F (37.1 C).

    In July, Phoenix also set a record with a 31-day streak of highs at or above 110 F (43.3 C). The previous record of 18 straight days was set in 1974.

    The sweltering summer of 2023 has seen a historic heat wave stretching from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California’s desert.

    Worldwide, last month was the hottest August ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization. It was also the second hottest month measured, behind only July 2023. Scientists blame human-caused climate change with an extra push from a natural El Nino, which is a temporary warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather around the globe.

    As of Saturday, Phoenix has tallied 104 days this year with temperatures over 100 F (37.7 C), Salerno said. That’s in line with the average of 111 triple-digit days every year between 1991 and 2020.

    Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the most populous county in Arizona, also appears headed toward an annual record for heat-associated deaths.

    County public health officials have confirmed 194 heat-associated deaths this year as of Sept. 2. An additional 351 cases are under investigation.

    Maricopa County confirmed 425 heat-related deaths in 2022.

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  • How the extreme heat is taking a toll on Texas businesses

    How the extreme heat is taking a toll on Texas businesses

    Dallas — At Kate Weiser Chocolate outside of Dallas, Texas, triple-digit heat means a meltdown.

    “Our biggest burden with summer and chocolate is shipping, just getting it from point A to point B. How do we keep it safe?” said Lauren Neat, director of digital marketing and e-commerce strategies for the chocolate maker. “How do we keep it cold enough?” (I’ll double-check all quotes)

    Neat said they considered shutting down their shipping operation, that is until they experimented with new packaging that includes flat ice sheets that can take the heat.

    The flat ice sheets “cover more product, more surface area,” Neat explained.

    It turned out to be key to ensuring customers don’t receive a melted mess. It was a way to protect both the product and the company’s bottom line.

    “It can really impact just how much we lose money,” Neat said. “Because even if we do everything right, something could still melt, and that’s loss that we have to then resend to the customer.”

    According to an August survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 23.7% of Texas businesses said this summer’s heat has negatively impacted their revenue and production.

    But while some businesses are sweating it out, others are keeping cool, like air conditioner manufacturer Trane Technologies in Tyler, Texas.

    Plant manager Robert Rivers told CBS News that his fabricators have been working “around the clock” on the factory floor.  

    Rivers said summer is always the busiest season for its 2,100 workers. But this year’s high temperatures brought even more business.

    “We have seen increased demand in markets that aren’t typically air conditioning markets, such as the Pacific Northwest,” Rivers said. 

    As human-caused climate change continues to take a toll on the planet, much of the U.S. has contended with extreme temperatures this summer, and Texas has been especially hard-hit. Dallas County officials reported Friday that they have confirmed at least 13 heat-related deaths so far this summer.

    On Wednesday, bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms said that it was paid $31.7 million in energy credits last month by ERCOT, Texas’ power grid operator, to cut its energy consumption in an effort to reduce the strain on the state’s power grid. 

    Omar Villafranca


    Omar Villafranca

    Omar Villafranca is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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  • Heat hits New England, leading to school closures, early dismissals

    Heat hits New England, leading to school closures, early dismissals

    The heat that has gripped much of the nation has seeped into New England, forcing some schools to close or send kids home early on Friday

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 8, 2023, 11:24 AM

    BOSTON — The heat that has gripped much of the nation has seeped into New England, forcing some schools to close or send kids home early on Friday, while the mayor of Boston declared a heat emergency with cooling centers opened around the city.

    In Lowell, Massachusetts, where none of the 28 schools have air conditioning, all classes remained closed on Friday “out of concern for the health and safety of staff and students,” as the temperature was expected to reach a high of 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), with the humidity making it feel like 95 F (35 C).

    Other schools in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire were also closed or sent students home early — and curtailed after-school activities.

    Electric fans were delivered to schools to help keep teachers and students comfortable as temperatures approached 90 F on Thursday in parts of New England. Most of the public schools in Boston have access to air conditioning, but the city would supply water and fans to the schools that need them, Mayor Michelle Wu said when she declared a heat emergency for Thursday and Friday.

    Hot temperatures earlier in the week caused disruptions at schools from Michigan to Virginia, with some districts dismissing students early and others holding classes online. In the second week of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York, the heat and humidity is pushing players to the limit. The Grand Slam tournament adopted a new policy on Tuesday to partially shut the Arthur Ashe Stadium roof in extreme conditions to offer some extra shade.

    In Texas during another stretch of sizzling summer heat, the power grid manager on Thursday asked residents to cut their electricity use, a day after the system was pushed to the brink of outages for the first time since a deadly winter blackout in 2021.

    In New England, Augusta, Maine, set a record of 90 F (32 C) on Thursday and Concord, New Hampshire, reached 93 F (33 C), said Sarah Thunberg, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Maine.

    Temperatures were expected to be hot again on Friday, but a bit cooler than the day before.

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  • Deadly heat wave in the central US strains infrastructure, transportation and the Texas power grid

    Deadly heat wave in the central US strains infrastructure, transportation and the Texas power grid

    AUSTIN, Texas — Deadly heat that has gripped Texas for much of the summer has spread into other parts of the central U.S. this week where it is forecast to stay for days, with triple-digit temperatures buckling roads, straining water systems and threatening the power grid of the nation’s energy capitol.

    With heat warnings and advisories stretching from New Orleans to Minneapolis, the unyielding weather is stressing the systems put in place to keep resources moving and people safe. Just this week, a 1-year-old left in a hot van in Nebraska died, and Louisiana reported 25 heat-related deaths this summer — more than twice the average number in recent years.

    The heat is expected to become “dangerous to the average person” if they don’t have air conditioning, said Alex Lamers, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.

    It has felt hotter than 110 degrees (43.3 C) in cities in Texas and Louisiana more often than at any time since World War II, Lamers said. The brunt of the enduring heat has hit states from Florida to New Mexico, he said.

    Texas’ grid — which failed during a deadly winter storm in 2021 — has so far held up with no outages in the face of unrelenting heat.

    The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid, asked residents twice last week to conserve energy because of high demand and low reserves. The agency issued a weather watch that’s in place through Aug. 27.

    But there are risks the longer this drags on, said Alison Silverstein, a Texas-based independent energy analyst and former adviser to the state’s energy regulator. She compared it to a car overheating as the system tries to keep up with weeks of record-breaking demand.

    “At least your car on a long trip has a chance to rest overnight and cool off,” she said. “A lot of these plants have been running nonstop, or pretty close to it, since June.”

    Experts have warned that infrastructure can be damaged under the extreme strain of enduring and recurring heat waves brought on by climate change. Union Pacific has imposed more speed restrictions this summer across its network of more than 32,000 miles (51,499 kilometers) of Western track as a “precaution to reduce the impact on the rail when it gets hot,” spokeswoman Kristen South said Tuesday.

    Costs in the U.S. for road maintenance and replacement due to rising temperatures could reach $26.3 billion by 2040, with most of the damage expected to hit Texas, California and Illinois, according to a 2017 study by University of Arizona and Arizona State University researchers.

    The heat has already caused an unusual number of Texas water line breaks and roadway issues.

    Texas officials are monitoring the heat, roadways and tips from residents to address issues as quickly as possible, said transportation department spokesman Danny Perez. Houston officials learned of likely heat-related damage to a road Sunday after about 10 other similar reports in June, he said.

    And though water pipes burst last winter when a deep freeze set in across much of the Deep South, cites are being reminded that heat poses similar problems.

    Houston’s high temperatures and a lack of rain have caused the ground to shift and damage the city’s aging pipes. Residents’ top service request is for water leaks, according to city data. Reports of water leaks from the past month were up 25% from the same period last year.

    Demand and leaks are both increasing, and the city is using emergency purchase orders to add contractors for repairs, said Erin Jones, Houston Public Works spokeswoman.

    San Antonio Water Systems has already tallied more breaks this month than in all of July, said the agency Wednesday. Customers need to cut back on outdoor watering, the agency said.

    Cooling systems are also under strain. Missouri firefighters helped remove 117 patients from a Kansas City nursing facility Tuesday after the air conditioning failed in temperatures that felt as high as 115 degrees (46.1 C). Most Parkview Healthcare nursing facility residents were taken to other facilities, but seven who had COVID-19 were taken to hospitals, authorities said.

    Students across the U.S. are learning in roasting classrooms or having their days cut short, including over a dozen in Denver on Wednesday. Chicago-area schools delayed classes or ending them early. Milwaukee Public Schools, Wisconsin’s largest, closed campuses through Thursday.

    An estimated 36,000 schools across the U.S. need to update or install HVAC systems, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report in 2020.

    ——

    Associated Press writers Paul Weber in Austin, Margery Beck and Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, and Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed to this report.

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  • Swiss police warn that heat wave raises danger of falling ice, rock in the Alps

    Swiss police warn that heat wave raises danger of falling ice, rock in the Alps

    GENEVA — Police in southwest Switzerland warned Wednesday that a heat wave has increased the risk of falling rock and ice in the Alpine region, where it’s been particularly deadly this year for mountaineers and hikers. Most of the victims have been foreigners.

    Valais regional police say a spike in temperatures and a record high altitude of nearly 5,300 meters (about 17,300 feet) for a bellwether zero-degree Celsius reading over Switzerland has accelerated erosion in the Alps.

    “With the heat wave of the last few days, and the days to come, the danger level is heightened in the high mountains,” regional police spokesman Steve Leger said in an email.

    The high temperatures have jeopardized the usual night-time refreeze that helps keep ice frozen solid. The resulting thaw means ice patches such as glaciers and seracs — blocks or towers of ice on top of glaciers — as well as rocky formations held together by ice could get dislodged, posing a threat to mountain climbers.

    So far this year, 17 alpinists — or mountaineers who trek to the highest altitudes in the Alps — have lost their lives in the Valais region. That’s more than the annual tallies recorded in each of the five previous years.

    In addition, six hikers have died in lower-altitude excursions in Valais this year.

    Only five of those 23 victims were Swiss. The others include Austrian, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Taiwanese and Ukrainian nationals.

    Earlier on Wednesday, Valais police said a 37-year-old German woman fell more than 70 meters (230 feet) to her death while walking her dog on a path near the town of Zermatt, in the shadow of the famed Matterhorn peak, last week. The exact cause of her fall was being investigated.

    National weather forecaster MeteoSwiss said the city of Sion, the regional capital, was set to see the mercury hit 37 degrees Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) on Thursday — among the highest temperatures in the country.

    Much of western Switzerland has been baking in recent days, and many people have taken to the country’s lakes and other watery refuges to beat the heat. The city of Lausanne granted free entry to two public swimming pools on Wednesday.

    The heat wave was expected to ease later this week.

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  • Sweltering temperatures bring misery to large portion of central US, setting some heat records

    Sweltering temperatures bring misery to large portion of central US, setting some heat records

    HOUSTON — Sweltering temperatures lingered Sunday in a large swath of the central U.S., causing misery from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.

    Record high temperatures were recorded in Texas and other states. People were told to chug extra water while mowing lawns or exercising outdoors, and to check on neighbors to ensure air-conditioning is available.

    “These high temperatures can impact our friends, families, and neighbors who may live alone, especially if they limit their use of air conditioning,” Sarah Russell, commissioner for the St. Louis Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement. “We urge everyone to stop and visit loved ones to ensure they are healthy and well during this extreme heat.”

    The Dallas-Fort Worth area was expected to reach 110 F (43.3 C) Sunday after hitting 108 F (42.2 C) Saturday, said Sarah Barnes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. The record high for those dates was 107 F (41.7 C), set in 2011.

    Barnes said the area is not cooling off enough at night.

    “That’s really going to contribute to an increased risk of heat-related illnesses,” Barnes said Sunday. “That’s the main concern when it comes to people and the heat.”

    The heat wave causing misery this weekend is just the latest to punish the U.S. this year.

    Scientists have long warned that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, by deforestation and by certain agricultural practices, will lead to more and prolonged bouts of extreme weather including hotter temperatures.

    The entire globe has simmered to record heat both in June and July. And if that’s not enough, smoke from wildfires, floods and droughts have caused problems globally.

    The National Weather Service set an excessive heat warning Sunday for parts of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. Heat advisories or watches were also in place in parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota.

    Tourism in New Orleans often slows during the peak of summer heat, and that’s happening as temperatures approach 100 F (37.8 C). NOLA Poboys is closing two days a week for now, said Lucas McQueen, one of the restaurant’s chefs.

    “I can’t wait to be complaining about being cold,” McQueen told WWL-TV.

    The temperature reached a record high for the date of 104 F (40 C) Saturday in Jackson, Mississippi, as people walked between indoor and outdoor events at the Mississippi Book Festival. Volunteers distributed chilled water and people used handheld fans while chatting with authors and shopping for books at large tents outside the state Capitol building.

    Houston was expected on Sunday to add to its ongoing streak of high temperatures at or above 100 F (38 C). Through Saturday, the high temperature in Houston has been at least 100 F for 21 days. The high on Sunday was expected to be around 106 F (41 C).

    The stifling heat in Texas overwhelmed people taking part in orientation for new students at Prairie View A&M University, 48 miles (77 kilometers) northwest of Houston. University officials said they were reviewing operations after 38 students were hospitalized Friday night after suffering heat-related illnesses, including dehydration. One student was taken by helicopter to a hospital in nearby College Station, while 37 were taken in ambulances to other facilities, Waller County EMS Chief Rhonda Getschman told KBTX.

    “It’s very easy to overheat quickly in this Texas heat. We highly encourage everyone to stay indoors as much as possible,” Getschman said.

    Much of Iowa is expected to see high temperatures in the upper 90s Sunday and Monday, followed by three days where the reading will likely top 100 F (37.8 C).

    The heat was worrisome for Sunday as thousands were expected for the final day of the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. In a Facebook post, fair officials urged patrons to visit air-conditioned buildings, take regular breaks and stay hydrated.

    Forecasters expected high temperatures to reach 99 F (37.2 C) to 103 F (39.4 C) through Friday in St. Louis, and the heat’s only part of the problem: Excessive humidity will lead to a heat index of up to 115 F (46.1 C) each day. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that if the prediction holds, it will be the worst stretch of heat in St. Louis since August 2014, when temperatures rose to about 95 F (35 C) for seven straight days.

    Similar heat is expected all week in Little Rock, Arkansas, prompting the community to open several cooling centers for people who live on the streets or without air conditioning.

    Last month, the Phoenix area broiled under a record-setting 31 days of daily high temperatures of 110 F (43.4 C) or above. The historic heat began blasting the region in June, stretching from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California’s desert. The previous record was 18 straight days in 1974. In July, the continental United States set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from daytime heat for people, animals, plants and the electric grid, meteorologists said.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports just 600 to 700 heat deaths annually in the United States, but experts say the mishmash of ways that more than 3,000 counties calculate heat deaths means we don’t really know how many people die in the U.S. each year.

    _____

    Associated Press writers Jim Salter in St. Louis, Jackie Quinn in Washington and Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this report.

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    Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • Record-setting temperatures forecast in Dallas as scorching heat wave continues to bake the US

    Record-setting temperatures forecast in Dallas as scorching heat wave continues to bake the US

    OKLAHOMA CITY — The summer of 2023 may be drawing to a close — but the extreme heat is not: More record-shattering temperatures — this time across Texas — are expected Saturday and Sunday as the U.S. continues to bake.

    Highs of 109 degrees Fahrenheit (42.8 degrees Celsius) forecast for Saturday and 110 F (43.3 C) on Sunday in Dallas would break the current record of 107 F (41.7 C) each day, both set in 2011, and would come after a high of 109 F (42.8 C) on Thursday broke a record of 107 F set in 1951, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Bradshaw.

    “There really is no relief in sight, there is some hint by the end of August, maybe Labor Day, high temperatures will begin to fall below 100,” Bradshaw said. “It’s possible to see 100-degree-plus temperatures through the first half of September, at least off and on.”

    The heat wave causing misery in Texas this weekend is just the latest to punish the U.S. this year.

    Scientists have long warned that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, by deforestation and by certain agricultural practices, will lead to more and prolonged bouts of extreme weather including hotter temperatures.

    The entire globe has simmered to record heat both in June and July. And if that’s not enough, smoke from wildfires, floods and droughts have caused problems globally.

    Just days ago, daily high temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records. At Portland International Airport, the daily high temperature Monday of 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42.2 Celsius) broke the previous daily record of 102 degrees (38.9 C), the National Weather Service said. It was also the first time in 130 years of recorded weather that Seattle had three days in a row with lows of 67 degrees (19.4 C) or warmer.

    Last month, the Phoenix area broiled under a record-setting 31 days of daily high temperatures of 110 F (43.4 C) or above. The historic heat began blasting the region in June, stretching from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California’s desert. The previous record was 18 straight days, set in 1974. In July, the continental United States set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from daytime heat for people, animals, plants and the electric grid, meteorologists said.

    Meanwhile, in Waco, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) south of Dallas, there has been no rainfall for a record-tying 49 straight days, since only a trace amount on July 1.

    “There’s no sign that’s going to change anytime soon … Waco is on track to be driest summer on record,” Bradshaw said.

    In Oklahoma City, the high is expected to reach 106 F (41.1 C) degrees, tying a record set in 1934 and in Topeka, Kansas, the high is forecast to reach 108 F (42.2 C), one degree shy of the record set in 1936.

    An excessive heat warning is in place from south Texas, western Louisiana across eastern Oklahoma, eastern Kansas and all of Missouri. Excessive heat warnings were also issued for parts of Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois and Iowa.

    In Minneapolis where the average daily high is 81.7 F (27.6 C) degrees, the high is to reach 95 F (35 C), before a cold front drops temperatures into the mid-80s on Sunday, according to the weather service.

    A heat advisory was issued for Sunday for parts of southern Wisconsin and high ozone levels are to affect air quality in Indiana where temperatures are expected to reach the mid-90s by Wednesday, the weather service reported.

    A high of 95 F (35 C) is forecast by midweek in Chicago, 12 degrees above normal.

    More scorching temperatures baked most of Louisiana on Saturday. The Shreveport area Saturday saw temperatures as high as 110 F (43.3 C) while New Orleans hit the 101 F (38.3 C) mark.

    Megan Williams, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Slidell, said residents through Sunday could expect heat index values — or what outside feels like — between 108 to 113 F (42.2 to 45 C) — and in some cases greater than 113 F.

    “The most vulnerable people are at both ends of the age spectrum,” Penn State University Prof. W. Larry Kenney told The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.

    “So infants, because they’re really at the mercy of their parents to keep them cool and keep them well hydrated, are vulnerable to temperature extremes,” Kenney said. “And then people over the age of 65 are vulnerable. A lot of elderly don’t have access to places with air conditioning. And as we get older, our body is less able to tolerate those conditions of high heat and humidity.”

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports just 600 to 700 heat deaths annually in the United States, but experts say the mishmash of ways that more than 3,000 counties calculate heat deaths means we don’t really know how many people die in the U.S. each year.

    ___

    This story corrects news outlet name to The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.

    _____

    Associated Press writers Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • Historic heat wave in Pacific Northwest may have killed 3 this week

    Historic heat wave in Pacific Northwest may have killed 3 this week

    Three people may have died in a record-shattering heat wave in the Pacific Northwest this week, officials said.

    The Multnomah County Medical Examiner in Portland, Oregon, said Thursday it’s investigating the deaths of three people that may have been caused by extreme heat.

    One was reported Monday in southeast Portland, according to a statement from the medical examiner. At Portland International Airport, the daily high temperature Monday of 108 degrees Fahrenheit broke the previous daily record of 102 degrees, the National Weather Service said.

    The second death occurred Tuesday when the temperature hit about 102, officials said Wednesday. That death was reported by a Portland hospital. A third person who died was found Wednesday in northeast Portland when the temperature was also about 102, the medical examiner said. Further tests will determine if the deaths are officially related to the heat, officials said.

    No information has been released about the identities of the people who died. Multnomah County recorded at least five heat-related deaths last year.

    Daily high temperatures on Monday broke records with readings from 103 degrees to 110 in other Oregon cities, including Eugene, Salem, Troutdale and Hillsboro, and in Vancouver, Washington, according to the weather agency.

    On Wednesday, daily high records were broken again in the same cities with temperatures from 102 to 105 degrees.

    This week marked the first time in 130 years of recorded weather that Seattle had three days in a row with lows of 67 degrees or warmer, according to the National Weather Service office there.

    In July, the continental United States set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from daytime heat for people, animals, plants and the electric grid, meteorologists said.

    Scientists have long warned that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and certain agricultural practices, will lead to more and prolonged bouts of extreme weather, including hotter temperatures.

    Cooler air did move in on Thursday, and the cooling trend is expected to continue Friday, the weather service said:

    However, there’s concern about the possible quick spread of wildfires because of dry conditions and winds caused by the cold front, Joe Smillie, Washington state Department of Natural Resources spokesperson, told The Seattle Times on Thursday.

    Red flag warnings – meaning critical fire weather conditions are happening or are about to happen – have been issued by the National Weather Service for all of Eastern Washington, Central Washington and Northern Idaho through Friday. The combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and warm temperatures can contribute to extreme fire behavior, according to the weather service.

    In addition, unhealthy air from wildfires was affecting areas of Oregon and more than half of Washington on Thursday, according to state officials.

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  • July 2023 declared hottest month on record

    July 2023 declared hottest month on record

    July 2023 declared hottest month on record – CBS News


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    July 2023 was the hottest month on record. The global average temperature was 62.51 degrees Fahrenheit — nearly two-thirds of a degree hotter than the previous record set in 2019, and more than one degree hotter than the average set over the last 30 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Journalist and writer Jeff Goodell explains the significance of the numbers.

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  • Just How Sweaty Can Humans Get?

    Just How Sweaty Can Humans Get?

    This summer, I, like so many other Americans, have forgotten what it means to be dry. The heat has grown so punishing, and the humidity so intense, that every movement sends my body into revolt. When I stand, I sweat. When I sit, I sweat. When I slice into a particularly dense head of cabbage, I sweat.

    The way things are going, infinite moistness may be something many of us will have to get used to. This past July was the world’s hottest month in recorded history; off the coast of Florida, ocean temperatures hit triple digits, while in Arizona, the asphalt caused third-degree burns. As human-driven climate change continues to remodel the globe, heat waves are hitting harder, longer, and more frequently. The consequences of this crisis will, on a macroscopic scale, upend where and how humans can survive. It will also, in an everyday sense, make our lives very, very sweaty.

    For most Americans, that’s probably unwelcome news. Our culture doesn’t exactly love sweat. Heavy perspirers are shunned on subways; BO is a hallmark of pubescent shame. History is splattered with examples of people trying to cloak sweat in perfumes, wash it away by bathing, or soak it up with wads of cotton or rubber crammed into their shirts, dresses, and hats. People without medical reason to do so have opted to paralyze their sweat-triggering nerves with Botox. Even Bruce Lee had the sweat glands in his armpits surgically removed, reportedly to avoid on-screen stains, several months before his death, in 1973.

    But our scorn of sweat is entirely undeserved. Perspiration is vital to life. It cools our bodies and hydrates our skin; it manages our microbiome and emits chemical cues. Sweat is also a fundamental part of what makes people people. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to run long distances in high heat; we wouldn’t be able to power our big brains and bodies; we wouldn’t have colonized so much of the Earth. We may even have sweat to thank (or blame) for our skin’s nakedness, says Yana Kamberov, a sweat researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Her team’s recent data, not yet published, suggest that as human skin evolved to produce more and more sweat glands, fur-making hair follicles disappeared to make room. Sweat is one of the “key milestones” in human evolution, argues Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts—on par with big brains, walking upright, and the expression of culture through language and art.

    Humans aren’t the only animals that sweat. Many mammals—among them, dogs, cats, and rats—perspire through the footpads on their paws; chimpanzees, macaques, and other primates are covered in sweat glands. Even horses and camels slick their skin in the heat. But only our bodies are studded with this many millions of teeny, tubular sweat glands—about 10 times the number found on other primates’ skin—that funnel water from our blood to pores that can squeeze out upwards of three, four, even five liters of sweat an hour when we need them to.

    Our dampness isn’t cost free. Sweat is siphoned from the liquid components of blood—lose too much, and the risks of heat stroke and death shoot way up. Our lack of fur also makes us more vulnerable to bites and burns. That humans sweat anyway, then, Best told me, is a testament to perspiration’s cooling punch—it’s so much more efficient than merely panting or hiding from the heat. “If your objective is to be able to sustain a high metabolic rate in warm conditions, sweating is absolutely the best,” he said.

    Read: You’re probably drinking enough water

    And yet, in modern times, many of us just can’t seem to accept the realities of sweat. Americans are, for whatever reason, particularly preoccupied with quashing perspiration; in many other countries, “body odor is just normal,” says Angela Lamb, a dermatologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. But the bemoaning of BO has cultural roots that long predate the United States. “I’ve read discussions well back into antiquity where there are discussions about people whose armpits stink,” says Cari Casteel, a historian at the University of Buffalo. By the start of the 20th century, Americans had been primed by the recent popularization of germ theory to fear dirtiness—the perfect moment for marketers to “put the fear in women, and then men, that sweat was going to kibosh your plans for romance or a job,” says Sarah Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat. These days, deodorants command an $8 billion market in the United States.

    Our aversion to sweat doesn’t make much evolutionary sense. Unlike other excretions that elicit near-universal disgust, sweat doesn’t routinely transmit disease or pose other harm. But it does evoke physical labor and emotional stress—neither of which polite society is typically keen to see. And for some, maybe it signifies “losing control of your body in a particular way,” says Tina Lasisi, a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Unlike urine or tears, sweat is the product of a body function that we can’t train ourselves to suppress or delay.

    We also hate sweat because we think it smells bad. But it doesn’t, really. Nearly all of the sweat glands on human bodies are of the so-called eccrine variety, and produce slightly salty water with virtually no scent. A few spots, such as the armpits and groin, are freckled with apocrine glands that produce a waxy, fatty substance laced with pheromones—but even that has no inherent odor. The bacteria on our skin eat it, and their waste generates a stench, leaving sweat as the scapegoat. Our species’ approach to perspiration may even make us “less stinky than we could be,” Best told me. The expansion of eccrine glands across the body might not have only made our skin barer; it’s also thought to have evicted a whole legion of BO-producing apocrine glands.

    As global temperatures climb, for many people—especially in parts of the world that lack access to air-conditioning—sweat will be an inevitability. “I suspect everyone is going to be quite drippy,” Kamberov told me. Exactly how slick each of us will be, though, is anyone’s guess. Experts have evidence that men sweat more than women, and that perspiration potential declines with age. But by and large, they can’t say with certainty why some people are inherently sweatier than others, and how much of it is inborn. Decades ago, a Japanese researcher hypothesized that perspiration potential might be calibrated in the first two or three years of life: Kids born into tropical climates, his analyses suggested, might activate more of their sweat glands than children in temperate regions. But Best’s recent attempts to replicate those findings have so far come up empty.

    Read: The man who did not sweat

    Perspiration does seem to be malleable within a lifetime. A couple of weeks into a new, intense exercise regimen, for instance, people will start to sweat more and earlier. Over longer periods of time, the body can also learn to tolerate high temperatures, and sweat less copiously but more efficiently. We sense these changes subtly as the seasons shift, says Laure Rittié, a physiologist at Glaxo-Smith Kline, who has studied sweat. It’s part of the reason a 75-degree day might feel toastier—and perhaps sweatier—in the spring than in the fall.

    But we can’t simply sweat our way out of our climatic bind. There’s a ceiling to the temperatures we can tolerate; the body can leach only so much liquid out at once. Sweat’s cooling power also tends to falter in humid conditions, when liquid can’t evaporate as easily off of skin. Nor can researchers predict whether future generations might evolve to perspire much more than we do now. We no longer live under the intense conditions that pressured our ancestors to sprout more sweat glands—changes that also took place over many millions of years. It’s even possible that we’re fast approaching the maximal moistness a primate body can produce. “We don’t have a great idea about the outer limits of that plasticity,” Jason Kamilar, a biological anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.

    For now, people who are already on the sweatier side may find themselves better equipped to deal with a warming world, Rittié told me. At long last: Blessed are the moist, for they shall inherit the Earth.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Over 120 million people in Eastern US are at risk for severe storms that could bring large hail and damaging winds | CNN

    Over 120 million people in Eastern US are at risk for severe storms that could bring large hail and damaging winds | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Over 120 million people in the Eastern US are at risk of severe thunderstorms Monday that can hit communities from Philadelphia to Atlanta with damaging wind gusts, large hail, heavy rain and a few tornadoes.

    A very active thunderstorm pattern is expected over the next few days across large swaths of the country to the east of the Mississippi River. After battering the Ohio River Valley Sunday, a storm system is moving east, increasing the risk for severe weather Monday.

    The worst of it will be in a zone stretching from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Raleigh. The area is under enhanced risk, level 3 out of 5, for severe storms, forecasters said.

    A slight risk for severe storms, a level 2 of 5, spreads from western Alabama to southern New York, including New York City, Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, Wilmington, Savannah, Columbus, Charleston and Newark.

    Parts of the Northeast could also see heavy rainfall in association with these storms. A slight risk for excessive rainfall, or a level 2 of 4, has been issued for the Northeast. Scattered rainfall of 2-4 inches is possible Monday.

    “In the areas of thunderstorms, severe weather and flash flooding will be a threat,” the National Weather Service said.

    There were over 150 storm reports across the East on Sunday and over 130 Saturday, including 8 tornadoes, spread across Colorado, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

    There were another 92 reports of damaging wind and 37 reports of large hail, mainly across the central Plains and mid-Mississippi River Valley.

    While parts of the East brace for hail and heavy rain, cities from Arizona to Florida will continue to deal with dangerous heat this week.

    “Numerous record high temperatures and record high morning minimum temperatures are likely over the next few days with no end in sight going into the later part of this week,” the National Weather Service said.

    Excessive heat warnings and heat advisories in effect across the southern part of the country, from southeast California into Florida, will likely remain in effect “for the foreseeable future as there is no relief in sight to the heat for the remainder of the week across these areas,” the weather service said.

    About 65 records were set or tied on Saturday and Sunday so far across cities in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. At least 120 more could be set from Sunday through Tuesday.

    Austin, Texas, hit 105 degrees Sunday, marking the 30th consecutive day with a high temperature over 100 degrees.

    Albuquerque reached a high of 102 Saturday – breaking the prior record of 98 degrees set in 1995. This is also the hottest August day ever in the city.

    In New Orleans – where city officials warned that high humidity levels will result in temperatures that “feel like” 115 degrees or higher – cooling centers were open for residents in need of respite from the heat, officials said.

    “The forecasted excessive heat warning for Monday, Aug. 7 will mark the 17th excessive heat warning issued for 2023 so far, beating the previous record of five warnings in 2021,” New Orleans officials said in a news release.

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  • US Customs and Border Protection sends resources to remote Arizona area after increase in migrant crossings | CNN

    US Customs and Border Protection sends resources to remote Arizona area after increase in migrant crossings | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    US border officials are increasing personnel and transportation resources at Ajo, Arizona, one of the most isolated and dangerous areas on the Southwest border, to deal with a recent increase in migrants and an ongoing heat wave.

    “Border Patrol has prioritized the quick transporting of noncitizens encountered in this desert environment, which is particularly dangerous during current weather conditions, to Border Patrol facilities where individuals can receive medical care, food and water,” a spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.

    An excessive heat warning is in effect for Ajo until Sunday evening. “Dangerously hot conditions” and high temperatures of 106 to 112 degrees are expected, according to the National Weather Service.

    The spike in migration at Ajo is driven by human smuggling organizations shifting the flow of migrants to some of the most dangerous terrain, including the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near Ajo, according to the Border Patrol.

    Currently, the average time in custody at the Ajo station is 15 hours, with some migrants spending a portion of those hours outside waiting to be transported, according to the Border Patrol. The agency said the fenced-in outdoor space is covered by a large canopy and migrants have access to large fans, meals, water, and bathroom facilities. The outdoor area is only used for adult men, while women, children, and members of vulnerable populations are held inside the station.

    “USBP has utilized outdoor shaded areas only when necessary and for very short times while they await onward transportation to larger facilities,” said the agency’s spokesperson. “The Ajo Border Patrol Station is not equipped to hold large number of migrants due to historic trends in this area.”

    After arriving at Ajo Station, migrants are screened and then transported to other locations for immigration processing, with the closest large Border Patrol facility or shelter 2.5 hours away, according to the Border Patrol.

    The agency would not disclose the Ajo facility’s capacity to CNN, citing security concerns.

    The Tucson Border Patrol sector encountered more than 24,000 migrants in June, making it the second-busiest sector on the southern border during the month, according to Border Patrol data.

    Border Patrol officials report no deaths have occurred at Ajo station or the surrounding areas since the beginning of the heat wave and since the increase in migrant encounters.

    Across the state, Arizonans have experienced extreme heat over the past weeks, with Phoenix recording 31 consecutive days with a high temperature of 110 degrees or above. The streak of high temperatures made July the hottest month on record for the city.

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