Consider This from NPR - Forecasters predict another sweltering summer. Are we ready?

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

The summer of 2023 saw skylines choked by Canadian wildfire smoke, coral cooked in hot tub-warm ocean water and a month straight of 110-degree Fahrenheit high temperatures in Phoenix.Scientists say 2024 will likely bring another hotter-than-normal summer and, with it, the potential for more climate-driven disasters.NPR's Rebecca Hersher says forecasters predict an extremely active Atlantic Hurricane season.And NPR's Kirk Siegler reports on a shortage of federal wildland firefighters ahead of a high-risk wildfire season.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

With one sentence, pulmonologist Ravi Kalhan succinctly described the weather that a lot of Americans experienced last summer. Well, it's been pretty awful outside. He was talking specifically about Chicago, where he works at Northwestern Medicine. The city was blanketed in smoke from Canadian wildfires. Someone I know described it as the smell of burning tires. And then normally driving into the city, I can see the beautiful skyline, and there was no sight of it over the past few days. It's a disconcerting feeling. But it was pretty awful outside in a lot of other places, too.

In cities like New York and Washington, which broke records for bad air quality, and in the Florida Keys, where the ocean reached hot tub temperatures. Finor Montoya-Maya with the Coral Restoration Foundation told NPR the damage was shocking. The coral have pretty much gone to dead. And perhaps nowhere had it worse than Phoenix, which hit 110 degrees on 31 consecutive days. Eric Brickley with the group Feed Phoenix described it this way. It's a sweltering heat, the kind of heat that will burn the bottoms of your feet from working out on the asphalt for too long. All told, 2023 was the hottest summer on record in many parts

of the U.S., and it was by far the hottest year for the planet as a whole. We are at record levels for 11 consecutive months now, so since last June through April, and we're still counting, of course. That's Karen Gleason with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. She says we're likely to see more global heat records in the coming months. In fact, it has already been so hot that 2024 is guaranteed to be one of the five hottest years on record. Consider this. Another sweltering summer is on its way. And with it, the potential for climate-fueled disasters.

How ready are we? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR. One reason scientists expect the summer to be hot is that ocean temperatures are abnormally high, especially the Atlantic. A hot Atlantic Ocean also usually means more hurricanes. The forecast is out for this year's Atlantic hurricane season, which starts June 1st, and NPR's Rebecca Herscher reports it's not good news. The National Hurricane Center is predicting between 17 and 25 storms will form in the Atlantic this year. At least eight of those are expected to be full-blown hurricanes as opposed to weaker tropical storms.

This season is looking to be an extraordinary one in a number of ways. Rick Spinrad leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. The forecast is the highest NOAA has ever issued for the May outlook. One big reason for the hyperactive forecast? Favorable wind conditions, meaning that vertical winds in the Atlantic are less likely to tear apart storms as they form, which happened a lot last summer. Also, water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are abnormally high. They've been in record-breaking territory for almost the entire last 12 months. Gavin Schmidt is a climate scientist at NASA. He says human-caused climate

change is the main reason for the off-the-charts heat in the Atlantic. And all that extra heat is like fuel for hurricanes, helping them get big and powerful and giving them more moisture, which then falls as heavy rain. That large number of hurricanes spells danger for tens of millions of Americans in the eastern half of the U.S. Emergency officials stress that even relatively weak storms can cause huge amounts of damage and many deaths from flooding. And hurricanes routinely affect people hundreds of miles from the coast, Spinrad warns. Remember, it only takes one storm to devastate a community.

And it's prudence to prepare now because once the storm is headed your way, it all happens so rapidly, you won't have the time to plan and prepare at that point. That means making a plan now for how you would evacuate or hunker down depending on the storm. Eric Hooks is the deputy administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He says the key to a good hurricane plan is to think about your specific situation. Do you have medication that requires refrigeration? Do you have a medical device that requires electricity? Do you have mobility challenges that make evacuations harder? Get prepared now, he says.

Atlantic hurricane season runs through the end of November. NPR's Rebecca Herscher. As we mentioned at the top, record global temperatures didn't stop when summer ended last year. They have continued every month since, in part thanks to a strong El Nino climate pattern. El Nino also drives warm, dry winters in parts of the northwestern U.S. and the Rockies, places like Ketchum, Idaho, where Scott Runkle is a high school science teacher. I went down to Littlewood Reservoir in the beginning of January to go ice fishing,

and it wasn't frozen. And that's never happened. This weird winter weather is worrying, especially because scientists say climate change could make it more common. You worry about the water, the snowpack, and the farming, and the fire season when the soil's drier. So it just has these snowballing effects that lead to compounding problems. On top of that, increased fire risk is another issue. Roughly a quarter of federal wildland firefighter jobs are vacant. NPR's Kirk Sigler reports that has put fire managers in the West

on edge. Southwest Idaho is on a U.S. government top 10 list of wildfire crisis zones due to recent droughts in overgrown forests close to a population of half a million people. The Wilderness Ranch subdivision northeast of Boise is accessed by steep, narrow, one-way-in, one-way-out dirt roads. There's no cell service. Homes are clustered amidst the pines. You know, 250 houses just in Walnut Ranch. You got 30-some houses up Daggett Creek over there. So it's with trepidation that the young rural fire chief here, Colton McCarthy, looks ahead to another summer of uncertainty.

There aren't enough wildland firefighters. Yeah, it's absolutely a concern. Across the West, volunteer fire departments like his are often the first to respond when a wildfire ignites. But if it spreads out of control, the federal army of elite hotshot crews, engine captains, and air tankers are called in to the rescue, if they're available.

McCarthy figures the U.S. Forest Service will probably do what they've been doing lately, cobble together private contractors, bring in firefighters from outside the country. You know, they're from other areas. They go on big, you know, going fires all over the place. They certainly have the experience there, but not necessarily the initial tech experience and the local knowledge. As they scramble to hire, federal agencies can at least point to a recent temporary pay bump for firefighters. It was first enacted by President Biden in 2021 and recently extended through September. But the labor crisis has been compounding for at least a decade. Grant Beebe is one of the nation's top fire bosses at the

National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Housing is super expensive everywhere in the West. I was just reading a story about flight attendants living out of their cars, you know, working out of the Pacific Northwest. That mirrors what a lot of our firefighters experience. They can afford to take the job, but they can't afford to live in the place they're taking the job. In longtime firefighting hubs like Boise, a smokejumper manager might make $66,000, where the median home price is now half a million. In Missoula, Montana, starting wages at a new Amazon warehouse

are roughly equivalent to rookie firefighter pay. That's a hard recruiting environment. I know more people that are looking for a way out than are looking for a way in. Lucas Mayfield is a former hotshot crew boss who now runs the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. He says in some national forests, the job vacancy rate is far higher than 25 percent. And particularly troubling is that experienced engine captains, squad leaders, they're leaving. Well, you're losing that talent pool that can make educated and informed on the ground decisions that can minimize the impacts of wildland fire.

Another big reason behind the high attrition is the fact that fire seasons are now year round. Fire managers like Grant Beebe point out that wildfires are getting more intense and dangerous due to climate change. Those of us who are in the profession are in it for a reason, you know, but we shouldn't expect people to sacrifice their health, their mental health, their families to do this job, right? We have to make it a better place to work. So that's what we're working hard on. There is pressure on Congress to pass a stalled bill that would make the recent pay increases permanent.

A lot of firefighters are being asked to do two jobs right now, protect people and property from fire, but also prevent them. One chilly morning on a hilltop near Boise, crews lit a controlled burn. Lily Barnes is deployed here on a hotshot crew from the nearby Wallowa Whitman National Forest in Oregon. It helps eliminate, find fuels so that if there is a large fire that comes through, they aren't as available. The hope is that would slow down an unplanned wildfire before it burns into a town a mile away. The Federal Fire Service is leaning heavily on people like Barnes who love this job. Yeah, it's rewarding. We're surrounded by highly motivated,

intelligent individuals. It's a good team environment. It's 14. We're surrounded by highly motivated, intelligent individuals. It's a good team environment. It's 14 days on here, three days off, then probably off to an actual wildfire as the West warms. And PR's Kirk Sigler in Boise. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan and Tyler Bartlem. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Rachel Waldholz, and Eric Whitney. Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. And in case you have not heard,

Consider This is now also a newsletter, just like on the podcast. We'll help you break down a major story of the day, and you'll also get to know our producers and hosts, and we'll share some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.