Positive Views of the Supreme Court Drop Sharply After Abortion Ruling
Madeleine Carlisle – September 1, 2022
Texas Challenges Elecetion Results at Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court stands on December 11, 2020 in Washington, DC. Credit – Getty Images—Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
Favorable views of the Supreme Court have dropped since the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, a new Pew Research Center survey found, driven largely by a steep drop in approval among Democrats.
In its 35 years of polling on the court, Pew has never documented a wider partisan gap in views of the institution. In August, just 28% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they view the Supreme Court favorably. That’s the lowest rating Democrats have ever given the court in the poll’s history—18 percentage points lower than in January before the court gutted abortion rights, and almost 40 points lower than in 2020.
Favorable opinions of the court among Republicans, on the other hand, have moderately increased. In January, 65% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents viewed the court favorably, while 73% said the same in August.
Overall, Pew found the American public is split over the Supreme Court: 48% of the public views the court favorably, while 49% holds an unfavorable view. Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at Pew Research Center, says this is the highest percentage of Americans sharing unfavorable views of the Supreme Court that Pew has documented in more than three decades. In August 2020, for example, Pew found that 70% of Americans held favorable views of the high court.
The survey released Thursday was conducted among 7,647 U.S. adults, including 5,681 registered voters, between August 1 and 14. Nonpartisan Pew Research Center said the intention of the survey was to understand the public view of the high court after its term concluded in June with several high-profile rulings along largely ideological lines, including the overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The portion of Democrats who believe the U.S. Supreme Court has too much power has almost tripled since 2020, and increased by more than 20 points this year alone: 64% percent of Democrats said the court has too much power, compared to 40% in January. The survey found that 45% of U.S. adults overall said the court has too much power, which is 15 points higher than in January. 48% of the public said the court has the “right amount of power” and only 5% said the court does not have enough power.
“We are seeing a shift in a lot of different components of how Americans view the court,” says Kiley. “We see a growing share of Americans saying that the court has too much power. A growing share of Americans also say that they see the court as conservative.”
Pew found Americans’ favorability ratings of the Supreme Court is similar to what it was in 2015, when the high court issued another controversial landmark decision: Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended same-sex couples the right to marriage. In July 2015 after the ruling, Pew found that 48% of Americans had a favorable opinion of the court, while 43% viewed it unfavorably, and 61% of Republicans viewed the court unfavorably. The partisan divide over the Supreme Court is even starker today.
DRIED UP: Texas cities in fear of running out of water
Saul Elbein – September 1, 2022
The American West is experiencing its driest period in human history, a megadrought that threatens health, agriculture and entire ways of life. DRIED UP is examining the dire effects of the drought on the states most affected — as well as the solutions Americans are embracing.
AUSTIN, Texas — As the Western U.S. suffers under its worst drought in a millennium, the government of Texas, a state that faces its own unique set of dangers from extreme weather, is at last turning to deal with the threat that climate change poses to its long-term water supply.
Texas’s situation is sufficiently dire that in July, a majority-Republican panel on the state legislature voted unanimously to require the state water planning board to consult with the state climatologist as it advises cities in planning to meet the state’s water needs in the future.
The rule change “removes the possibility that the political climate could harm [local water officials’] ability to plan responsibly for the future,” state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D), a major backer of the shift, told The Hill.
“It kind of insulates the regional water authorities from political pressures that would harm their ability to do what they need to do,” Johnson said.
But that process won’t bear fruit for years — and Texans increasingly worry that the crisis is here now.
Never rains but it pours
The most recent demonstration of the volatile climate was last month’s flash downpours that stunned Johnson’s hometown of Dallas — a record rainfall that interrupted the city’s longtime drought, running off baked earth and acres of asphalt infrastructure to flood much of the city.
Those kinds of events offer a foretaste of the future Texas can expect, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told The Hill.
“You saw record dry conditions week after week after week — and then all of a sudden, a summer’s worth of rain in a single day,” Hayhoe said.
For much of the state, annual levels of rainfall may not change much — but that average conceals potentially lethal extremes of drought and flood, she said. “The amount of precipitation is staying the same. But the distribution is changing. It’s getting more extreme in both directions.”
Even if rainfall totals and distribution both stayed the same — which is unlikely — the simple fact of rising heat under climate change could presage water shortages, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told The Hill.
“Lakes evaporate faster, water in the ground evaporates faster,” said Nielsen-Gammon, who is also a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
That’s a problem for a state whose water storage strategy relies heavily on a collection of nearly 200 open-air reservoirs, exposed at all times to the baking sun. Moisture sucked into the air can also worsen flash storms, making rain events large enough to overwhelm the ability of soils to absorb them and catchment infrastructure to trap them.
Population growth looms
When these disruptive impacts are added to the booming populations foreseen by the Texas Water Development Board — expected by 2070 to surge from around 30 million to 52 million — they create a situation that worries many water planners interviewed by The Hill.
Much of that growth is expected along the dry and vulnerable I-35 corridor that connects Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio, Austin and the enormous collection of towns and cities surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth. The highway roughly divides Texas’s wet east from its dry west.
With that influx of people will come new water-dependent industries, from manufacturing plants such as the new Tesla facility going up outside Austin to more than a dozen high-tech semiconductor factories. And even with climate change making the weather ever more extreme, the state is fighting hard to protect fossil fuels. Those take a lot of water too, particularly when oil and gas is extracted through fracking.
“If any community in the state fails, and its water supply, that is big national, international news, and then has impacts on, I would argue, on the economic growth and perception of Texas,” Robert Mace of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment told local station KXAN, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media.
The looming prospect of a more intense and unpredictable drought-flood cycle presents a fearsome challenge for water planners.
It’s also one that — at least as it pertains to climate change — local officials have largely been left to figure out on their own, state water experts told The Hill.
For now, members of the Water Development Board “certainly don’t appear to be addressing [climate issues] directly,” Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist, told The Hill.
In contrast to the state’s specific and data-driven approach to planning for population growth, “there isn’t any official projection as far as streamflow or groundwater recharge impacts from climate change,” he added.
“It’d be really nice if individual water suppliers weren’t left to their own devices to tackle the issue.”
But the Texas Water Development Board’s planning process has traditionally looked backward, not forward, in envisioning the worst-case scenario that managers should plan for.
“By not considering climate change, we’re counting on water that’s probably not going to be there in the future,” Mace told KXAN said. “And so that increases the risk of reservoirs going dry, and of people losing their water supplies.”
Incorporating climate planning, however, is extraordinarily difficult.
“The key word with climate is complicated,” Matt Nelson, a water resources professional at the Texas Water Development Board, told The Hill.
Even at the state level, Nelson said, models are ambiguous, leaving the coming effects on the ground unclear. That means that state officials who move quickly to, say, increase supply are at risk of installing expensive and potentially “maladaptive” infrastructure aimed at solving the wrong problem, he added.
The long-term trend of climate change — to the extent that it’s clear — is also easily drowned out in the near-term chaos of Texas weather, he said.
“There can be more substantial risk in the near term than a climate long-term effect,” Nelson said.
Local groups take action
Some individual water suppliers have taken the state’s absence as an invitation to make their own plans.
For the city of Austin, the onrushing threat of climate change has led the city to study its own vulnerability — and to secure its water supply out past 2100, by which point its population is expected to triple from 1.1. million to 3.3 million.
“Water utilities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change. The nature of our product is such that we have to be responsive and adaptive to these changes as they’re happening in real time,” program manager Marisa Flores Gonzalez of Austin Water told The Hill.
Over the turbulent century to come, “we may have periods of time where we have plenty of water around — more water than we want,” Flores Gonzalez said.
“But we need to be able to take advantage of those supplies when they’re present during average or wet conditions and store that water so that we can make use of it during drought times.”
Austin is exploring a number of ways to do this. City officials are scouting locations where excess water could be injected into natural subterranean caverns in periods of abundance — in effect creating an artificial aquifer, immune to evaporation, that the city can draw on during the extended dry periods to come.
Groundwater injection is a measure that many other cities around the state are pursuing — most notably San Antonio, an hour’s drive south of Austin, but also smaller cities such as El Paso and even folk music mecca Kerrville.
Dallas-Fort Worth and other cities of the north Texas sprawl are building new reservoirs as fast as possible, and both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are exploring ways to pipe in water from other basins as they look to a future where their own stores will be overtaxed.
But with “really out of the box unprecedented things are definitely being discussed, we often neglect the easiest and most common one — which is conservation,” Hayhoe said.
Austin, for example, has winnowed the amount of water needed per person per day by a nearly a third since the 1990s, and it’s about a quarter of the way through a campaign to switch all the city’s analog water meters to leak-detecting smart ones.
And the city is experimenting with pilot sewage recycling systems — which treats wastewater on-site for reuse in watering, fountains and flushing toilets — which could ultimately cut demand for water by 75 percent, KXAN reported.
At the extreme end of this strategy, the residents of Big Spring, Texas — in the state’s arid far west — drink purified and treated wastewater, a system officially called “direct potable reuse” and sometimes derided as “toilet to tap,” public radio station WHYY reported.
‘The lowest point that I’ve ever seen’
Nelson at the Water Development Board says the board is working to incorporate usable climate models into its planning process. Board researchers are working with Nielsen-Gammon to try and derive standardized rules and models that are sufficiently flexible to bring to bear on state planning processes, such as trying to figure out how changing heat levels will impact evaporation from different regions’ lakes and rivers.
The state itself lags behind growing cities such as Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, where local governments have done their own expensive climate forecasting — and many of which are already in the process of securing new supplies against their booming populations.
But most of Texas’s more than 1,200 incorporated towns and cities don’t have the resources to do their own climate planning — and are less likely to have multiple options to draw from in the case of a crisis.
That’s happening even just west of Austin, as former cattle ranches in the region known as the Hill Country — popular for its wineries and swimming holes — get converted into housing developments, which demand water for taps, toilets and lawns.
Wieman warned that these communities are draining the Lower Trinity Aquifer to the “tipping point where our demand for water resources has outpaced the ability of our aquifers and rivers to replenish themselves,” Wierman added.
A cruel paradox of Texas water politics is that those municipalities most vulnerable to climate change are likely to be least willing or able to prepare on their own.
The smaller the city, Nielsen-Gammon said, “the smaller the water supply — and the less likely they will be able to deal with climate change and possibly not even be willing to consider it because they have more immediate concerns.”
It’s those bodies that are at the greatest risk from climate change, Perry Fowler of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network told KXAN.
“If local entities aren’t already looking at fortifying their water sources, then they’re already really behind the eight ball on that,” Fowler said.
KXAN’s Mia Abbe and Christopher Adams contributed to this report.
Melting Himalayan Glaciers Are Making Pakistan’s Floods Worse
Archana Chaudhary and Aaron Clark – September 1, 2022
(Bloomberg) — Every year, as the weather warms, teams of Indian scientists trek the Himalayan mountains to study the Chhota Shigri glacier in India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh. For the past decade and a half, they’ve recorded the extent of snow cover, checked the temperature of the air and soil, observed the surface of ice formations and measured the discharge from seasonal snowmelt that feeds the river valleys below.
This year, record-breaking glacial melt washed the discharge measuring station clean away.
“We had installed it in June and by August we couldn’t even find the remnants,” said Mohd Farooq Azam, a glaciologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. “We had an intense heat wave in early summer when temperatures in March and April broke 100-year records. And we have had resulting glacial melt. Our team was on a glacier last week and we have seen record-breaking melt in the Himalayas.”Unprecedented heat waves that swept the planet this summer are melting snow and ice not just in Europe’s Alps but in the iconic Himalayan range, where the mountains shelter the largest reserve of frozen freshwater outside the North and South poles. Global warming is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers much faster than scientists previously thought, destabilizing a fragile system that’s helped regulate the earth’s atmosphere and key water cycles for millennia.
The impact is most acute in Pakistan, where floods have submerged farmland and cities, affecting more than 30 million people and killing upward of 1,000 since June.
There, glacial melt has added to severe monsoon rainfall driven by a warming Arabian Sea and the weather-warping effects of La Nina, creating what Pakistani officials have called a “climate catastrophe.” That deluge is just the beginning, however.
Extreme floods often lead to extreme drought. The Indus River basin, which begins in Tibet and flows through Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea near Karachi, is twice the size of France and generates 90% of Pakistan’s food. When the basin floods, much of the water flows to the ocean rather than seeping into the soil, paradoxically causing water scarcity. A World Bank study estimates that by 2050, 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion people in South Asia could be vulnerable to dwindling water supplies.Read More: New Weather Patterns Are Turning Water Into a Weapon
The consequences are poised to reverberate through the global economy long after the flood waters in Pakistan recede, adding to a litany of harvests from Brazil to France ruined by extreme weather this year. But disruption to a major cryosphere is also contributing to shifting global weather patterns that are warming oceans, raising sea levels and intensifying droughts, even in China.The Himalaya, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges contain almost 55,000 glaciers that feed river systems on which more than 1.3 billion people rely. More than 7,000 of those are in Pakistan itself, where melting ice and snow has formed thousands of high-altitude lakes prone to overflowing.“Science is very clear about the interconnectedness of the ocean and the active water cycle. Why are these two systems important? Because they regulate the earth’s atmosphere,” said Anjal Prakash, a research director and professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “The system that regulates the earth’s climate needs to be protected.”
India’s record-smashing heatwave, Pakistan’s floods and accelerating glacial melt in the “rooftop of the world” could shift the tenor of climate negotiations at COP27, which is taking place in November in Egypt. There, global warming is having adverse effects on the Nile, and making life harder for farmers in its increasingly salty delta.
Developing nations, responsible for a fraction of historical greenhouse gas emissions, will push their case for more funds from industrialized countries that have prospered for more than a century at the expense of the planet. The cash is meant to both compensate poorer nations for the adverse effects and help them adapt.
Pakistan is a glaring example. It’s classified as the world’s eighth most vulnerable country to climate change, but contributes 1% to global emissions of planet-warming gases, according to Mohsin Hafeez, Pakistan’s representative at the International Water Management Institute.
“Pakistan will need to be more vigilant and take more measures to build capacities to deal with climate change,’’ Hafeez said. “But Pakistan cannot manage things on its own.”
Floods and droughts have affected human civilizations since ancient times, but they’re increasing in frequency and intensity as the planet warms.
When the earth heats up, more water evaporates and is captured in the atmosphere, creating drought and, when it finally rains, a torrent. In Pakistan, which already gets annual monsoon downpours, it means severe flooding will become more frequent. The period from January to July 2022 was the sixth-warmest start to a calendar year for the globe in records going back 143 years, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Information.
Read More: Deadly Floods Are Wreaking Global Havoc
The crisis is already prompting calls for lenders to forgive Pakistan’s debt to help it cope. Even before the flood, the country was grappling with financial and political turmoil. It secured a $1.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund this week to avert an imminent default.
The flood damage, however, is worth upwards of $10 billion, according to Finance Minister Miftah Ismail, equivalent to nearly 3% of the country’s gross domestic product last year. Swirling waters have set back the economy, affecting millions of acres of farmland, including about 40% of the country’s prized cotton crop in the worst-hit province of Sindh, according to Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal.
In less developed nations like Pakistan, where large populations and widespread poverty stretch government resources, there’s also been chronic underinvestment in flood defenses and the aging dams and canals built to irrigate drier areas. The lack of investment means the Tarbela and Mangla reservoirs on either side of Islamabad have become so choked with silt sweeping down from the mountains that they’re less able to contain floodwaters and prevent inundation further downstream.
Pakistan may get aid to help shelter those displaced, but its financial problems mean there likely won’t be much left to invest in that infrastructure.
Pakistan’s Catastrophe Could Have Been Avoided: David Fickling
As Chair of the Group of 77, a coalition of 134 developing countries, Pakistan, along with India and others, should make a case for loss and damages from these extreme weather events at COP27, according to Fahad Saeed, an Islamabad-based climate scientist with Climate Analytics.
“The floods this year are a wake up call for everyone,’’ said Saeed. “This is the effect that a 1.1 degree Celsius rise has brought upon us. The result is climate events that are beyond tolerable levels of low and medium income nations.’’
The climate clock is ticking even on the tallest peaks. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal predicts the Himalayas could lose 64% of their ice by 2100 — within a human lifetime — reshaping the face of mountains that have inspired human endeavor.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya region, which stretches from Afghanistan to northern Myanmar, is home to iconic peaks, including Mount Everest and K2, which have attracted generations of explorers and climbers. Even that’s changing.
Snow and ice is crashing through mountain villages, leveling hotels and this summer prompted officials in Nepal to say they planned to move the base camp for Mount Everest expeditions off the rapidly thinning Khumbu glacier as crevasses increasingly appear in the area where climbers sleep. They told the BBC they’d move the site to a lower altitude where there’s no year-round ice.
“The heat waves this year and the massive floods in Pakistan are a warning,” said Azam, the Indian glaciologist. “This is the point at which we human beings simply have to turn back.’’
The US is drastically undercounting the cost of climate change damages
Tim McDonnell – September 1, 2022
The economic impacts of climate change are likely to be more than three times higher than what economists and US government officials have previously expected, according to a major analysis published Sept. 1 in the journal Nature.
The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is a metric used by the government to evaluate the costs and benefits of climate policies and investments in infrastructure. It projects the costs of flooding, crop failure, higher bills for air conditioning, and loss of life under different future climate change scenarios, and then translates that estimate into a cost per ton of CO2 emissions.
The SCC is an inexact measure, but it’s a critical tool for policymakers and is often cited in legal and political battles over clean energy spending and greenhouse gas regulations. If the cost is very low, then any spending required to cut emissions probably isn’t worth it. If it’s high, then more aggressive climate policies are economically justified.
Under president Barack Obama, the US’s official SCC was about $51. President Donald Trump slashed artificially that to about $4. President Joe Biden quickly re-established the Obama figure, and tasked a team of economists to develop a new estimate, a process which is ongoing. The Nature study, which was conducted independently by two dozen researchers from several think tanks and top-tier universities, is meant to inform the government’s analysis. It pegs the SCC at $185.
Why the previous social cost of carbon was much too low
The new estimate is much higher for several reasons. Trump’s estimate was limited to impacts in the US, whereas Biden’s and the new estimate are global (which makes more sense, given that the US has an economic stake in global supply chains, in addition to ethical obligations to consider impacts outside its borders). The new estimate also incorporates updated models of the damages themselves, reflecting the latest science on how severe climate change is likely to be and the implications for crop yields, health impacts, and other aspects of life and the economy.
Most importantly, the new estimate uses a lower “discount rate,” the rate by which future damages are given less value than current costs. (In other words, a dollar saved today is worth more than one saved tomorrow). Trump’s discount rate was 7%; currently the rate is 3%. The new estimate uses a rate of 2%, which the authors say more closely matches real interest rates and changes in the value of the dollar over time.
The Biden administration has not announced when it will update its official SCC. If it lands on a number close to what the Nature researchers recommend, it would help the administration make a stronger case on everything from new methane regulations to buying electric vehicles for government fleets.
(Bloomberg) — Torrential downpours claimed the lives of more than 1,000 in Pakistan, where almost half a million people are in relief camps. A massive deluge crashed across Mississippi in the past week, leaving the roughly 150,000 residents of capital city Jackson without reliable access to clean drinking water. Cascades of rain recently poured into Seoul’s subway stations and turned streets into rivers in one of the worst storms in more than a century.
The world has been swept by a series of deadly floods in recent weeks, destroying homes, inundating croplands, snarling mining operations and wreaking economic devastation.
In Pakistan alone, officials estimate the damage at more than $10 billion — a toll that was part of what forced the country to secure a $1.1 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in order to avert an imminent default. The country is now facing a looming food crisis with large swathes of farmland under water. Downpours have hit places as varied as India, the US South and the UK.
In a paradoxical turn, the torrents have come at a time when the planet is also besieged by crippling drought and dwindling rivers. While it seems to defy logic, the mechanics of the atmosphere make it possible for record-shattering floods to occur alongside widespread heat waves and drought. It’s not unknowable chaos, but rather the impact of accelerating climate change.
“As the air and oceans warm under a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases, more water vapor evaporates into the air, providing more moisture to fuel thunderstorms, hurricanes, nor’easters and monsoons,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
“Heavier downpours and more frequent flooding are clear fingerprints of the climate crisis,” she said.
How Are Droughts and Floods Connected?
The droughts and floods are connected. That’s partly because when moisture in the air is diverted from one region, it gets dumped somewhere else.
There’s also the lingering La Nina, which also contributes to floods and droughts worldwide. The phenomenon, caused when the equatorial Pacific cools, disrupts weather patterns worldwide. It can bring more rain to Indonesia, inundating palm plantations, while the southern US and California become drier, hurting cotton crops and wine grapes.
Climate change is the biggest driver. Earth’s rising temperatures mean that the warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles. Every increase of 1 degree Celsius boosts the capacity by about 7%. The period January-July 2022 was the sixth-warmest start to a calendar year for the globe in records going back 143 years, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Information.
“That increases the ceiling on how intense precipitation can become,” Swain said, adding that the hotter atmosphere also allows more water evaporation.
“That same process also increases the atmosphere’s propensity to act as a giant sponge and extract additional water from the landscape,” Swain said. “This is often less recognized than the effect on increasing extreme precipitation, but it’s still quite important: It largely explains the increased soil-drying effects of climate change and the effect of global warming on drought and wildfire severity.”
Take China’s Sichuan province. Just weeks ago, the area was in the grips of an historic drought that caused major power shortages and disrupted business for companies including Toyota Motor Corp. Now, the southwestern province, one of the country’s most populous, is being hit by floods. More than 119,000 people have been evacuated, and authorities are asking more than 300 mines, including 60 coal operations, to withdraw workers as a safety precaution.
In places like Colorado, where capital city Denver recently saw daily record rainfall, the showers aren’t undoing the deeper impact of the prolonged drought pattern that has gripped the US West. But it can be enough to spark flash floods, cancel flights and put homes, property and life at risk. In New Mexico, about 200 people at a national park were recently trapped for several hours during a downpour.
Other places, including parts of Australia, are seeing a broader shift to a pattern of deluges. At the start of 2022, a relentless stream of storms caused massive flooding across the southeastern part of the continent. In a three-month outlook, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology predicts more flooding is in store.
“With wet soils, high rivers, and full dams, and the spring outlook for above average rainfall, elevated flood risk remains for eastern Australia,” the bureau said in a statement.
In Pakistan, the extra moisture in the atmosphere gave the annual monsoon more power. That coupled with a rapid melt from regional glaciers “made a bad flood even worse,” said Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
“Add to that the encroachment of infrastructure and homes into floodplains, and you have a recipe for the flooding disaster that unfolded,” she said.
Many of Pakistan’s rice and vegetable crops have been wiped out. Wheat planting, which starts in October, is also threatened at a time when the world can ill afford another disruption to grain supplies. Even before the floods, the country was facing a wheat shortage.
Of course, flooding has impacted civilization since its start. Since 1980, 36 major floods in the US have caused $173.7 billion in damage across the country, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. But now the extremes are occurring more frequently, and they’ve grown in power.
“Unless we treat the underlying disease — the blanket of greenhouse gases thickened by burning fossil fuels and slashing forests — events like these will happen more often,” Francis said. Flooding will “intensify, last longer, and affect regions normally immune to them.”
Colorado River would need years of ‘biblical’ precipitation to be restored. The Gaggle plumbs Arizona’s water crisis
Kaely Monahan, Arizona Republic – August 31, 2022
The news reports are morbid. Bodies are being discovered in the newly visible muck of Lake Mead. But perhaps the most terrifying reality about the water situation involving the Colorado River is not the past; it’s the future for all of us. The water is drying up.
In early August, the U.S. Interior Department announced a water shortage that will trigger cuts in the water supply in Arizona and other parts of the Southwest. A United Nations environmental program said Lake Powell and Lake Mead had reached “dangerously low levels.”
The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the nation’s water projects, gave the seven states and 30 tribes that use the Colorado River eight weeks to come up with a plan to conserve more water.
The goal was to conserve an extra 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water, thereby stabilizing the rapidly dwindling reservoirs.
However, no plan was reached, and the clock keeps ticking.
Arizona has been fiercely conserving water for some time. But we share the Colorado River with California, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, as well as 30 federally recognized tribes.
This doesn’t take into account Mexico, which also uses the river as a water supply.
In this episode of The Gaggle, host Ron Hansen is joined by The Republic’s Brandon Loomis and Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU. Together they wade through the issues facing our state’s water supply and what government and policy leaders are doing about them.
Listen to the episode:
The best way to listen is to subscribe to The Gaggle on your favorite podcast app, but you also can stream the full episode below.
Do you have questions about Arizona’s political scene? We want to hear from you! Submit your questions to thegaggle@arizonarepublic.com or leave us a voicemail at 602-444-0804. Your question just might end up on a future episode!
A firefighter helicopter drops water to put out a wildfire in the Baixa Limia – Serra do Xures Natural Park near the village of Lobeira, Ourense province, northwestern Spain, on August 25, 2022. Credit – MIGUEL RIOPA- AFP/Getty Images)
While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.
Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other rural livelihoods have become impossible.
The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.
We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. It involves adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.
Our best hope lies in cooperating as never before: decoupling the political map from geography. However unrealistic it sounds, we need to look at the world afresh and develop new plans based on geology, geography, and ecology. In other words, identify where the freshwater resources are, where the safe temperatures are, where gets the most solar or wind energy, and then plan population, food and energy production around that. The good news is, there’s plenty of room on Earth. If we allow 20 square meters of space per person—around double the minimum habitable size for a house allowed under the International Residential Code—11 billion people would need 220,000 square kilometers of land to live on. There would be plenty of room to house everyone on earth in a single country—the surface area of Canada alone is 9.9 million square kilometers. Of course, I’m not proposing anything as absurd, but this is something to reflect on when it is claimed that a country is “too full” for more people.
The bad news is that no place on Earth will be unaffected by climate change. Everywhere will undergo some kind of transformation in response to changes in the climate, whether through direct impacts or the indirect result of being part of a globally interconnected biophysical and socioeconomic system. Extreme events are already occurring around the world and will continue to hit “safe” places. Some places, though, will be more easily adaptable to these changes, while others will become entirely uninhabitable fairly quickly. Bear in mind that many places will be uncomfortable if not intolerable by 2050—around the lifespan of most mortgages—we need to start planning where we make our homes now. By 2100 it will be a different planet, so let’s focus on some of the livable options.
Global heating is shifting the geographical position of our species’ temperature niche northwards, and people will follow. The optimum climate for human productivity—the best conditions for both agricultural and nonagricultural output—turns out to be an average temperature of 11°C to 15°C, according to a 2020 study. This global niche is where human populations have concentrated for millennia, including for the entirety of human civilization, so it’s unsurprising that our crops, livestock and other economic practices are ideally adapted to these conditions. The researchers show that, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, ‘1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years.’ They add that, ‘in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience mean average temperatures [that are currently found mostly] in the Sahara.’
As a general rule, people will need to move away from the equator, and from coastlines, small islands (which will shrink in size), and arid or desert regions. Rainforests and woodlands are also places to avoid, due to fire risk. Populations are going to shift inland, towards lakes, higher elevations and northern latitudes.
Looking at the globe, it is immediately clear that land is mainly distributed in the north—less than a third of Earth’s land is in the southern hemisphere and most of that is either in the tropics or Antarctica. So the scope for climate migrants to seek refuge in the south is limited. Patagonia is the main option, although it is already suffering from droughts, but agriculture and settlement there will remain possible as the global temperature rises. The main lands of opportunity for migrants, however, are in the north. Temperatures in these safer regions will rise—and will rise faster in higher latitudes than at the equator – but the average absolute temperature will still be far lower than in the tropics. Of course climate disruption brings extreme weather, and nowhere will be spared these increasingly common events—Canada reached temperatures of 50°C in 2021, making British Columbia hotter than the Sahara Desert, and then, a few months later, was hit by deadly floods and landslides that displaced thousands. Fires have blazed across Siberia’s tundra, and melting permafrost is a shifting, unstable ground on which to build infrastructure.
Happily, however, the northern latitudes are already home to wealthier nations that generally have strong institutions and stable governments that are among the best placed to build social and technological resilience to the challenges this century.
Problematically, many of them have also struggled politically with immigration to a far greater extent than have many much poorer countries (poor countries also host by far the greatest numbers of displaced people), and with a migrant “crisis” that is far smaller than the great climate migration we will see over the next 75 years. It may be more possible to shift a political-social mindset in the space of a few years, however, than to return the tropics to habitability. Consider that most of Europe’s nations each rely on tens of thousands of migrant workers just to harvest the crops they grow today. With better agricultural conditions across the north, the need for labour will only increase.
North of the 45°N parallel—which runs through Michigan in North America, France, Croatia, Mongolia, and Xinjiang in China, for instance—will be the twenty-first century’s booming haven: it represents 15 per cent of the planet’s area but holds 29 per cent of its ice free land, and is currently home to a small fraction of the world’s (aging) people. It’s also entering that optimum climate for human productivity with mean average temperatures of around 13°C.
Inland lake systems, like the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S., will see a huge influx of migrants—reversing the previous exodus from these areas—as the vast bodies of water should keep the region fairly temperate. Duluth in Minnesota on Lake Superior bills itself as the most climate-proof city in the U.S., although it’s already dealing with fluctuating water levels. Other upper Midwest cities around the lakes, including Minneapolis and Madison, are also likely to be desirable destinations. More southerly Midwestern cities face the threat of extreme heatwaves. The University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative researchers concluded that “eight of the top 10 cities facing the highest likelihood of extreme heat in 2040 are located in the Midwest,” including cities from Detroit to Grand Rapids. Further east, locations get riskier quickly, but Buffalo in New York State, and Toronto and Ottawa in Canada look to be safer choices for migrants from the coasts.
The 1.6 mile Cakewalk north of Grand Marais is the only section of trail that runs along the shore of Lake Superior outside of the Duluth Lake Walk. Here, Melanie McManus hikes the rocky shore of Lake Superior past the Tombolo Island.Brian Peterson-Star Tribune/Getty Images
Preparation and adaptation could enable some cities to survive on a coastal location. Boston, for instance, is far enough north to escape much of the projected extreme heat, and planners have developed a detailed strategy that includes elevating roads, building up coastal defences, and introducing marshes to absorb flood waters. New York City, which faces extreme threats but might be too important to fail, is similarly planning extensive defences, although it’s unclear how effective these will prove. Its planned Big U, a vast sea wall to protect the financial district of lower Manhattan would leave anyone living north of West 57th Street exposed to the waves. The city is already dealing with regular inundations, which in 2021 killed dozens, and saw people swimming in flooded subway stations and geysers erupting out of the streets’ drainage covers. (Many of the people who died when Hurricane Ida hit New York City in 2021 were poorer residents living in basement apartments that flooded.) Coastal cities that are far enough north and have steep enough coasts to protect against storm surges as sea levels rise will be safer.
Much of the rest of the U.S. will be problematic for one reason or another. The central corridor will see worsening tornadoes; below the 42nd parallel, heatwaves, wild fires and drought will be perilous; at the coasts, flooding, erosion and freshwater fouling will be an issue. Today’s desirable locations, such as Florida, California and Hawaii, will be increasingly deserted for the more pleasant climates of former Rustbelt cities that will experience a renaissance, as a globally diverse community of new immigrants revitalizes them.
Alaska looks the best place to live in the U.S., though, and cities will need to be built to accommodate millions of migrants heading for the newly busy Anthropocene Arctic. In 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a Climate Resilience Screening Index, which ranked Kodiak Island, Alaska, as being at the lowest risk of climate events in the country. By 2047, Alaska could be experiencing average monthly temperatures similar to Florida today, according to an analysis of climate models. As with everywhere, location is key, though—the residents of Newtok, Alaska, are relocating because melting permafrost and increasing erosion have caused portions of their village to wash away. The retreat of ice sheets and melting of tundras is already causing huge problems for indigenous communities, whose way of life is being irrevocably altered. Their terrible loss, and that faced by native wildlife—not to mention other dangers, including unknown pathogens lurking in the currently frozen tundras, waiting to be exposed—will be countered by the vast opportunities for development in the New North. This is where many of the tropical migrants will create new homes during the turbulent twenty-first century, while humanity battles to restore a liveable globe. Whether self-governed indigenous communities will welcome this influx of southern migrants or reject what is the latest in a long history of often-violent intrusions remains to be seen. However, people will move north and they will need to be accommodated.
The New North
With agriculture newly possible and a bustling North Sea Passage shipping route, the far north will be transformed. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet—the largest on Earth after Antarctica—will expose new areas for people to live, farm and mine minerals. Buried beneath the Arctic ice of Greenland, Russia, the U.S. and Canada, there is also useful agricultural soil and land to build cities upon, giving rise to a hub of connected Arctic cities.
Nuuk is one such city set to grow rapidly over the coming decades. The capital of Greenland (an autonomous outpost of Denmark) sits just below the Arctic Circle, where the effects of climate change are obvious—residents already talk of the years ‘back when it was cold’. Fisheries here are experiencing a boost: less ice means boats can fish close to shore year round, while warmer ocean temperatures have drawn new fish species further north into Greenland’s waters. Some halibut and cod have even increased in size, adding commercial value to fish catches. Land exposed by the retreating ice is opening up new farming opportunities with a longer growing season and plentiful irrigation. Nuuk’s farmers are now harvesting new crops, including potatoes, radishes, and broccoli. The retreating ice is also exposing mining opportunities and offshore exploration, including for oil. Nuuk stands at the edge of real economic gain. The country already has five hydroelectric plants to turn its abundant meltwater into power. According to projections Greenland will even have forests by 2100. It may be among the best places to live.
View over the old town. Nuuk the capital of Greenland during late autumn.Martin Zwick-REDA/Universal Images Group
Similarly, Canada, Siberia and other parts of Russia, Iceland, the Nordic nations and Scotland will all continue to see benefits from global heating. Arctic net primary productivity, which is the amount of vegetation that grows each year, will nearly double by the 2080s, with an end to cripplingly cold winters. Growing seasons will significantly expand, particularly around today’s farmland. The Nordic nations already enjoy relatively warm temperatures because of the North Atlantic currents, but continental temperatures, which can plunge below –40°C in winter, will also ease, making interior locations more bearable. Nordic nations score comparatively low on climate change vulnerability and high on adaptive readiness.
Global heating has already boosted Sweden’s per capita GDP by 25 per cent, a Stanford study found. The biggest greenhouse gas emitters “enjoy on average about 10 per cent higher per capita GDP today than they would have in a world without warming, while the lowest emitters have been dragged down by about 25 per cent,” the researchers found. The moral argument for including tropical migrants in the economies of the north is clear. The researchers estimate that India’s GDP per capita has lagged by 31 per cent owing to global heating; Nigeria’s has lagged by 29 per cent; Indonesia’s by 27 per cent; and Brazil’s by 25 per cent. Together, those four countries hold about a quarter of the world’s population.
Rapid ice melt will make the Northwest Passage—the sea route through the Arctic connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—open and navigable for shipping for much of the year, cutting shipping times by around 40 per cent. This will enable easier regional trade, tourism, fishing and travel, as well as open opportunities for mineral exploration. Port cities, such as Churchill in Manitoba, Canada, will profit. This barren outpost, wedged between boreal forest, Arctic tundra and Hudson Bay, has just 1,100 residents, who rely almost entirely on polarbear tourism. Churchill’s land was considered so undesirable that in 1990 the US freight company OmniTrax bought the town’s port from the Canadian government for $7. However, with an active migration programme recruiting people and businesses from around the world, the newly developed city could support international trade through its revitalized port on the Hudson Bay—the only commercial deepwater port in northern Canada. This could make it a key stopping and unloading point on the Northwest Passage for cargo ships coming all the way from Shanghai. Churchill is connected to Winnipeg and the rest of Canada—and the U.S.—via its restored railway line. And it’s just over 100 kilometres from Nunavet, Canada’s newest indigenous province, a growing Inuitgoverned territory.
Churchill could become a booming city. Indeed, Canada will be a key destination for our migrants, and the government is betting on it, aiming to triple the population by 2100 through immigration. Marshall Burke, Deputy Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, calculated that global heating could raise the average income in Canada by 250 per cent due to greatly expanded growing seasons, reduced infrastructure costs and increased maritime shipping.15 With a stable, noncorrupt democracy, onefifth of the world’s freshwater reserves and as much as 4.2 million square kilometres of newly arable farmland, Canada could be the world’s new breadbasket later this century.
Russia will be another net winner—its 2020 national action plan explicitly describes ways to “use the advantages” of climate warming. According to the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Russia “has the potential to gain the most from increasingly temperate weather.” The country is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat, and its agricultural dominance is set to grow as its climate improves. By 2080, more than half of Siberia’s permafrost will have gone, making the frozen north more attractive, with longer growing seasons, and able to support much larger populations, according to models. Though there is much potential gain, the loss of permafrost and of ice roads will be hugely problematic for the climate and also for many settlements that depend on frozen foundations for buildings, roads, railway tracks and other infrastructure. Engineering techniques exist to deal with the problem, but they are very expensive.
Other places that will see new or expanded cities include Scotland, Ireland, Estonia, and elevated sites with plenty of water, like Carcassonne in France, which is surrounded by rivers. In the global south, as mentioned, there is far less landmass in the high latitudes, but Patagonia, Tasmania and New Zealand, and perhaps the newly icefree parts of the western Antarctic coast, offer potential for cities. In Antarctica alone, up to 17,000 square kilometres of new, icefree land is projected to appear by the end of the century. This could offer an opportunity for development, but I fervently hope that Earth’s last wild continent will remain a precious nature reserve.
Elsewhere, people will move to higher elevations, including the Rocky Mountains in North America and the Alps in Europe. In the US, Boulder and Denver, both above 1,600 metres, are already attracting migrants, and Ljubljana in Slovenia is another alpine location with a rich underground aquifer system and lush agriculture.
People will aim for safer places, and they will be better off moving to locations that already have good governance, productivity and resources. Happily, there are many places where these coincide. Some of this migration will involve rapidly expanding existing towns and cities; in other places, such as Russian Siberia and Greenland, entirely new cities will need to be built.
Achieving safe settlement for hundreds of millions of migrants could require the compulsory purchase by international consensus of land held by current states, with compensation and a stake in the new cities and their industries. It could require a new kind of international citizenship. It could mean richer, safer latitude states becoming ‘care taker states’ for poorer, more vulnerable ones, during the crisis period of global heating until planetary restoration. It could involve charter cities, states within states, the extinction of some of the 200 nation states and consolidation of the remaining few into regional geopolitical entities. There are many alternative visions to today’s status quo of nation states, borders and passports – which are, after all, relatively recent.
Instituting global freedom of movement, for instance, would boost national economies, as well as saving or improving billions of lives. Open borders would, it’s fair to assume, result in very large flows of people—estimations range from a few million to more than 1 billion—and it could increase global GDP by tens of trillions of dollars. Among the catastrophic losses this century, we have so much potential to gain if we open our minds to different ways of living, unsticking people from their fixed abodes. People will move in their millions this century, and right now we have a chance to make this upheaval work through a planned, managed peaceful transition to a safer, fairer world. We must try.
Corporate landlords are gobbling up mobile home parks and rapidly driving up rents — here’s why the space is so attractive to them
Vishesh Raisinghani – August 30, 2022
Corporate landlords are gobbling up mobile home parks and rapidly driving up rents — here’s why the space is so attractive to them
The hunt for yield has pushed private equity firms and professional investors into new segments of the real estate market.
In recent years, sophisticated investors have snapped up multi-family units and single-family homes. Now, corporate landlords are targeting the most cost-effective segment of the real estate market: mobile home parks.
The most affordable housing available
Manufactured homes or mobile homes are considered the most affordable non-subsidized housing option in America. That’s because the owners own only the prefabricated unit and not the land under the home. The land is usually leased from the landlord of a trailer park.
The average monthly rent for a mobile home in 2021 was $593. That’s significantly lower than the average one-bedroom condo rental rate of $1,450. The mobile park rental also often includes utilities and insurance.
Rents typically rise 4% to 6% annually and renters have the flexibility to move their housing unit to another park. These factors make the manufactured home highly attractive to low-income households.
As of 2020, nearly 22 million Americans lived in mobile homes. That’s 6.7% of the total population or about one in 15 people across the country. However, the economic inefficiencies that make these manufactured homes affordable also make them attractive to professional investors.
Investing in mobile home parks
Factors such as below-market rents and disrepair make mobile home parks attractive for investors seeking to add value. The typical mobile home park lot costs $10,000, which means 80 lots would be worth $800,000 on average.
Put simply, the entry price for these parks is much lower than multi-family apartments and condo buildings across the country.
Professional investors can also raise rents significantly to improve the valuation of the property. Attracting tenants with higher incomes or improving the park’s amenities and infrastructure are other value-add strategies that make this asset class appealing.
The fact that moving a typical mobile home costs between $3,000 to $10,000 also means that most tenants are unable to afford the move. This gives landlords immense pricing power.
Meanwhile, the yield is much higher. The capitalization rate (the ratio of net operating income to market price) could be as high as 9%, according to real estate partners Dave Reynolds and Frank Rolfe, who together are the fifth-largest owner of mobile home parks in the U.S.
The largest mobile park landlord is real estate veteran Sam Zell. Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS) owns 165,000 units across the country and the asset is a key element of his $5.4 billion fortune.
In recent years, larger investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and private equity firms such as The Carlyle Group, Brookfield, Blackstone, and Apollo have also added exposure to this asset class.
Even Warren Buffett is involved. His firm’s subsidiary, Clayton Homes, is the largest manufacturer of mobile homes in the U.S., and also operates two of the biggest mobile home lenders, 21st Mortgage Corp. and Vanderbilt Mortgage.
You can invest too
Retail investors looking for exposure to mobile home parks have plenty of options. Acquiring a park is, perhaps, the most straightforward way to access this asset class. However, publicly-listed stocks and real estate investment trusts offer exposure too.
Sam Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ELS. Sun Communities Inc. (SUI) owns 146,000 units across the U.S. and some in Canada, while Legacy Housing Corp. (LEGH) builds, sells, and finances manufactured homes.
Retail and institutional investors could see more upside from this segment as the economic inefficiencies are ironed out.
Arizona AG, governor candidates call for Saudi Arabian water leases investigation
Rob O’Dell, Arizona Republic – August 30, 2022
Democratic attorney general candidate Kris Mayes is calling to investigate and potentially cancel the leases the State Land Department signed with a Saudi Arabian company that is pumping from Phoenix’s backup water supply in western Arizona.
Mayes is also calling for the Saudi Arabian company to pay the state approximately $38 million for using the water in La Paz County, which sits in a basin that could be tapped as future water source for the Phoenix metro area.
Mayes says the lease should be put on hold while they are investigated because they potentially violate the Arizona Constitution in two ways: they could violate the gift clause as well as a clause that requires state land and its products to be appraised and offered at their true value.
Fondomonte pays only $25 per acre annually, which is about one-sixth of the market price for farm land in that area, according to experts interviewed by The Republic as well as the state’s own mass appraisal for areas in and around Butler Valley.
Kris Mayes, Democratic candidate for Arizona Attorney General.
In addition, the water that is being pumped by Fondomonte is located in what’s called a transfer basin, meaning water sucked from the ground can be shipped to areas of the state where groundwater is regulated. That makes the water underneath the desert in Butler Valley extremely valuable.
State Land Department employees said the water being pumped from the ground could be worth as much as $4 million annually. But Fondomonte is paying just $86,000 annually to lease the land.
Money generated from the rental and sale of state land is earmarked to help fund K-12 education.
“One of the most egregious aspects of this water giveaway is that it is shortchanging our schools and our kids,” Mayes said. “We need to be maximizing the amount of money that our schools receive from state trust land and the water beneath it.”
Mayes held a press conference about the issue this month and discussed it at length in an interview with The Republic.
“I think most Arizonans find it shocking that our government is giving the state’s water away to a Saudi corporation at a time of extreme drought,” Mayes said. “This Saudi water lease is a flat out scandal and our current governor and attorney general allowed it happen on their watch.”
Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Mayes is not the only candidate for top public offices in Arizona calling for the leases to be terminated when contacted by The Republic.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake wants to cancel the leases as well, said communications director Ross Trumble.
“We want to terminate the Fondomonte lease and will examine all existing leases to ensure Arizona’s water and natural resources primarily benefit Arizonans, not overseas corporations,” Trumble said in statement.
The State Land Department is overseen by Ducey, who appointed current Land Commissioner Lisa Atkins. Both have declined to talk about the leases.
This week, the Hobbs campaign said the leases need to reflect the market and not be sweetheart deals for foreign and special interests. She also said in a statement that Arizona’s Groundwater Management Act needs to be updated to give rural areas more tools for regulating groundwater pumping.
She stopped short of calling for the leases to be canceled or investigated.
Mayes’s opponent in the attorney general’s race, Republican Abe Hamadeh, said in a statement that “government should not be subsidizing private industry, especially when it involves private or foreign entities freely accessing and capitalizing off our natural resources.”
He said the government has a duty to show private entities and foreign governments that Arizona is not for sale.
“I generally believe the attorney general should not be invalidating or overturning lawful contracts with private entities,” he said. “However, I have a growing concern that the agency tasked to care for our state land has been involved in recent controversies related to undervalued public land auctions and now the Saudi groundwater land deal threatening Arizona’s precious water supply.”
Mayes said the state can’t afford water deals like the one with Fondomonte.
“Arizonans deserve and attorney general who will be a watchdog over things like this,” she said. “I call for a cessation of these leases, an audit of the leases, and an investigation into this particular lease. … This is a particularly terrible place for the state to be engaging in this kind of behavior.”
Dramatic increase in deadly US heat waves now likely inevitable, but experts say there’s still hope
Doyle Rice, USA TODAY – August 30, 2022
A dramatic increase in deadly heat waves is now probably inevitable, a study published Thursday says.
The authors say there’s still hope that global temperature increases resulting from human-caused climate change can be curbed, which would avert even more catastrophic heat in some areas on Earth.
“The frequency of extreme heat waves is likely to increase by 3 to 10 times by the end of the century, depending on where you live in the U.S.,” study lead author Lucas Vargas Zeppetello told USA TODAY.
The authors say their results highlight the need to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions and to protect populations, especially outdoor workers, against dangerous heat.
Heat already kills more Americans each year than any other weather hazard, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, according to the National Weather Service.
The findings suggest carbon dioxide emissions from human activity could drive increases in exposure to extreme temperatures in the coming decades, even if global warming is limited to 2 degrees C, in line with the Paris Agreement.
“The record-breaking heat events of recent summers will become much more common in places like North America and Europe,” said Vargas Zeppetello, who did the research as a doctoral student at the University of Washington and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.
High temperatures pose a threat to public health, with extreme heat contributing to heat cramps, heat exhaustion and chronic illnesses, according to the study.
“This is especially dangerous for hot and humid places like the South and Eastern Seaboard, but we’ve seen the consequences of extreme heat on the West Coast as well, so there really is no place in the U.S. where this will not be an issue,” Vargas Zeppetello said.
People in equatorial regions will suffer even more
The forecast is even more ominous in other parts of the world:
“For many places close to the equator, by 2100 more than half the year will be a challenge to work outside, even if we begin to curb emissions,” Vargas Zeppetello said.
In a worst-case scenario in which emissions remain unchecked until 2100, “extremely dangerous” conditions, in which humans should not be outdoors for any amount of time, could become common in countries closer to the equator – notably in India and sub-Saharan Africa.”
The study looks at the “heat index,” which measures the effect of heat on the human body. A “dangerous” heat index is defined by the Weather Service as 103 degrees. An “extremely dangerous” heat index is 124 degrees, which is considered unsafe to humans for any amount of time.
According to study co-author David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, the number of days with dangerous levels of heat in the southeastern and central U.S. will more than double by as soon as 2050.
“It’s extremely frightening to think what would happen if 30 to 40 days a year were exceeding the extremely dangerous threshold,” Vargas Zeppetello said. “These are frightening scenarios that we still have the capacity to prevent. This study shows you the abyss, but it also shows you that we have some agency to prevent these scenarios from happening.”
