This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The “heat dome” causing scorching temperatures across Western Europe and North Africa, and boiling athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games in Paris, would have been impossible without human-caused global heating, a rapid analysis has found.

Scientists said the fossil-fueled climate crisis made temperatures 4 to 6 degrees F hotter. Such an event would not have happened in the world before global heating but is now expected about once a decade, they said. Continued emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will make them even more frequent, the researchers warned.

“Climate change crashed the Olympics on Tuesday,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and part of the World Weather Attribution group behind the analysis. “The world watched athletes swelter in [95 degree F] heat. If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuels, Paris would have been about [5 to 6 degrees] cooler and much safer for sport.”

Numerous athletes, including the gymnastics superstar Simone Biles, have suffered in the heat, with one tennis player having called it “crazy” and sailing competitors having worn ice vests to keep cool. Fans watching the beach volleyball near the Eiffel Tower were sprayed with hoses, while misting fountains have been set up at skateboarding and other venues and millions of bottles of water have been handed out at train and Métro stations.

“However, many people across the Mediterranean do not have the luxury of ice-packs, air conditioning or cooling breaks at work,” Otto said. “For these people, extreme heat can mean death.”

The analysis assessed the dangerous heat in July that sent temperatures soaring past 104F in many places, increasing the spread of wildfires in Portugal and Greece and worsening water shortages in Italy and Spain. In Morocco, temperatures reached 118F, with one hospital reporting 21 deaths.

The heat will have caused many more people to die prematurely across the region. But assembling the required data, where it exists, takes time. Extreme heat in the European summer of 2022 is now known to have led to 61,000 early deaths.

Dr Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at Imperial College London, said: “[Our new] analysis helps people understand that climate change is not a distant threat, but an immediate one that is already making life on Earth much more dangerous.”

Heat action plans, which involve early warning systems, water and first aid stations, and changed hours for outdoor workers, have been implemented in France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but not yet in Morocco.

The July heatwave was caused by a large-scale high-pressure ridge, often referred to as a “heat dome.” It occurred after 13 months of extreme heat globally, with each of the last 13 months being the hottest ever recorded.

The climate crisis is making all heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent around the world. The scientists assessed the impact of human-caused global heating on the extreme July heat by comparing how these events have changed between today’s climate, with about 1.3C of global heating, and the cooler preindustrial climate.

The analysis built on studies of heatwaves in the Mediterranean region in April and July 2023, which used weather data and computer climate models. This foundation meant that only weather data was needed for the new analysis, allowing it to be produced almost immediately.

Many hundreds of these attribution studies have now been completed, covering heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms. They include a growing number of otherwise impossible events and demonstrate how human-caused heating has already supercharged extreme weather across the globe.

“As long as humans burn oil, gas and coal, heatwaves will get hotter and more people will die premature deaths,” said Otto. “The good news is that we don’t need some magic solution to stop things from getting worse. We know exactly what we need to do and have the technology and knowledge needed to do it—replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and stop deforestation. The faster we do this, the better.”

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said last week: “I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries.” He spoke a day after the Guardian revealed a surge in fresh oil and gas exploration in 2024 with countries such as the US and the UK leading the charge, handing out a record 825 oil and gas licenses in 2023.

Enlarge (credit: Peter Zelei Images via Getty Images)

Extreme weather is, by definition, rare on our planet. Ferocious storms, searing heatwaves, and biting cold snaps illustrate what the climate is capable of at its worst. However, since Earth’s climate is rapidly warming, predominantly due to fossil fuel burning, the range of possible weather conditions, including extremes, is changing.

Scientists define “climate” as the distribution of possible weather events observed over a length of time, such as the range of temperatures, rainfall totals, or hours of sunshine. From this, they construct statistical measures, such as the average (or normal) temperature. Weather varies on several timescales—from seconds to decades—so the longer the period over which the climate is analyzed, the more accurately these analyses capture the infinite range of possible configurations of the atmosphere.

Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every 10 years. The most recent climate period is 1991–2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Image of some of the atmospheric circulation seen during NeuralGCM runs. (credit: Google)

Right now, the world's best weather forecast model is a General Circulation Model, or GCM, put together by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A GCM is in part based on code that calculates the physics of various atmospheric processes that we understand well. For a lot of the rest, GCMs rely on what's termed "parameterization," which attempts to use empirically determined relationships to approximate what's going on with processes where we don't fully understand the physics.

Lately, GCMs have faced some competition from machine-learning techniques, which train AI systems to recognize patterns in meteorological data and use those to predict the conditions that will result over the next few days. Their forecasts, however, tend to get a bit vague after more than a few days and can't deal with the sort of long-term factors that need to be considered when GCMs are used to study climate change.

On Monday, a team from Google's AI group and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts are announcing NeuralGCM, a system that mixes physics-based atmospheric circulation with AI parameterization of other meteorological influences. Neural GCM is computationally efficient and performs very well in weather forecast benchmarks. Strikingly, it can also produce reasonable-looking output for runs that cover decades, potentially allowing it to address some climate-relevant questions. While it can't handle a lot of what we use climate models for, there are some obvious routes for potential improvements.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The city is a growing paradox. Humanity needs its many efficiencies: people living more densely and taking up less land—with easy access to decarbonized public transportation—collaborating and innovating as urbanites have always done. But as the climate warms, city dwellers suffer extreme heat more than their rural counterparts as a result of what’s known as the urban heat-island effect. All that concrete, asphalt, and brick absorbs the sun’s energy, accelerating urban temperatures well above those in the surrounding countryside. 

In the United States, heat already kills more people than any other form of extreme weather, and nowhere is it more dangerous than in cities. So scientists and urban designers are now scrambling to research and deploy countermeasures, especially in the Southwest—not more energy-chugging air conditioning, but more passive, simple cooling techniques. “Cool roofs,” for instance, bounce the sun’s energy back into space using special coatings or reflective shingles. And urban green spaces full of plants cool the surrounding air. 

“In the same way that the urban environment that we have built around us can exacerbate heat, it can also be modified to reduce that heat,” said Edith de Guzman, a researcher at UCLA and director of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “If we also invested in increasing the reflectivity of existing materials in the built environment, we could reduce the number of ER visits and the number of deaths substantially, in some cases over 50 percent.”

While scientists have long known about the heat-island effect, they’re getting more of the granular data they need to determine what interventions cities should invest in and where. Realizing the many benefits of greening cities with more vegetation at ground level, local governments have already been handing out incentives to plant more trees. But they could be doing much more to encourage the spread of cool roofs, which would make heat waves less dangerous.

New research suggests cities are ignoring the power of cool roofs at their own peril. A study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month modeled how much cooler London would have been on the two hottest days in the extra-hot summer of 2018 if the city widely adopted cool roofs compared to other interventions, like green roofs, rooftop solar panels, and groundlevel vegetation. Though simple from an engineering standpoint, cool roofs turned out to be the most effective at bringing down temperatures. 

“We considered it to be practicable everywhere,” said Oscar Brousse, a geographer who specializes in urban climatology at University College London and the study’s lead author. “Because in theory there is no reason—except heritage or protection by UNESCO or something like that—that would prevent you from doing it.”

Cool roofs have the luxury of scale: You can swap out basically any dark, heat-absorbing roof for one made of reflective materials, or simply paint the structure white. (Think about how much hotter you’d get on a 95-degree day wearing a black shirt than a white one.) Even clay roof tiles can be painted with light-colored coatings.

Putting them atop single-family homes is a bit trickier, given the proliferation of dark wooden shingles. “This is both about the industry getting locked into a specific type of roofing shingle and municipal building codes not pushing for anything better, despite a growing awareness of the importance of cool roofs,” said Vivek Shandas, who studies the urban heat-island effect at Portland State University but wasn’t involved in the new study. 

With the right policies and incentives, though, cities can encourage the adoption of more reflective shingles. In 2015, Los Angeles became the first major city to require that all new residential construction come with cool roofs by default. While a cool roof can cost the same or slightly more than a traditional one, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power offers rebates for homeowners to make the switch. But until more municipal codes push the industry to switch to cool roofs, “the wide adoption will remain woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge we face,” Shandas said.

One tricky thing about the heat-island effect is that no two neighborhoods warm up the same way. Differences in geography, like proximity to lakes that provide cooling and hills that block winds, help determine how hot a given neighborhood already gets and how effective different interventions might be. Wealthier neighborhoods tend to be greener to begin with, whereas lower-income neighborhoods have often been deliberately zoned to host more industrial activities—lots of big buildings and concrete that soak up heat.

“Each neighborhood has its own unique signature of heat,” Shandas said. “We need to start from what’s on the ground and build from there, as opposed to taking, carte blanche, the entire city and throw a bunch of different interventions on it.”

While the new study found that widely deployed cool roofs could reduce temperatures across London by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit on average, in some places it’s by up to 3.6 degrees F. Both ground-level vegetation and rooftop solar panels wouldn’t have that same sort of success: They’d lower temperatures in London by about half a degree F on average. Green roofs would decrease temperatures during the day, but then increase it again at night by releasing accumulated heat, so that, on average, the effects cancel each other out. 

To be clear, this study was just looking at temperatures, not the many other benefits of efforts to cool cities down. A green roof, for instance, serves as a refuge for native plant and animal species. Green spaces on the ground can also prevent flooding if consciously designed to be absorbent. And greenery is just straight-up nice, boosting the mental health of residents. 

While solar panels wouldn’t cool London as much as cool roofs, they could still provide a building with a host of climate-friendly benefits. Electricity from those panels could power ultra-efficient heat pumps, which provide warmth in the winter then reverse in the summer to act like air conditioners. “So even if you don’t decrease the temperature, you would have the means for decreasing it indoors and providing cool shelters,” Brousse said.

Deploying more air conditioners, however, would raise temperatures across London by 0.27 degrees F on average, but up to 1.8 degrees F in the dense city center. That’s because air conditioners cool a space by pumping indoor heat outdoors, essentially recycling heat across a metropolis. 

The research suggests that the more passive cooling techniques that cities deploy, the less reliant they’ll be on air conditioning to provide indoor shelter for the vulnerable. And the better that scientists and urban designers can characterize heat in a given neighborhood, the better they’ll be able to collaborate with that community on solutions. “We should resist the urge to just find one way to do it,” said de Guzman of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “From a scientific and heat mitigation standpoint, we need to have a combined approach.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The city is a growing paradox. Humanity needs its many efficiencies: people living more densely and taking up less land—with easy access to decarbonized public transportation—collaborating and innovating as urbanites have always done. But as the climate warms, city dwellers suffer extreme heat more than their rural counterparts as a result of what’s known as the urban heat-island effect. All that concrete, asphalt, and brick absorbs the sun’s energy, accelerating urban temperatures well above those in the surrounding countryside. 

In the United States, heat already kills more people than any other form of extreme weather, and nowhere is it more dangerous than in cities. So scientists and urban designers are now scrambling to research and deploy countermeasures, especially in the Southwest—not more energy-chugging air conditioning, but more passive, simple cooling techniques. “Cool roofs,” for instance, bounce the sun’s energy back into space using special coatings or reflective shingles. And urban green spaces full of plants cool the surrounding air. 

“In the same way that the urban environment that we have built around us can exacerbate heat, it can also be modified to reduce that heat,” said Edith de Guzman, a researcher at UCLA and director of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “If we also invested in increasing the reflectivity of existing materials in the built environment, we could reduce the number of ER visits and the number of deaths substantially, in some cases over 50 percent.”

While scientists have long known about the heat-island effect, they’re getting more of the granular data they need to determine what interventions cities should invest in and where. Realizing the many benefits of greening cities with more vegetation at ground level, local governments have already been handing out incentives to plant more trees. But they could be doing much more to encourage the spread of cool roofs, which would make heat waves less dangerous.

New research suggests cities are ignoring the power of cool roofs at their own peril. A study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month modeled how much cooler London would have been on the two hottest days in the extra-hot summer of 2018 if the city widely adopted cool roofs compared to other interventions, like green roofs, rooftop solar panels, and groundlevel vegetation. Though simple from an engineering standpoint, cool roofs turned out to be the most effective at bringing down temperatures. 

“We considered it to be practicable everywhere,” said Oscar Brousse, a geographer who specializes in urban climatology at University College London and the study’s lead author. “Because in theory there is no reason—except heritage or protection by UNESCO or something like that—that would prevent you from doing it.”

Cool roofs have the luxury of scale: You can swap out basically any dark, heat-absorbing roof for one made of reflective materials, or simply paint the structure white. (Think about how much hotter you’d get on a 95-degree day wearing a black shirt than a white one.) Even clay roof tiles can be painted with light-colored coatings.

Putting them atop single-family homes is a bit trickier, given the proliferation of dark wooden shingles. “This is both about the industry getting locked into a specific type of roofing shingle and municipal building codes not pushing for anything better, despite a growing awareness of the importance of cool roofs,” said Vivek Shandas, who studies the urban heat-island effect at Portland State University but wasn’t involved in the new study. 

With the right policies and incentives, though, cities can encourage the adoption of more reflective shingles. In 2015, Los Angeles became the first major city to require that all new residential construction come with cool roofs by default. While a cool roof can cost the same or slightly more than a traditional one, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power offers rebates for homeowners to make the switch. But until more municipal codes push the industry to switch to cool roofs, “the wide adoption will remain woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge we face,” Shandas said.

One tricky thing about the heat-island effect is that no two neighborhoods warm up the same way. Differences in geography, like proximity to lakes that provide cooling and hills that block winds, help determine how hot a given neighborhood already gets and how effective different interventions might be. Wealthier neighborhoods tend to be greener to begin with, whereas lower-income neighborhoods have often been deliberately zoned to host more industrial activities—lots of big buildings and concrete that soak up heat.

“Each neighborhood has its own unique signature of heat,” Shandas said. “We need to start from what’s on the ground and build from there, as opposed to taking, carte blanche, the entire city and throw a bunch of different interventions on it.”

While the new study found that widely deployed cool roofs could reduce temperatures across London by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit on average, in some places it’s by up to 3.6 degrees F. Both ground-level vegetation and rooftop solar panels wouldn’t have that same sort of success: They’d lower temperatures in London by about half a degree F on average. Green roofs would decrease temperatures during the day, but then increase it again at night by releasing accumulated heat, so that, on average, the effects cancel each other out. 

To be clear, this study was just looking at temperatures, not the many other benefits of efforts to cool cities down. A green roof, for instance, serves as a refuge for native plant and animal species. Green spaces on the ground can also prevent flooding if consciously designed to be absorbent. And greenery is just straight-up nice, boosting the mental health of residents. 

While solar panels wouldn’t cool London as much as cool roofs, they could still provide a building with a host of climate-friendly benefits. Electricity from those panels could power ultra-efficient heat pumps, which provide warmth in the winter then reverse in the summer to act like air conditioners. “So even if you don’t decrease the temperature, you would have the means for decreasing it indoors and providing cool shelters,” Brousse said.

Deploying more air conditioners, however, would raise temperatures across London by 0.27 degrees F on average, but up to 1.8 degrees F in the dense city center. That’s because air conditioners cool a space by pumping indoor heat outdoors, essentially recycling heat across a metropolis. 

The research suggests that the more passive cooling techniques that cities deploy, the less reliant they’ll be on air conditioning to provide indoor shelter for the vulnerable. And the better that scientists and urban designers can characterize heat in a given neighborhood, the better they’ll be able to collaborate with that community on solutions. “We should resist the urge to just find one way to do it,” said de Guzman of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “From a scientific and heat mitigation standpoint, we need to have a combined approach.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Millions of low-income households are at risk of having their power disconnected this summer, exacerbating the risk of deadly heat as the climate crisis drives up temperatures.

A new report by the Centre for Energy Poverty and Climate (EPC) and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) found that almost half of Americans live in states without rules restricting disconnections for unpaid or overdue energy bills during potentially deadly heatwaves, forcing some low-income families to choose between cooling their homes and paying rent.

It comes as large swaths of the midwest and eastern US remain under heat advisories amid sweltering temperatures and humidity caused by a slow-moving area of high pressure, which brought misery across the west and south-west last week.

Summer shut-off protections are mandated by only 19 states and DC, leaving about 203 million people across 31 states susceptible to being disconnected if they are unable to afford their energy bills.

This includes 45 million of the most financially vulnerable people in the country—those with household incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level—who are most likely to struggle to keep up with rising energy bills. The average energy bill is expected to rise by almost 9 percent across the US from June through September, with households paying an average of $719—up from $661 during the same period last year.

The elderly and children—groups which are particularly susceptible to the health impacts of extreme heat—are also disproportionately affected by the gaps in shutoff rules. Almost 48 percent of children and 52 percent of seniors live in states with no restrictions on summer shutoffs.

The proportion of households with children that could not afford to pay their energy bill for at least one month during the last year increased from 29.3 percent to 32.4 percent, according to the latest Census Households Pulse Survey. This includes 22.4 percent of families with children who were forced to keep their homes at unsafe temperatures due to financial concerns—a 3 percent rise over the past 12 months.

“Our current strategies, including access to cooling centers, may have been appropriate when they were designed in the 1970s when summer temperatures were lower and heatwaves were sporadic,” said Mark Wolfe, author of the report and executive director of Neada, an organization for state directors of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap), the federal energy assistance fund. “They are inadequate to provide relief from the record-breaking high temperatures and continuous heatwaves that have become our new normal in the summer months.”

Summers are getting hotter, with dangerous heatwaves hitting every corner of the US amid an abject failure to take decisive action on phasing out fossil fuel production to curb global heating.

Federal energy assistance for low-income households is both outdated and on the decline—despite a surge in heat-related deaths and illness in recent years.

The federal fund Liheap was cut by $2 billion for this fiscal year, and only 12 percent of the allocated $4.1 billion will be used to aid struggling families keep cool this summer. As a result, about 1m fewer households will receive financial help with energy bills this year.

Energy assistance is vital as even in the states with shutoff rules only provide partial protection.

In Arizona, the state with the highest recorded number of heat deaths annually, the regulator banned privately owned utilities from disconnecting households for overdue bills after campaigners exposed multiple indoor deaths linked to a lack of power for cooling.

But while some utilities impose a moratorium on shutoffs from 15 June to 1 October, others suspend disconnections only on days when the National Weather Service (NWS) issues an excessive heat warning—even though the impact of extreme heat is cumulative on the body. The first heat-related death in Maricopa county this year was on 18 April. Cooperatives and municipal utilities are excluded from the shutoff rule.

“Arizona is a state that faces extreme energy bill burden and the life-or-death need for AC,” said Stacey Champion, a heat safety advocate based in Phoenix. “People here die from heat from April through October, so statewide disconnect rules for all utilities and increased Liheap funding to help low-income residents pay their energy bills will save lives.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As this summer has already made clear, extreme heat is here, and it’s poised to get worse in the coming years.

Due to soaring temperatures, more and more people are also at risk for severe health concerns that come with them, including heat stroke, cardiovascular problems, and respiratory issues. That’s particularly true for already-vulnerable groups including elderly people, those who are pregnant, and those with preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes.

In Texas—a state that often sees some of the hottest temperatures in the country—extreme heat killed more than 330 people in 2023, setting a new record. More recently, millions of people in cities like Houston have had to deal with a massive heat wave while navigating power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Despite the growing toll, there’s shockingly little regulation around protecting people from the effects of heat. It’s a stark contrast to how policies tend to treat the extreme cold. And while extreme cold continues to be deadlier than extreme heat, as heat waves become more dangerous, the gap between the two is likely to shrink.

For example, very few states have laws that require landlords to provide air conditioning for their renters. Conversely, most states have policies that mandate the provision of heat in the winter. But even navigating what is and isn’t required around extreme heat is difficult. A comprehensive state-by-state cooling policy resource doesn’t yet exist, which speaks to the sparse landscape of regulations considering heat exposure.

That’s largely due to policymakers lagging behind climate change, the opposition from landlord groups to such requirements, and the hefty cost of both energy bills and equipment that would actually address the problem. There are questions, too, over who would bear those costs, including concerns that mandates for air conditioning would simply fall on tenants in the form of higher rents.

The need for adequate cooling will only become more pressing, though. And the growing prevalence of heat waves—which are getting stronger, longer, and more frequent—underscores the fact that air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity and that the lack of it in people’s homes could prove fatal.

Cooling policies for rental properties vary state by state, often city by city. There’s no federal law or regulation governing them, and many states don’t have them either. Although some cities like Dallas have approved ordinances mandating that landlords provide air conditioning, for instance, Texas doesn’t offer the same protections statewide.

“There’s no baseline right to air conditioning or anything like that at the federal level,” David Konisky, Indiana University’s co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, told Vox.

As a result, such measures—known as habitability laws—are highly dependent on where people live. These laws, which determine what requirements a landlord must meet for the housing they provide, rarely include cooling. For heat, meanwhile, these policies tend to say that rental properties need to include a heating unit that keeps them above a certain temperature.

“Unlike heat, cooling is really not incorporated into habitability standards or enforced in increasingly hot summers,” says Ruthy Gourevitch, a housing policy manager at the Climate and Community Project.

Some state policies, like those in California and New York, require landlords to maintain air conditioning that’s already in a unit, but they don’t mandate that they provide AC in the first place. Most states have experienced scorching heat waves in recent years yet many still have no state law on the books to require cooling systems.

A similar dynamic is evident when it comes to federal energy assistance programs, which often dedicate most of their funds to assisting tenants in the winter to cover heating costs. About 80 percent of the funds allocated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are doled out in the winter, while far less is distributed in the summer, says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. That’s largely a byproduct of the underfunding of the program, with much of the money running out after it’s been used in the winter, Wolfe says.

This breakdown can leave tenants in need of such aid struggling to cover costs in the summer even if they have access to air conditioning.

As Rebecca Leber previously reported for Vox, this same trend holds true when utility companies shut off power, something they do when a customer misses their payments.Many states will offer protections to customers in these situations during the cold months of winter. Not so with the increasingly fierce, hot months of summer. According to Vox’s previous reporting, 41 states offer customer protections from utility shut-offs during the extreme cold if they fail to pay a bill, while just 18 states offer the same for extreme heat.

Preventing such shut-offs is one key way to ensure that people have air conditioning access during dire spikes in temperature, Leber writes.

“There are lots of areas of policy where we have this distinction historically, between cold and heat,” says Konisky. “[We’ve thought that] trying to protect people from extreme cold temperatures has been more important.” But, now, “heat is just as deadly, just as big of a concern.”

As extreme heat becomes more common and more hazardous to people’s health as a result, the impact of these gaps will become increasingly apparent.

Low-income tenants, in particular, are disproportionately affected by such omissions, experts say, because they’re less likely to be able to afford their own cooling systems. Black Americans are also more likely to live in places where they are exposed to extreme heat, a 2020 study found. According to research by climate and health scientists Adrienne Hollis and Kristy Dahl, “counties with large African American populations are exposed to extreme temperatures two to three more days per year than those counties with smaller African American populations.”

The risks of being indoors without air conditioning or other cooling options during these heat waves are high especially for older people, infants, pregnant people, and those with serious health conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Severe complications that could result include blood clots, kidney impairment, and asthma.

“With access to cooling, unfortunately, it’s heading that direction of being another one that shows the economic divide in the country and also the globe,” says Wolfe. Roughly 13 percent of US households lack air conditioning, with renters more likely to go without than homeowners.

The consequences of that lack have been increasingly evident in recent years, with multiple cities like Phoenix recording record-high deaths from heat. In 2023, Phoenix experienced 30 consecutive days of heat over 110 degrees Fahrenheit and saw 645 deaths, almost double the number from the year before. A large proportion of these deaths included people who were low-income or unhoused, according to Phoenix officials.

Being inside during such heat waves, without air conditioning, is particularly hazardous.

“It can actually get hotter indoors than outside, and this is a really important environmental justice issue,” Leah Schinasi, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, concluded in a 2024 Heliyon study.

In addition to regulations that treat cooling systems like a necessity, experts say there needs to be more funding to cover the costs associated with them.

Some cities, where temperatures have been consistently high and climbing, like Dallas, have approved ordinances in recent years to mandate that landlords provide air conditioning that keeps units under a specific temperature. Other cities, like Los Angeles, are considering similar proposals.

Such policies add to a handful of laws at the state level.

Seth Gertz-Billingsley, a Harvard law student who has studied heat protection policies across different states, notes that the Oregon law is one of the most expansive. That law—which passed in 2022—allows renters to install air conditioning, and also sets up an emergency fund to help low-income tenants afford AC. It doesn’t, however, mandate that all landlords offer air conditioning.

In addition to strengthening requirements for air conditioning and other cooling systems, advocates say it’s important that such policies account for the costs that would accompany these changes, so they aren’t simply passed on to tenants.

Federal and state governments could offer subsidies to landlords, for instance, says Wolfe. And more funding is needed for energy assistance programs directly focused on tenants. Wolfe estimates that LIHEAP could use an additional $3 billion annually to cover the costs people face in summer. Tenant protection from rent increases and potential evictions needs to be baked into such proposals, too, says Gourevitch.

Another key consideration is the need to install cooling options, like heat pumps, which are more efficient than traditional AC. The paradox of air conditioning has long been that it’s crucial to help preserve people’s health during heat waves but that it simultaneously spews a sizable amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Devices like heat pumps, which move heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa, are a more climate-friendly alternative, especially in the winter since they are vastly more efficient than conventional furnaces.

To change such policies, however, lawmakers need to catch up with how quickly climate change is taking place and affecting people’s lives. Forecasts for this summer and beyond show that the world is poised to get hotter.

“Many of our habitability laws and enforcement policies are many decades old, and need to be updated to confront the new reality that we live in,” says Gourevitch.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As this summer has already made clear, extreme heat is here, and it’s poised to get worse in the coming years.

Due to soaring temperatures, more and more people are also at risk for severe health concerns that come with them, including heat stroke, cardiovascular problems, and respiratory issues. That’s particularly true for already-vulnerable groups including elderly people, those who are pregnant, and those with preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes.

In Texas—a state that often sees some of the hottest temperatures in the country—extreme heat killed more than 330 people in 2023, setting a new record. More recently, millions of people in cities like Houston have had to deal with a massive heat wave while navigating power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Despite the growing toll, there’s shockingly little regulation around protecting people from the effects of heat. It’s a stark contrast to how policies tend to treat the extreme cold. And while extreme cold continues to be deadlier than extreme heat, as heat waves become more dangerous, the gap between the two is likely to shrink.

For example, very few states have laws that require landlords to provide air conditioning for their renters. Conversely, most states have policies that mandate the provision of heat in the winter. But even navigating what is and isn’t required around extreme heat is difficult. A comprehensive state-by-state cooling policy resource doesn’t yet exist, which speaks to the sparse landscape of regulations considering heat exposure.

That’s largely due to policymakers lagging behind climate change, the opposition from landlord groups to such requirements, and the hefty cost of both energy bills and equipment that would actually address the problem. There are questions, too, over who would bear those costs, including concerns that mandates for air conditioning would simply fall on tenants in the form of higher rents.

The need for adequate cooling will only become more pressing, though. And the growing prevalence of heat waves—which are getting stronger, longer, and more frequent—underscores the fact that air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity and that the lack of it in people’s homes could prove fatal.

Cooling policies for rental properties vary state by state, often city by city. There’s no federal law or regulation governing them, and many states don’t have them either. Although some cities like Dallas have approved ordinances mandating that landlords provide air conditioning, for instance, Texas doesn’t offer the same protections statewide.

“There’s no baseline right to air conditioning or anything like that at the federal level,” David Konisky, Indiana University’s co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, told Vox.

As a result, such measures—known as habitability laws—are highly dependent on where people live. These laws, which determine what requirements a landlord must meet for the housing they provide, rarely include cooling. For heat, meanwhile, these policies tend to say that rental properties need to include a heating unit that keeps them above a certain temperature.

“Unlike heat, cooling is really not incorporated into habitability standards or enforced in increasingly hot summers,” says Ruthy Gourevitch, a housing policy manager at the Climate and Community Project.

Some state policies, like those in California and New York, require landlords to maintain air conditioning that’s already in a unit, but they don’t mandate that they provide AC in the first place. Most states have experienced scorching heat waves in recent years yet many still have no state law on the books to require cooling systems.

A similar dynamic is evident when it comes to federal energy assistance programs, which often dedicate most of their funds to assisting tenants in the winter to cover heating costs. About 80 percent of the funds allocated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are doled out in the winter, while far less is distributed in the summer, says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. That’s largely a byproduct of the underfunding of the program, with much of the money running out after it’s been used in the winter, Wolfe says.

This breakdown can leave tenants in need of such aid struggling to cover costs in the summer even if they have access to air conditioning.

As Rebecca Leber previously reported for Vox, this same trend holds true when utility companies shut off power, something they do when a customer misses their payments.Many states will offer protections to customers in these situations during the cold months of winter. Not so with the increasingly fierce, hot months of summer. According to Vox’s previous reporting, 41 states offer customer protections from utility shut-offs during the extreme cold if they fail to pay a bill, while just 18 states offer the same for extreme heat.

Preventing such shut-offs is one key way to ensure that people have air conditioning access during dire spikes in temperature, Leber writes.

“There are lots of areas of policy where we have this distinction historically, between cold and heat,” says Konisky. “[We’ve thought that] trying to protect people from extreme cold temperatures has been more important.” But, now, “heat is just as deadly, just as big of a concern.”

As extreme heat becomes more common and more hazardous to people’s health as a result, the impact of these gaps will become increasingly apparent.

Low-income tenants, in particular, are disproportionately affected by such omissions, experts say, because they’re less likely to be able to afford their own cooling systems. Black Americans are also more likely to live in places where they are exposed to extreme heat, a 2020 study found. According to research by climate and health scientists Adrienne Hollis and Kristy Dahl, “counties with large African American populations are exposed to extreme temperatures two to three more days per year than those counties with smaller African American populations.”

The risks of being indoors without air conditioning or other cooling options during these heat waves are high especially for older people, infants, pregnant people, and those with serious health conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Severe complications that could result include blood clots, kidney impairment, and asthma.

“With access to cooling, unfortunately, it’s heading that direction of being another one that shows the economic divide in the country and also the globe,” says Wolfe. Roughly 13 percent of US households lack air conditioning, with renters more likely to go without than homeowners.

The consequences of that lack have been increasingly evident in recent years, with multiple cities like Phoenix recording record-high deaths from heat. In 2023, Phoenix experienced 30 consecutive days of heat over 110 degrees Fahrenheit and saw 645 deaths, almost double the number from the year before. A large proportion of these deaths included people who were low-income or unhoused, according to Phoenix officials.

Being inside during such heat waves, without air conditioning, is particularly hazardous.

“It can actually get hotter indoors than outside, and this is a really important environmental justice issue,” Leah Schinasi, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, concluded in a 2024 Heliyon study.

In addition to regulations that treat cooling systems like a necessity, experts say there needs to be more funding to cover the costs associated with them.

Some cities, where temperatures have been consistently high and climbing, like Dallas, have approved ordinances in recent years to mandate that landlords provide air conditioning that keeps units under a specific temperature. Other cities, like Los Angeles, are considering similar proposals.

Such policies add to a handful of laws at the state level.

Seth Gertz-Billingsley, a Harvard law student who has studied heat protection policies across different states, notes that the Oregon law is one of the most expansive. That law—which passed in 2022—allows renters to install air conditioning, and also sets up an emergency fund to help low-income tenants afford AC. It doesn’t, however, mandate that all landlords offer air conditioning.

In addition to strengthening requirements for air conditioning and other cooling systems, advocates say it’s important that such policies account for the costs that would accompany these changes, so they aren’t simply passed on to tenants.

Federal and state governments could offer subsidies to landlords, for instance, says Wolfe. And more funding is needed for energy assistance programs directly focused on tenants. Wolfe estimates that LIHEAP could use an additional $3 billion annually to cover the costs people face in summer. Tenant protection from rent increases and potential evictions needs to be baked into such proposals, too, says Gourevitch.

Another key consideration is the need to install cooling options, like heat pumps, which are more efficient than traditional AC. The paradox of air conditioning has long been that it’s crucial to help preserve people’s health during heat waves but that it simultaneously spews a sizable amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Devices like heat pumps, which move heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa, are a more climate-friendly alternative, especially in the winter since they are vastly more efficient than conventional furnaces.

To change such policies, however, lawmakers need to catch up with how quickly climate change is taking place and affecting people’s lives. Forecasts for this summer and beyond show that the world is poised to get hotter.

“Many of our habitability laws and enforcement policies are many decades old, and need to be updated to confront the new reality that we live in,” says Gourevitch.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At high tide, the marsh alongside Seafood Road disappears under an inscrutable mirror of water. Then, as it drains, reeds resurface and begin to trace hundreds of paths through the marsh, etched by generations of subsistence fishing. 

Ten Mile’s community center overlooks the water from red brick stilts while a heron flaps across the marsh. Local artist Dana Coleman stands out on the road in a black, short-sleeved shirt with chunky turquoise embroidery. Every passing car honks affably because Coleman grew up in Ten Mile, a community settled behind Seafood Road by freed slaves after the Civil War. Now there is a new noise: rhythmic hammering over his shoulder from a block of houses under construction on the Ten Mile Eagles’ old baseball diamond.

As climate change threatens South Carolina’s coastal riches—from sunswept resorts like Hilton Head to huge future developments—the state’s historical African American settlements are also at risk. Squeezed between luxury homes and rising water, Coleman and other locals spy an opportunity to get creative. 

While the county council considers a pause on new developments, settlement leaders are turning to forestry projects, land trusts and greenbelt initiatives. Land trusts and the county greenbelt program prohibit development on tracts reserved for conservation, while sustainable forestry offers landowners a way to make money from their family’s land without selling to a developer. Green programs like these could help preserve the character of historic Black neighborhoods, Coleman hopes, while enshrining as much flood resiliency as possible. 

“We know some secret spots,” said Coleman. “Wait till the tide goes out, walk about a quarter mile and there’s hundreds of little channels going all different directions.” Pick the right one and before long, the marsh under your feet is more oyster than mud, he said. “We get a bag full—fresh oysters, clams, crab, everything—come back and steam them right here in the yard.”

He points over the water: Between two palmettos in the distance is a channel leading to the Atlantic. “This is what we’re trying to protect. And this is why the developers want it.”

In recent years, Ten Mile has found itself in the path of one of the country’s fastest growing cities: the affluent suburban sprawl of Mount Pleasant, just east of Charleston. As well as driving up house prices, locals say development is exacerbating sea level rise by replacing absorbent trees and marshes with concrete. Experts warn that this worsening sea level rise, in turn, will fuel more gentrification—which is why locals feel such urgency to act.

First, Ten Mile petitioned Charleston County to become a historic district. Granted in 2022, the designation means that new construction must be approved by a county commission. Now, community leaders hope green programs could help preserve the community into the future. 

Critics say development restrictions could harm property values, or push development into neighboring Black communities that have not yet organized. But Coleman hopes Ten Mile can be an example to follow for the other 23 historic black settlements scattered across the county. 

“We’re getting more, for lack of better words, bullets in our guns now,” he said from a bench under the community center. Between him and the hammering construction is an 11-acre copse. The neighborhood association bought it with greenbelt funding: a program where Charleston County offers cash to protect green spaces from development in perpetuity. “We’ve got stuff in place to fight for the land for our kids and grandkids.” 

Jesse M. Keenan, a Harvard professor focusing on urbanism, first noticed climate change and gentrification walking in lockstep on a research trip to Denmark in 2011. San Kjeld was a working class, portside neighborhood of Copenhagen a decade earlier, but when Keenan arrived, all the amenities of gentrification had beaten him to it.

“I remember walking around with the vice mayor at the time and it was apparent that this neighborhood had gone through a kind of transformation physically,” Keenan remembers. “When you see neighborhoods that go through change there’s little details about the type of retail, how people put planters and flowers on streets, how trash receptacles are located.” The catalyst of San Kjeld’s change, Keenan learned, was an experimental climate resilience program, and the investment that came with it.

Around the world, “climate gentrification” was working in two main ways, according to a Harvard paper Keenan finished seven years later. He found that low-income communities would be squeezed out of elevated neighborhoods as the cost of flooding grew clearer and high ground took on a premium. And, as happened in San Kjeld, poorer people would also be edged out of low-lying areas as the cost of repairs, insurance and resilience infrastructure increased, for those able to afford them. 

Communities like Ten Mile are being squeezed by the latter. In coastal South Carolina, waterfront land is more valuable than ever, despite accelerating sea level rise. Charleston harbor is now seven inches higher than it was in 2010, according to tide gauges. Federal scientists predict it will rise over a foot more by 2050, at which point two days out of every three in the City of Charleston will see tidal flooding.

“When you’re talking about waterfront development in pretty high-risk areas like Charleston, there are people who are willing to absorb not only the risks of flooding and storm damage, but also the insurance cost of doing so,” said Keenan. 

Only wealthy owners can afford the new houses, such as those nearest Seafood Rood largely built on brick stilts. That development pushes up property taxes across the neighborhood. And at the same time, the new houses make flooding worse.

When he grew up in Ten Mile, Coleman said, Seafood Road would only flood if a big storm swept through, once a year at most. “Now it floods on a regular tide with no hurricane, excess rain or anything. These tides that come in now that never were a thing in the past.” He laughs a little incredulously. “They’ve got names for them, man: king tides, wolf tides.”

The historical irony, he explains, is that settlements only formed along marshes and wetlands because white landowners sold cheap after the Civil War. Charleston was once home to the busiest slave port in the United States—so prolific that two out of every five enslaved Africans arrived in the country through a single wharf downtown. Few freed slaves were given land after emancipation. Instead, most bought it, often by working for meager wages at the same rice or indigo plantations they were enslaved on. For that reason, many freed communities found themselves pushed towards the cheaper, marshy areas white landowners did not want.

“They didn’t want to live in the country; they didn’t want to live close to the water; they didn’t want to live near swampland because of mosquitos and everything—so they let slaves have it,” said Coleman. “But now it’s reversed.” He can’t help himself from chuckling. “They want to be out on the water. Waterfront is the thing now.”

In the 1980s, the same decade Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston’s suburbs, Mount Pleasant’s population doubled. Since the turn of the century, it has doubled again. Instead of growing denser (Mount Pleasant already has a ban on new apartments or condos, extended in March for the fourth time), the town continues to sprawl outwards into rural and waterfront areas. “The majority of population growth occurred in entirely new subdivisions located within recently annexed neighborhoods,” according to the town’s development plan.

An important historical factor made settlement communities uniquely vulnerable to predatory developers and helped propel such growth: Since the first generation of Black landowners, most settlement land slipped into so-called heirs’ ownership, when land is inherited without a public will or deed proving legal ownership, leaving the property informally split between all living heirs. Each heir can sell their stake. 

Then if any stakeholder—whether they are an original member of the family or bought a stake from one—wants to sell the land itself, a court tries to divvy it up physically. Often that is not possible, in which case the whole tract automatically goes on the market, as a way of severing co-ownership. Each state has different statutes for resolving disputes like this: Some put the tract up for auction; others, like South Carolina, put it on the market.

Jennie L. Stephens is CEO of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, a nonprofit educating South Carolina’s settlement communities about property law. She said the beginning of ownership was a pivotal historical moment: hopeful, but vulnerable. “As African Americans, we went from being property to owning property,” Stephens said. “But think about it: There were not a lot of Black attorneys they could go to to help them navigate those waters.”

In one case the center found that a single deed from the 1950s was now split between over 200 heirs. If a developer were to buy a stake from any one of them, the developer would have the same ownership rights as any other heir. “Developer X, Y or Z becomes the newest member of the family,” Stephens said. 

From that position they can effectively force the entire property on the market: ask the court to sell against the wishes of familial heirs. When a judge almost inevitably finds the property cannot be physically divided, the entire tract is put on the market to resolve the co-ownership dispute.

Coleman’s grandfather, John Wright Sr., saved up from farming, carpentry, lumber work and shifts as a chef to eventually buy a tract in the early 1900s from another Black family. The paper document itself was destroyed when Storm Hugo hit Coleman’s mother’s house, but Coleman has since put the plot he now lives on under his own name.

The burden of updating old land titles falls onto individual owners and is not always straightforward, according to the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation. For many settlement descendants, selling can seem easier than a protracted legal battle against developers or other heirs.

Mavis Gragg left her job at a financial law firm when her parents died in a car crash and she became an heir to their property. “It became crystal clear that my own family was land-rich, cash-poor: that our generational wealth was very precarious.” She set up a private practice helping other heirs clear their titles in North Carolina. But in two decades of practicing as a self-described “death and dirt” attorney, she reached an epiphany of frustration. 

“‘I had to choose between you and the property taxes,’” she said one client told her a year after dropping her calls. “He hired me to help save the property, but he risked losing the property if he paid me instead of paying the tax. I felt like I needed to have a bigger impact. I wanted to see systemic change.”

In 2020, Gragg started HeirShares, an online platform for real estate ownership education, developing tools to estimate how many heirs might be alive today, reconstruct family trees and trace ownership. Both HeirShares and the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation use sustainable forestry as a means for keeping heirs property owners on their land. The latter offers consultation with a professional forester for any owner who commits to workshops on water management and regenerative alternatives to clear-cutting. 

Gragg picked up on the power of conservation initiatives serving as director of the Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program. The federally funded initiative connects Black landowners in Southern states with markets for sustainable lumber. “We found that doing conservation, stewardship and sustainable forestry actually motivates people to take action on the legal part that makes their ownership so precarious,” Gragg said.

Forestry programs not only offer landowners a way to retain their property and make money off it. Recent research has found that healthy forests also play an outsized role in mitigating flood risk. 

While we know that trees suck up water, understanding the exact role forests play in flood resilience has long confounded scientists. More than a decade after Einstein offered his theory of relativity, the US Department of Agriculture concluded that barely any scientific studies had produced useful findings about forests and flooding, “because of the inherent difficulty of isolating variables from the complex interacting factors in watersheds.”

But last summer, German scientists—spurred by 2021 floods that killed 243 people across Europe—found that forests can both help and hinder flooding. Their findings suggested that for forests near infrastructure, like drains or bridges that can get clogged by timber and debris, the kind of management that comes with sustainable forestry can reduce deadwood and lessen the threat of flooding. 

In addition to forestry programs for individual owners who retain their property, communities like Ten Mile are turning to funding from the county greenbelt program to intercept land before developers get to it. 

For Coleman, that’s why a development moratorium—which passed its first reading at the county council but awaits final approval—is so important. “It slows the growth, gives us time. Then we can talk to the community and educate them,” Coleman said. At first the council approved a decade-long moratorium, but in June voted to shorten it to two years. “We’ve got all these things that we can put in place so right after that [moratorium] developers swoop in and people will be like, ‘Nah, we’re good.’” 

Since it began in 2007, the greenbelt program has protected almost 45,000 acres across Charleston County, mostly in rural areas and wetlands, according to county figures. A third of the publicly accessible land was purchased for settlement communities or other neighborhoods with a majority Black or Indigenous population. So far Ten Mile’s neighborhood association has bought almost 20 acres, and Coleman is eyeing 50 more that fit the bill. 

Even without turning the land over to green programs, land use patterns in settlement communities are naturally more flood resilient, according to county planning documents.

While new developments already constructed in the neighborhood can average more than seven houses per acre, the rest of Ten Mile is much sparser, averaging less than one house per acre. The space between houses, often forested or broken up by wetlands and tidal creeks, absorbs water during floods and releases it slowly.

“African Americans were environmentalists before the word was even created because of the way in which we live,” Stephens, with the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, said about the original settlers of Ten Mile. “That community might not have known about sea level rise, but they understood certain things: If you move from one spot to another, the water is going to adjust. They knew that and they were mindful of their surroundings.”

Hurricane Hugo hit the coast of South Carolina in September 1989. Suddenly, that instinctive flood resilience was clear to Donna Brown Newton, a grandmother and now-retired administrator at the local school district in Snowden, another settlement just west of Ten Mile.

“It was so weird how one house can be demolished and the next house be standing,” Newton said, driving through the neighborhood one recent afternoon. “It was really, really creepy—as if it selected which houses would be destroyed.” It’s the same in Ten Mile: Brick bungalows with a low center of gravity survived; wooden new builds were washed down the street.

These days, her hair braided and dyed orange, Newton catalogs from behind her steering wheel how Snowden is slipping underwater. “They built a subdivision over there,” she said, pointing to a clutch of brightly painted wooden houses. “That was a marshland and it’s filled in with dirt.” She remembers playing out of her driveway in the rain as a child. Now every hard rain floods the main road, and each month another car slides off a turn into the ditch running alongside it. “I’m being squooshed out here,” Newton said.

Despite the signs of rising flood risk, Snowden, like most other settlements, does not have the same protections as Ten Mile. Locals like Newton fear that while the county’s greenbelt restrictions and historic designations set a good example for preserving community land, they may also push development into Snowden and other adjacent, unprotected neighborhoods. In the meantime, she is fighting against distrust to get her neighbors to petition for the same historic designation as Ten Mile: the first step in limiting development.

There’s lots of old-school thinking that if it becomes a historical district, then the white man will come and take it,” Newton explained, “but I’m hoping people here will understand the importance: We’re going to lose the sense of community, the sense of family, a sense of somebody having your back. You can’t build that no place else, no matter where you go.” 

Snowden’s community center has used greenbelt funding to buy and protect four acres, but blocks away another 20 acres just went up for sale. Newly built homes already edge back from the main road towards the community’s historic core, along with Planet Fitness and a Chick-fil-A. Since Newton began trying to bring new protections to the neighborhood, two of her brothers sold their lots to developers and moved out without telling her, she said, decisions she called “heartbreaking.” Neither could be reached for comment.

“What bothers me about my brother selling the property is I know how much our ancestors had to sacrifice,” she said. Newton’s great-great-grandfather bought the family’s lot in the 1890s for $120. “You’ve got to figure back then for a Black man to get that kind of money to buy five acres of property …” She shakes her head. “The sacrifice he had to make to do that.”

Newton isn’t blind to the attraction of selling. “Sometimes I think I could just give all this up and be done with it,” she said, “but I will stay here and fight to the bitter end. I think selling to me is just giving up and saying, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re not worth it. The people here are not worth it.’”

While she tries to get Snowden protected, Newton is also aiming higher. This summer she advanced from her district’s Democratic primary and will face the incumbent Republican representative in November. In a majority white, affluent, Republican district, she admits, “It’s an uphill battle.” But she is not in the habit of giving up.

Like much of South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry, settlement communities face dramatic, accelerating sea level rise in the coming decades. Eventually moving inland will be inevitable, coastal scientists say. But for Newton and Coleman, any kind of retreat, managed or not, loses its meaning if the community is broken apart by development.

“We know that eventually parts of this will probably be underwater, and that’s kind of the reason we want to preserve what’s here now,” Coleman said. 

Just like he knows the marsh’s secret fishing paths, the community knows how water moves through Ten Mile: where the ground is higher, and where it stays dry. “When stuff like that is happening, we have an area where we can go.” He smiles. “If people are still here.”

In the meantime, Coleman is working to protect Ten Mile, both the land and its stories. His latest painting is only a monochrome foundation so far, but the outline is clear: From a corridor of reeds, a young man in rubber boots leans into the foreground, picking an oyster from the mud. Sometimes Coleman paints from distant memory or imagination, he said, but this time that wasn’t necessary. All he needed was a fishing trip with his son out from Seafood Road.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

One of the iconic sensory experiences of riding a train is actually the sound of ingenuity. As steel railroad tracks heat up, they grow: Eighteen hundred feet of rail expands by more than an inch for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase. So rails used to be laid down in sections — each between 30 and 60 feet long — with small gaps.

“The very specific railway noise that you hear — chuchat … chuchat … chuchat … chuchat … chuchat — is because there is a gap between the rails, and this gap is meant for such expansion,” said Dev Niyogi, who studies urban climate extremes at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Still, in a severe heat wave, the rail can swell until the underlying ties can no longer contain it. Then the rail gets visibly wavy, morphing into what’s known as a sun kink. That’s a serious hazard for trains, which can derail on misaligned tracks. In extreme cases, the track can violently buckle, going from a straight shot to grotesque curves almost instantly. So if it’s excessively hot out, rail services will slow their trains as a precaution, which provides less of the mechanical energy that can lead to buckling. Amtrak, for instance, restricts speeds to 80 miles per hour if the rail temperature hits 140 degrees. That was partly the reason behind Amtrak delays in the Northeast Corridor, which runs between Washington, D.C. and Boston, during a brutal heat wave last month. (Amtrak did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.) 

As extreme heat waves get worse, more tracks will turn into sun kinks — disrupting commuter rail service that reduces carbon emissions and slows that warming. In 2019, a study estimated that the U.S. rail network could see additional delay costs totaling between $25 billion and $45 billion by the year 2100, in a scenario that assumed greenhouse gas emissions decline in the next 20 years. 

Compared to a tree falling on top of a track and blocking traffic, or a switch breaking, heat is a much larger, harder problem for rail operators to deal with. “Heat waves tend to be regional, so the impacts can be huge,” said Jacob Helman, one of the author’s of that 2019 study and a senior climate consultant at Resilient Analytics, which provides infrastructure vulnerability assessments. “It can impact the entire Northeast Corridor over the course of five days.”

As climate change drives hotter and longer heat waves, companies are reevaluating their operations and adapting new technologies. Railroads already use remote sensors to determine the temperature of their rails, but are getting still more sophisticated as heat waves intensify. They’re using computer modeling, for example, to figure out how to make tracks more resistant to buckling, among many other steps. “The industry is implementing new ways to use advanced sensors, satellite imaging, and AI to constantly monitor track health and respond to any potential hazards,” said Scott Cummings, assistant vice president of research and innovation at MxV Rail, a subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads. 

While those gaps in the rail reduce the problem of buckling, each wheel of a train rolling over each gap results in wear and tear both on the rail and the cars. In response, railroads have for decades been deploying “continuous welded rail,” or CWR — segments of track stretching a quarter mile or more. CWR is held firmly in place by concrete ties (the strips under the rails that used to be made of wood), themselves held in place with ballast stones poured in between them. “It’s all just so much more rigid,” said Daniel Pyke, a rail expert at Sensonic in the United Kingdom, which makes train safety tech. “You’ve got so much more mass there to keep everything in place.” 

Railroads even adapt tracks to a specific climate: By installing continuous welded rail on a day with the right conditions, crews prepare it for the local high and low temperatures. “Tracks are laid and secured at the ‘neutral temperature,’ which is the average temperature of the rails,” said Farshid Vahedifard, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University who studies the impact of climate change on infrastructure. “This helps ensure that the rail remains stable throughout temperature fluctuations.” As regional temperatures rise, railroads might opt to lay down track on hotter days, thus preparing the rail for increasingly extreme heat. (Though when the rails get cold in winter, they contract, which can cause cracking.)

Another intervention is painting the rails white, which reflects a good amount of the sun’s energy off the steel. “It sounds crazy,” Pyke said, “but it works.” It’s labor-intensive — you have to keep reapplying because of the wear-and-tear on the paint and the fact that it dirties over time — but track-mounted machines can do the work quickly. 

A new technology known as distributed acoustic sensing uses fiber optic cables running along railways to “listen” for defects. Disturbances on the track jostle the optics, changing how light travels through them. That’s analyzed by a special device to determine whether a rockfall has crashed into the tracks, or if a crack has formed in the rails, as each kind of disturbance has its own unique signal. 

As the track heats up and expands, the fiber optics already hear “thermal pops.” Theoretically, Pyke said, Sensonic’s technology could detect the unique ground vibrations associated with buckling. They’d just need data — perhaps they can manually heat up a test track to induce a sun kink — to train the algorithm on what to listen for. “We already produced some rock fall, landslide sensors, and they’re looking for ground vibration,” Pyke said. “So I would imagine — I can’t promise — but I would imagine we would tweak those to be able to detect it.”

If railroads can get better data on their vulnerability to buckling — like specific track temperatures over wide areas, instead of relying on inferences from local air temperatures — they could more accurately determine how much to slow trains as a precaution. That would avoid delays, keep commuters  from returning to their cars, save railroads money, and generally make trains safer. “You can make more informed decisions about speed orders,” said Helman from Resilient Analytics. “Maybe it doesn’t need to be 40 miles per hour. Maybe it only needs to be 10. Maybe you don’t need it at all.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A brutal and long-lasting heatwave is threatening to wreak havoc across the US west this week, as sweltering conditions, power shutoffs and a severe uptick in wildfire risks coincide with Fourth of July celebrations.

Nearly 90 million people were under heat alerts from the National Weather Service (NWS) on Tuesday morning, as swaths of the south-central and western US were scorched. As pressure builds over the west through the week, the dangerous weather event is expected to stretch for days with little reprieve.

Starting Wednesday, parts of California will be subject to “extreme” levels of heat risk—reaching the highest level on the National Weather Service’s index—that will last until Sunday or longer. In some areas of the state, life-threatening triple-digit temperatures could linger for longer than a week.

“This is going to be a severe, prolonged, potentially record-breaking heatwave that may have large impacts for much of California,” said climate scientist Dr Daniel Swain during a broadcast discussion of the heat event on Monday. The long duration will only add to the potential impacts and intensity, especially because little relief can be expected even after the sun sets. “It just isn’t going to cool off—even at night,” he said.

While central and northern California are expected to bear the brunt of this event, areas in the southern part of the state are also going to cook. Heavily populated centers and rural agricultural enclaves alike could see record-setting highs during the day as well as record overnight temperatures.

NWS forecasters warned that several daily records in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys could fall in the coming days. In the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural hub, temperatures are expected to hover near 110F through the week without dropping below 70F. Parts of Death Valley national park could climb up to 127F.

But the risks aren’t confined to California. NWS warnings, watches and advisories for excessive heat stretch from south-west Washington into Arizona. In Oregon, areas around the Willamette Valley and Medford will spend days above 100F, and temperatures could reach up to 115F.

“These are places where, yes, it is hot in summer—but it’s not often hot like this, and certainly not for this duration,” Swain said.

Extreme heat is the most deadly type of weather-related disaster, and the toll is on the rise. Forecasters warned the dangerous weather conditions this week will pose health risks to the majority of the population, especially those unable to access cooling.

Public health officials across the country cautioned against outdoor activities through the holiday weekend, calling residents and visitors in excessively hot areas to stay inside when possible.

A 69-year-old hiker died after becoming unresponsive on a trail in Grand Canyon national park, the National Park Service reported on Monday. The man, identified as Scott Sims, from Austin, Texas, was attempting an overnight stay in an area of the park that can reach 120F in the shade, park officials said, warning others against hiking in the inner canyon during peak-heat hours between 10am and 4pm.

The extreme weather will also set the stage for new wildfire ignitions that can quickly turn into infernos. An abundantly wet winter left landscapes across California coated in grasses that quickly dried as the weather warmed. The yellowing hillsides and valleys are thick with fuel for fast-burning brush fires. Even deserts, typically-barren this time of year, are now primed to burn. “Unfortunately, I am not using the term ‘if wildfires develop’ because I think it’s inevitable during this event,” Swain said.

Crews were battling small wildfires that popped up across California on Tuesday. The Thompson fire in Butte county prompted evacuation orders for an unknown number of homes in Oroville, a town of about 15,000 residents that is 70 miles north of Sacramento.

Fire risks always rise on the Fourth of July, when hot dry weather aligns with explosive celebrations. Across the country, more than 18,500 fires ignite on average due to Independence Day celebrations, whether from errant fireworks or badly tended campfires. But as the temperatures rise, so do the dangers. Both fire activity and fire behavior this week will likely be extreme and new ignitions may become difficult to contain.

“It’s going to be a challenge both day and night—so the message is prevention,” said the Cal Fire deputy director Nick Schuler. The agency is at peak staffing levels to prepare for what’s expected to be an extremely busy week, extending into an extremely busy summer. Already, California has seen more than 131,400 acres burn, with months left before the risks peak.

“The important takeaway is that 95 percent of wildfires in California are human-caused, and the majority of them are preventable,” Schuler said, noting that careless barbecuing, a spark from a trailer chain hitting the road or even some well-intended brush clearing can rapidly turn disastrous during the hottest days.

But the heat won’t only amplify the fire risks and intensity this week—it will also work to dry out more vegetation that could help fuel future fires.

A fiery start to July only adds to what’s been an incredibly hot spring. May wrapped up the 12th consecutive month of record warmth across the world. The trend continued in June in many places, including parts of California, and the summer is on track to be a scorcher. 2023 was declared the hottest year on record, and 2024 may quickly claim the title.

“Heat sucks the moisture out of vegetation and soil,” said Dr Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, noting that, while this may be the worst heatwave to hit California this year, it will be far from the last.

While individual weather events can be difficult to connect to global heating more broadly, “heatwaves are the most directly impacted” by the climate crisis, Gershunov explained. Fueled by human-caused warming, heatwaves are increasing in both intensity and frequency, but they are also lasting longer and covering wider areas than before. This has only added to their potential to affect human health and put strain on systems.

“Heatwaves are certainly the weather extremes that are impacted by the steroids of climate change,” he said, explaining that the effect is similar to an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Summer weather has been extreme before, but it’s going to get hotter.

“The trend is toward more frequent, more extreme, longer-lasting heatwaves all over the world,” he said. “California is certainly no exception.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the summer of 2011, Victor Ramirez was working in a Walmart warehouse in Mira Loma, California, when he suddenly fainted. When he came to, he was lying on the floor, confused about what had just happened, with his head aching terribly. While he didn’t receive any medical attention—his boss only told him to go home if he didn’t feel well enough to keep working—he knew that this sudden bout of unconsciousness must have been triggered by the relentless heat in the warehouse.  

“When it’s hot outside, it feels even hotter within the warehouses, because of all the machinery,” Ramirez told Grist in Spanish. “If it’s like 110 outside, then it’s like 10 more degrees inside.” The heat was exacerbated by a lack of water and poor air circulation inside the warehouse.

Later that summer, he once again felt similar symptoms. He was flushed, profusely sweating, and his head was hurting. This time around, he knew these were signs of heat stress and told a supervisor, who asked Ramirez why he was “acting dumb” and questioned why he wasn’t working faster. In both instances, no one offered emergency aid or even recommended he go see a doctor. (Walmart declined to comment on Ramirez’s experience, stating that the site was operated by a third party, Schneider Logistics. A spokesperson for Schneider Logistics did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

“I’m nervous, for myself and my daughter,” said Ramirez, whose family relies on his wages to pay their bills. He now works at another warehouse, but the 55-year-old is constantly worried something might happen to him because of dangerous heat exposure on the job. Inadequate access to water, limited air conditioning, and cavalier attitudes about heat exposure are common in his industry. Ramirez’s fear is reignited every year when temperatures start rising and summer rolls around. 

Ramirez has good reason to be concerned. Extreme heat is the deadliest extreme weather event, with a threat level that’s intensifying because of climate change. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that dozens of workers die every year from workplace heat exposure, with a total of 436 deaths between 2011 and 2021, though federal officials have noted that’s widely recognized as an undercount. But no national regulation exists to shield indoor or outdoor workers from heat—a fact that has prompted Ramirez to fight for protections in Southern California, and others to advocate for stronger safeguards across the country. 

“Pay attention to the workers,” Ramirez said. “We are what matters.” 

As of this month, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is one step closer to creating America’s first-ever national heat stress rule for workers. The agency, which announced it would begin the process of drafting a federal heat rule three years ago, submitted a proposal on June 11 to the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, for review. It’s a critical step that signals that the rule could be finalized relatively soon—but legal experts and labor advocates worry about upcoming legal, bureaucratic, and political challenges to OSHA’s rulemaking process, especially in an election year. A Trump victory in November could spell doom for any federal heat stress rule—and even without an administration change in 2025, OSHA’s rule may be subject to legal challenges in the courts. 

Experts, advocates, and panels hosted by the agency suggest the standard could mandate worker and employer training on how to recognize and treat symptoms of heat stress, a process that allows workers new to an area to gradually adapt to hazardous temperatures, and a temperature threshold that triggers heat illness prevention programs that require more frequent, longer breaks. OSHA has previously stated that the rule’s mandates could begin to take effect once the heat index approaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit, Bloomberg Law reported. 

Such a rule could be transformative. “OSHA regulates the entire workforce,” said Cary Coglianese, the director of the Penn Program on Regulation and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “Heat affects every outdoor worker and some major industries—whether it’s construction, travel, transportation, I mean, you name it.”

According to Coliagnese, the draft proposal going to the White House marks the beginning of a review process that may take about 90 days—although it could be longer or shorter. “A lot depends certainly on how much of a push there is within the administration to get a rule out,” said Coglianese. 

The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on when it will finish the review. A spokesperson from OSHA said in a statement, “Heat is a serious workplace hazard that threatens the health, safety, and lives of workers every year,” adding that enacting a federal heat standard is a priority for the Department of Labor. “As of Tuesday, June 11th, the proposed rule is with the Office of Management and Budget for review, and we are one step closer to giving workers the protections they need and deserve.”

When the review has concluded, details of the proposed rule will be publicized, at which point the public will be given at least a 60-day period to submit comments to the agency on the rule. Coglianese warns that a rule with such wide-reaching impacts will mean OSHA is likely to receive plenty of comments. 

Once the comment period is over, OSHA will need time to reflect on and address any issues raised by the public. How long the agency takes on that “is a function of the comments that come in, of their priorities, and maybe of just how vexing some of the issues are,” said Coglianese. After OSHA has an updated draft, another White House review follows; if all goes well, the rule is then finalized and published in the Federal Register. 

OSHA’s latest progress in this process is welcome news to many advocates who have invested years into fighting for heat protections—like Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Xiuhtecutli participated in a working group that made recommendations to OSHA to help inform the proposed rule. But he worries the rulemaking process may drag on well beyond this year.  

“It could be a few more years,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I think the Biden administration is interested in making this happen, so I hope that they hurry up and do it.” 

Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas who went on a one-day thirst strike last year to call attention to the urgent need for worker protections agrees that when it comes to extreme heat, time is of the essence.

“We need this heat protection, as soon as possible. We need it yesterday,” said Casar. He added that he has confidence in the Biden administration in “getting this done right and getting it done quickly.”

But the yearslong battle wrought by workers and advocates to get a national heat standard on the table now faces a looming hurdle: the forthcoming presidential election. 

In Coglianese’s opinion, it’s unlikely that the rule will be finalized before November, or even by next January. He added that, if Donald Trump takes office, he will likely put a hold on any federal rules that have not yet been finalized. Even if a federal heat rule were to “squeak through” at the end of Biden’s term, Congress would have the authority to nullify the rule under the Congressional Review Act—and Coglianese expects that Trump would approve such a nullification. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

Advocates share Coglianese’s concerns. “[If] Biden loses the election, then it’s going to linger there indefinitely, or it could just be killed,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I hope that it continues to move forward speedily, because people’s lives depend on it.”

Experts’ predictions about the future of the rule reflect the recent politicization of extreme heat. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enacted anti-immigrant legislation that included a law that bans municipalities from requiring employers to enact protections, such as shade or water breaks, for outdoor workers. The bill closely resembled a Texas law barring localities from creating such regulations, which passed last summer. 

However, other communities have gone in the opposite direction. In Phoenix, a citywide ordinance was adopted in March mandating heat safety plans for all companies contracted by the city. 

On a state level, just six states—California, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have enacted heat protection rules for outdoor workers, while three of those states have established similar protections for indoor workers, too. 

California is the latest to do so, having just passed a law to enforce heat protections for indoor workers that requires employers to provide breaks, cooling areas, and water when the indoor temperature reaches 82 degrees. If the temperature exceeds 87 degrees, companies may also be required to install cooling devices, adjust work schedules, provide more breaks, and slow down workers’ production pace. Tim Shadix, legal director at the California-based nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center, describes it as the “most comprehensive” set of indoor heat protection regulations in the U.S. “Obviously when the rubber hits the road will be in how employers respond to it, and how it’s enforced,” said Shadix. 

But Shadix is hoping the OSHA rule will go further than the California rule by setting lower temperature thresholds that trigger heat exposure requirements. Shadix considers California’s thresholds “way too high” and thinks a lower federal threshold “would be a very good thing for workers.” 

However, Xiuhtecutli, from the OSHA working group, doesn’t expect the proposed federal rule to include a national threshold for temperatures. “They may leave that up to be determined by region,” he said. The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 1984 decision known as the “Chevron doctrine” that allowed federal agencies to more easily regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety, and other issues. The upending of this precedent diminishes the administration’s ability to enact policy changes via federal regulations, which suggests that passing a national heat standard for workers could be open to more legal challenges. 

Coglianese describes the road to finalizing a federal heat standard as “an uphill battle.” Still, in his view, the case for federal protections is becoming more and more obvious. “I think, in the long game, the heat is coming. The politicians trying to fight this are probably going to be ultimately on the losing end.” 

In the meantime, he asks, “How many lives will be lost from extreme heat?” In 2023, a record 2,300 people across America died from heat-related causes, and this summer could be even hotter than the last. “I hope that we can take steps to reduce that number, and my guess is that most Americans would probably feel the same way,” said Coglianese.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A brutal and long-lasting heatwave is threatening to wreak havoc across the US west this week, as sweltering conditions, power shutoffs and a severe uptick in wildfire risks coincide with Fourth of July celebrations.

Nearly 90 million people were under heat alerts from the National Weather Service (NWS) on Tuesday morning, as swaths of the south-central and western US were scorched. As pressure builds over the west through the week, the dangerous weather event is expected to stretch for days with little reprieve.

Starting Wednesday, parts of California will be subject to “extreme” levels of heat risk—reaching the highest level on the National Weather Service’s index—that will last until Sunday or longer. In some areas of the state, life-threatening triple-digit temperatures could linger for longer than a week.

“This is going to be a severe, prolonged, potentially record-breaking heatwave that may have large impacts for much of California,” said climate scientist Dr Daniel Swain during a broadcast discussion of the heat event on Monday. The long duration will only add to the potential impacts and intensity, especially because little relief can be expected even after the sun sets. “It just isn’t going to cool off—even at night,” he said.

While central and northern California are expected to bear the brunt of this event, areas in the southern part of the state are also going to cook. Heavily populated centers and rural agricultural enclaves alike could see record-setting highs during the day as well as record overnight temperatures.

NWS forecasters warned that several daily records in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys could fall in the coming days. In the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural hub, temperatures are expected to hover near 110F through the week without dropping below 70F. Parts of Death Valley national park could climb up to 127F.

But the risks aren’t confined to California. NWS warnings, watches and advisories for excessive heat stretch from south-west Washington into Arizona. In Oregon, areas around the Willamette Valley and Medford will spend days above 100F, and temperatures could reach up to 115F.

“These are places where, yes, it is hot in summer—but it’s not often hot like this, and certainly not for this duration,” Swain said.

Extreme heat is the most deadly type of weather-related disaster, and the toll is on the rise. Forecasters warned the dangerous weather conditions this week will pose health risks to the majority of the population, especially those unable to access cooling.

Public health officials across the country cautioned against outdoor activities through the holiday weekend, calling residents and visitors in excessively hot areas to stay inside when possible.

A 69-year-old hiker died after becoming unresponsive on a trail in Grand Canyon national park, the National Park Service reported on Monday. The man, identified as Scott Sims, from Austin, Texas, was attempting an overnight stay in an area of the park that can reach 120F in the shade, park officials said, warning others against hiking in the inner canyon during peak-heat hours between 10am and 4pm.

The extreme weather will also set the stage for new wildfire ignitions that can quickly turn into infernos. An abundantly wet winter left landscapes across California coated in grasses that quickly dried as the weather warmed. The yellowing hillsides and valleys are thick with fuel for fast-burning brush fires. Even deserts, typically-barren this time of year, are now primed to burn. “Unfortunately, I am not using the term ‘if wildfires develop’ because I think it’s inevitable during this event,” Swain said.

Crews were battling small wildfires that popped up across California on Tuesday. The Thompson fire in Butte county prompted evacuation orders for an unknown number of homes in Oroville, a town of about 15,000 residents that is 70 miles north of Sacramento.

Fire risks always rise on the Fourth of July, when hot dry weather aligns with explosive celebrations. Across the country, more than 18,500 fires ignite on average due to Independence Day celebrations, whether from errant fireworks or badly tended campfires. But as the temperatures rise, so do the dangers. Both fire activity and fire behavior this week will likely be extreme and new ignitions may become difficult to contain.

“It’s going to be a challenge both day and night—so the message is prevention,” said the Cal Fire deputy director Nick Schuler. The agency is at peak staffing levels to prepare for what’s expected to be an extremely busy week, extending into an extremely busy summer. Already, California has seen more than 131,400 acres burn, with months left before the risks peak.

“The important takeaway is that 95 percent of wildfires in California are human-caused, and the majority of them are preventable,” Schuler said, noting that careless barbecuing, a spark from a trailer chain hitting the road or even some well-intended brush clearing can rapidly turn disastrous during the hottest days.

But the heat won’t only amplify the fire risks and intensity this week—it will also work to dry out more vegetation that could help fuel future fires.

A fiery start to July only adds to what’s been an incredibly hot spring. May wrapped up the 12th consecutive month of record warmth across the world. The trend continued in June in many places, including parts of California, and the summer is on track to be a scorcher. 2023 was declared the hottest year on record, and 2024 may quickly claim the title.

“Heat sucks the moisture out of vegetation and soil,” said Dr Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, noting that, while this may be the worst heatwave to hit California this year, it will be far from the last.

While individual weather events can be difficult to connect to global heating more broadly, “heatwaves are the most directly impacted” by the climate crisis, Gershunov explained. Fueled by human-caused warming, heatwaves are increasing in both intensity and frequency, but they are also lasting longer and covering wider areas than before. This has only added to their potential to affect human health and put strain on systems.

“Heatwaves are certainly the weather extremes that are impacted by the steroids of climate change,” he said, explaining that the effect is similar to an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Summer weather has been extreme before, but it’s going to get hotter.

“The trend is toward more frequent, more extreme, longer-lasting heatwaves all over the world,” he said. “California is certainly no exception.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the summer of 2011, Victor Ramirez was working in a Walmart warehouse in Mira Loma, California, when he suddenly fainted. When he came to, he was lying on the floor, confused about what had just happened, with his head aching terribly. While he didn’t receive any medical attention—his boss only told him to go home if he didn’t feel well enough to keep working—he knew that this sudden bout of unconsciousness must have been triggered by the relentless heat in the warehouse.  

“When it’s hot outside, it feels even hotter within the warehouses, because of all the machinery,” Ramirez told Grist in Spanish. “If it’s like 110 outside, then it’s like 10 more degrees inside.” The heat was exacerbated by a lack of water and poor air circulation inside the warehouse.

Later that summer, he once again felt similar symptoms. He was flushed, profusely sweating, and his head was hurting. This time around, he knew these were signs of heat stress and told a supervisor, who asked Ramirez why he was “acting dumb” and questioned why he wasn’t working faster. In both instances, no one offered emergency aid or even recommended he go see a doctor. (Walmart declined to comment on Ramirez’s experience, stating that the site was operated by a third party, Schneider Logistics. A spokesperson for Schneider Logistics did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

“I’m nervous, for myself and my daughter,” said Ramirez, whose family relies on his wages to pay their bills. He now works at another warehouse, but the 55-year-old is constantly worried something might happen to him because of dangerous heat exposure on the job. Inadequate access to water, limited air conditioning, and cavalier attitudes about heat exposure are common in his industry. Ramirez’s fear is reignited every year when temperatures start rising and summer rolls around. 

Ramirez has good reason to be concerned. Extreme heat is the deadliest extreme weather event, with a threat level that’s intensifying because of climate change. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that dozens of workers die every year from workplace heat exposure, with a total of 436 deaths between 2011 and 2021, though federal officials have noted that’s widely recognized as an undercount. But no national regulation exists to shield indoor or outdoor workers from heat—a fact that has prompted Ramirez to fight for protections in Southern California, and others to advocate for stronger safeguards across the country. 

“Pay attention to the workers,” Ramirez said. “We are what matters.” 

As of this month, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is one step closer to creating America’s first-ever national heat stress rule for workers. The agency, which announced it would begin the process of drafting a federal heat rule three years ago, submitted a proposal on June 11 to the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, for review. It’s a critical step that signals that the rule could be finalized relatively soon—but legal experts and labor advocates worry about upcoming legal, bureaucratic, and political challenges to OSHA’s rulemaking process, especially in an election year. A Trump victory in November could spell doom for any federal heat stress rule—and even without an administration change in 2025, OSHA’s rule may be subject to legal challenges in the courts. 

Experts, advocates, and panels hosted by the agency suggest the standard could mandate worker and employer training on how to recognize and treat symptoms of heat stress, a process that allows workers new to an area to gradually adapt to hazardous temperatures, and a temperature threshold that triggers heat illness prevention programs that require more frequent, longer breaks. OSHA has previously stated that the rule’s mandates could begin to take effect once the heat index approaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit, Bloomberg Law reported. 

Such a rule could be transformative. “OSHA regulates the entire workforce,” said Cary Coglianese, the director of the Penn Program on Regulation and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “Heat affects every outdoor worker and some major industries—whether it’s construction, travel, transportation, I mean, you name it.”

According to Coliagnese, the draft proposal going to the White House marks the beginning of a review process that may take about 90 days—although it could be longer or shorter. “A lot depends certainly on how much of a push there is within the administration to get a rule out,” said Coglianese. 

The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on when it will finish the review. A spokesperson from OSHA said in a statement, “Heat is a serious workplace hazard that threatens the health, safety, and lives of workers every year,” adding that enacting a federal heat standard is a priority for the Department of Labor. “As of Tuesday, June 11th, the proposed rule is with the Office of Management and Budget for review, and we are one step closer to giving workers the protections they need and deserve.”

When the review has concluded, details of the proposed rule will be publicized, at which point the public will be given at least a 60-day period to submit comments to the agency on the rule. Coglianese warns that a rule with such wide-reaching impacts will mean OSHA is likely to receive plenty of comments. 

Once the comment period is over, OSHA will need time to reflect on and address any issues raised by the public. How long the agency takes on that “is a function of the comments that come in, of their priorities, and maybe of just how vexing some of the issues are,” said Coglianese. After OSHA has an updated draft, another White House review follows; if all goes well, the rule is then finalized and published in the Federal Register. 

OSHA’s latest progress in this process is welcome news to many advocates who have invested years into fighting for heat protections—like Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Xiuhtecutli participated in a working group that made recommendations to OSHA to help inform the proposed rule. But he worries the rulemaking process may drag on well beyond this year.  

“It could be a few more years,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I think the Biden administration is interested in making this happen, so I hope that they hurry up and do it.” 

Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas who went on a one-day thirst strike last year to call attention to the urgent need for worker protections agrees that when it comes to extreme heat, time is of the essence.

“We need this heat protection, as soon as possible. We need it yesterday,” said Casar. He added that he has confidence in the Biden administration in “getting this done right and getting it done quickly.”

But the yearslong battle wrought by workers and advocates to get a national heat standard on the table now faces a looming hurdle: the forthcoming presidential election. 

In Coglianese’s opinion, it’s unlikely that the rule will be finalized before November, or even by next January. He added that, if Donald Trump takes office, he will likely put a hold on any federal rules that have not yet been finalized. Even if a federal heat rule were to “squeak through” at the end of Biden’s term, Congress would have the authority to nullify the rule under the Congressional Review Act—and Coglianese expects that Trump would approve such a nullification. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

Advocates share Coglianese’s concerns. “[If] Biden loses the election, then it’s going to linger there indefinitely, or it could just be killed,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I hope that it continues to move forward speedily, because people’s lives depend on it.”

Experts’ predictions about the future of the rule reflect the recent politicization of extreme heat. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enacted anti-immigrant legislation that included a law that bans municipalities from requiring employers to enact protections, such as shade or water breaks, for outdoor workers. The bill closely resembled a Texas law barring localities from creating such regulations, which passed last summer. 

However, other communities have gone in the opposite direction. In Phoenix, a citywide ordinance was adopted in March mandating heat safety plans for all companies contracted by the city. 

On a state level, just six states—California, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have enacted heat protection rules for outdoor workers, while three of those states have established similar protections for indoor workers, too. 

California is the latest to do so, having just passed a law to enforce heat protections for indoor workers that requires employers to provide breaks, cooling areas, and water when the indoor temperature reaches 82 degrees. If the temperature exceeds 87 degrees, companies may also be required to install cooling devices, adjust work schedules, provide more breaks, and slow down workers’ production pace. Tim Shadix, legal director at the California-based nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center, describes it as the “most comprehensive” set of indoor heat protection regulations in the U.S. “Obviously when the rubber hits the road will be in how employers respond to it, and how it’s enforced,” said Shadix. 

But Shadix is hoping the OSHA rule will go further than the California rule by setting lower temperature thresholds that trigger heat exposure requirements. Shadix considers California’s thresholds “way too high” and thinks a lower federal threshold “would be a very good thing for workers.” 

However, Xiuhtecutli, from the OSHA working group, doesn’t expect the proposed federal rule to include a national threshold for temperatures. “They may leave that up to be determined by region,” he said. The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 1984 decision known as the “Chevron doctrine” that allowed federal agencies to more easily regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety, and other issues. The upending of this precedent diminishes the administration’s ability to enact policy changes via federal regulations, which suggests that passing a national heat standard for workers could be open to more legal challenges. 

Coglianese describes the road to finalizing a federal heat standard as “an uphill battle.” Still, in his view, the case for federal protections is becoming more and more obvious. “I think, in the long game, the heat is coming. The politicians trying to fight this are probably going to be ultimately on the losing end.” 

In the meantime, he asks, “How many lives will be lost from extreme heat?” In 2023, a record 2,300 people across America died from heat-related causes, and this summer could be even hotter than the last. “I hope that we can take steps to reduce that number, and my guess is that most Americans would probably feel the same way,” said Coglianese.