Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come
The real question is not whether superheated cities are sustainable. With enough money and engineering skill, you can sustain life on Mars. The issue is, sustainable for whom?in downtown Phoenix, when the temperature soars to 115°F or higher, heat becomes a lethal force. Sunshine assaults you, forcing you to seek cover. The air feels solid, a hazy, ozone-soaked curtain of heat. You feel it radiating up from the parking lot through your shoes. Metal bus stops become convection ovens.
But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water.
found that by 2100, if emissions continue to grow, 74 percent of the world’s population will be exposed to heat waves hot enough to kill. “The more warming you have, the more heat waves you have,” says Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The more heat waves you have, the more people die. It’s a pretty simple equation.”
But warming is not happening at the same rate everywhere. The Arctic, for example, is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Why? It’s a classic climate feedback loop: Ice and snow are highly reflective, bouncing sunlight back into space. But as the region warms, sea and land ice declines, exposing more open land and ocean, which are darker and absorb more heat.
The loss of water through sweat is itself a health hazard. The average person contains roughly 40 liters of fluid. On a hot day, when the body is struggling to keep from overheating, a person can easily lose a liter of sweat per hour. When the body is down one liter, basic functions are impaired. When it’s down five, fatigue and dizziness set in. Ten liters disturbs hearing and vision and you will likely collapse — a condition known as heat stress.
Retrofitting Phoenix — including reining in suburban sprawl, revising building codes to improve energy efficiency and ventilation, and creating greener urban spaces — is certainly imaginable, but “if we are going to be serious about this, a big investment is required,” Hondula says. “We need billions of dollars.”
Counterintuitively, the biggest health effects of rising heat often occur at night, when vulnerable people such as the elderly badly need the chance to cool down. Without that chance, they can succumb to heatstroke, dehydration, and heart attacks. This appears to be what happened during the heat wave that hit Europe in 2003, killing 70,000 people, mostly in buildings without air conditioning.
Other places, such as Stuttgart, Germany, are trying to re-engineer the airflow of the whole city. Stuttgart is an industrial town surrounded by steep hills at the bottom of a river valley, where heat and polluted air linger. To help cool things off, city planners have built a number of wide, tree-flanked arterial roads that work as ventilation corridors and help clean, cool air flow down from the hills.
But mostly what you see in Phoenix is asphalt and concrete, cars and malls, and big, crowded highways. In this sense, it is like virtually every other city in America, except with a few more palm trees and a heavy dependence on air conditioning. As Hondula says one afternoon as we drive through Encanto Village, a historic middle-class neighborhood in Phoenix, “The number-one heat adaptation here is forking over money for the electric bill.
On hot days, Juarez’s small apartment feels like a cave. She has heavy purple curtains on the windows to block the sun. “I could not live here without air conditioning,” she tells me. Because she has poor credit, she doesn’t qualify for the usual monthly billing from Salt River Project, her utility. Instead, to pay for electricity and keep her AC running, SRP has given her a card reader that plugs into an outlet that she has to feed like a jukebox to keep the power on.
Pullman’s death sparked wide media coverage and street protests over APS’s disconnect policy, and pushed Arizona regulators to ban power shut-offs on hot summer days. These deaths also raise larger questions about the future of cities like Phoenix. As temperatures soar in the coming years, the real question is not whether superheated cities are sustainable. With enough money and engineering skill, you can sustain life on Mars. The issue is, sustainable for whom?an equal-opportunity killer.
We pull into Sands Park, a typical suburban green swath with basketball courts and picnic areas. Heitz and Farretta head to a concrete bathroom, where they find a middle-aged woman sitting in the shade on the floor near the entrance.
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