Transcriber: Jorkden Herry Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
I have personal experience with extreme heat.
When I lived in Arizona in my cheap rental apartment units,
air conditioning unit would break down every summer during the hottest period.
And during one such episode,
I started to suffer from extreme heat.
My heart started beating out of control.
I started to panic and I couldn’t find a way to cool down.
In an act of inspiration,
I crammed my head inside of the freezer
until I started to feel a little bit better.
The only good thing to come of this whole experience
was that it was hot enough inside of my apartment
to kill the bedbugs.
So like myself, extreme heat impacts everyone.
But there are some people who are most at risk for extreme heat.
That includes older adults, people with pre-existing health conditions,
low income households who can’t afford to pay for air conditioning,
and people who work or exercise outdoors.
And how can we wrap our heads around how extreme heat impacts human health?
And one way to do that is to think about numbers.
And of course, I'd like to start just with the number one.
Because every illness, injury or death is personal to someone you love.
I think of Zack Martin.
Zack’s mother described him as the type of kid
who, on the first day of school,
would go out of his way to introduce himself to the new student
who just moved to the district and helped them feel comfortable.
At the age of 16.
His friends called Zack a gentle giant.
He weighed 320 pounds
and was 6′4.
Like many kids his age, his dream was to play professional football.
Sadly, he wasn’t able to realize his dream.
A few years ago, at a high school football practice,
he was running wind sprints and he collapsed abruptly on the field.
Zack fell into a coma and would die a couple weeks later.
Unfortunately. Zach's death could have been prevented.
In addition to Zack,
I think of literally the thousands of people in the United States each year
who die from extreme heat.
So extreme heat kills more people
than hurricanes or tornadoes or flooding in the United States.
This is a picture of a refrigeration truck of a heat wave that occurred
during the Chicago Food Festival.
This normally jovial occasion would have had a refrigeration truck full of food,
but these trucks had to be repurposed to store the extra dead bodies
that the morgues could no longer hold.
Extreme heat’s impact also extends beyond our borders, globally.
Scientists are currently racing
to find the cause of a very mysterious kidney disease
that kills otherwise healthy people in their prime working years.
All of this story is likely complex.
It is very possible that just simply working in hot and humid conditions
for a prolonged period of time can cause your kidneys to fail.
And in these poor and middle income countries,
they can’t afford to pay for dialysis; this is essentially a death sentence.
I also think of the millions
of newborns each year that are affected by extreme heat.
Extreme heat spikes the body's hormone and cholesterol levels,
which may induce labor prematurely.
And while it may not sound like a big deal
to be born a few weeks earlier or a pound later,
it can have some lifelong consequences.
For example, you're more likely to develop diabetes
or die prematurely if you're born in these circumstances.
So returning back to Florida.
Extreme heat is still a problem here,
even though nearly every household has access to air conditioning.
The areas that have the highest heat illnesses, shown in purple,
tend to have a few things in common.
They have a high proportion of outdoor workers,
such as around Lake Okeechobee,
and in the panhandle, the state around Mariana.
Other areas that we’re concerned about
are areas with low income African-American households
that can’t afford to pay for air conditioning.
Extreme heat is a problem now.
And it’s unfortunately only going to get worse due to climate change.
So consider a place like Miami.
Even with some of the aggressive actions that we’ve already started to commit to
with the Paris Climate Accords, by the year 2080,
even considering those actions,
a place like Miami will be six degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average
and more humid, and we'll start to really feel more like Cuba.
Furthermore, those extreme heat events,
like the one in Chicago, will become more intense, frequent and longer lasting.
So these projections are very serious,
but sometimes they lead to some provocative headlines, such as…
Will places like Phoenix, Arizona,
become uninhabitable by the end of the century ?
And while this is a fair question,
I personally think a better question is:
who will these places become uninhabitable for?
And one way to think about this is to consider another place.
Such as Dubai, that has a similar climate to Phoenix.
This is the lobby of the Palazzo Versace, Dubai,
that was originally slated to have
the world's very first outdoor air conditioned beach.
So for the rich, extreme heat might just be an inconvenience, at least for now.
But for those risk groups that we've talked about,
extreme heat is literally a matter of life and death.
Returning back to Zack Martin,
the high school football player who collapsed on the field.
His mother, pictured here, took her grief and channeled it into a call to action.
She worked tirelessly to convince the Florida legislature
and the Florida High School Athletic Association to pass new regulations.
They were just passed in 2020
to make sure a similar tragedy
didn’t befall any other child in the state.
But how many more people have to die before you take similar actions
for those other risk groups that we talked about?
Climate change is much more than just polar bears.
What does climate change actually feel like?
Well, in the case of extreme heat,
it might taste like salt,
it might smell like sweat,
and it might feel like your vision blacking out.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
There are some things that you can do to help with this.
It may sound simple, but simply getting to know your neighbors,
introducing yourself, sharing your contact information can help during a disaster.
Consider a place like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
which is one of the world’s leaders in this approach.
They literally have a volunteer block captain in every single neighborhood.
And when a disaster like a heat wave strikes,
they have someone knocking on everyone’s door to make sure
the least of us are okay.
Somewhat surprisingly,
there are no federal regulations or guidelines protecting outdoor workers.
Just some voluntary recommendations.
So passing meaningful occupational health and safety reforms,
such as passing the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness Prevention Act,
will prevent needless injury, illness and death.
And finally, transitioning to clean, healthy renewable energy
100% by the middle of the century
is the only thing that we can do
to stop it from making this problem worse.
And we think that it’s time for the Sunshine state
to start living up to its name.
Thank you.
(Applause)