Consider This from NPR - How To Protect Ourselves From Extreme Heat — And Our Planet From Climate Change

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

We know that climate change is making all sorts of extreme weather events more likely all around the globe. So what can we do about that?In this episode, NPR's Allison Aubrey gives us tips on how to avoid heat-related illnesses when temperatures soar to dangerous levels.And we hear from a climate researcher about what steps we would need to take on a global scale to try and bring temperatures down.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. Summer is supposed to be hot, but 120 degrees hot? That was the high temperature recently in Palm Springs, California. Roman Ruiz coordinates the city's homelessness response. Many of the individuals are finding refuge under freeway overpasses, or there is like a wash area that kind of goes through the city,

and that's the area that's kind of most covered with many of the bushes and the shaded trees and things like that. The wash area he mentioned is like a dry creek bed. He says that during the day, the city has space for people to cool off in their cooling centers, but those close at night. Dr. Gemma Kim runs a mobile health clinic in Palm Springs and has been treating unhoused patients. We're seeing like heat stroke, heat exhaustion, cramping because of the heat. It's really all due to dehydration. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, in Florida, an ocean heat wave off the state's coast has broken records for water temperatures.

Usually in the summer, it can feel like climbing into a bathtub here, but right now it's more like a hot tub. Water temperatures typically average about 88 degrees in the summer. Now they're about five degrees higher. Water just offshore in Florida Bay near the Upper Keys hit 98 degrees last week. So that is literally hot tub hot. That's reporter Jenny Stoletovich from member station WLRN in Miami. She spoke to some climate scientists about what they're seeing.

They're concerned about coral reefs and ocean life. Now with such high temperatures this early in the summer, scientists are worried about widespread bleaching. That's when coral expel the algae they need to survive and they die. That's already happening elsewhere. Andrew Baker is a coral scientist at the University of Miami, and he says it's happened in places like Belize. This is clearly kind of a Caribbean region-wide thing, and that's, I think, why people are starting to think that it probably has some legs and is likely to be with us for a while. And then, halfway around the globe in India, a different sort of extreme weather event. Record monsoon rains that killed over 100 people recently.

Jashmita Patuk reported from Delhi. So this is monsoon season, so heavy rains are expected during this time of the year. But climate change is making intense spells of rain more frequent, and that's increasing the likelihood of landslides and flash floods. Climate change is also making heat waves more common. So overall, extreme weather events

are increasing in India because of climate change. We know that climate change is making all sorts of extreme weather events more likely everywhere. Coming up, we hear from a climate researcher about what we can expect in the future, and we learn how to avoid heat-related illnesses. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. It's Thursday, July 20th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR. Excessive heat advisories have been a common theme all across the United States this summer. So if you want to spend some time outdoors, what steps can you take to protect yourself from heat-related illnesses? NPR's Allison Aubrey spoke to the experts and has some tips for us. Dr. Neil Gandhi has seen plenty of heat exhaustion in his ER. As an emergency medicine doctor at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, the heat can be a serious health concern. But he says people tend to underestimate the risks.

I think the most common mistakes really kind of fall into two categories. One is what I call too much, too soon. When a heat wave comes along, most people are accustomed to working and spending most of their days indoors in the comfort of A.C. Then all of a sudden, on a Saturday or Sunday, they opt to spend six, seven hours outdoors. These individuals, they're very sensitive because their bodies are not acclimatized to handle the stress. The good news is that our bodies can acclimate. And what it takes is spending time outdoors each day in the heat before you decide to set out for a long day of cycling, hiking, golfing, or even tackling your home improvement or gardening project. David Eisenman is a physician and researcher at UCLA. He explains how our bodies adjust after repeated exposure to the heat.

One thing that happens is that our body starts to learn how to sweat sooner. Also, the blood flow to the skin improves. And when there's more blood flow, it carries more heat. So it can get the heat out of the core of your body, cooling your core temperature better. He says there's no magic number of hours of exposure that it takes to adjust. It's more of a continuum. So bottom line, the more time you spend in the heat, the more acclimated you can become. Another common mistake people make is failing to prehydrate before they go out in the heat. Sounds kind of obvious, but lots of people underestimate. And in the extreme heat, you may start to become a little dehydrated before you sense thirst.

Eisenman says eight cups a day of water is reasonable on a typical day. But being outside in the heat, you may need more. Most people aren't hydrated enough as it is. So I would double that on a day when you're exposed to a lot of heat. I would be making sure that you're peeing frequently and that the urine is pale clear. And that's when you know you're hydrating yourself correctly. Another way to protect yourself is to find out if the medicines you take can make you more vulnerable to the heat. Common blood pressure medications taken by millions of people can have a dehydrating effect, making them more susceptible to heat exhaustion. And when it comes to a really simple thing you can do on a hot day, the way you

dress can make a difference, says Wafi Momin, a cardiologist at Memorial Hermann Health System in Katy, Texas. As far as being outdoors and what to wear and in terms of color, I would seek lighter colors because those tend to reflect heat rather than absorb heat compared to darker colors such as your blacks and dark blues and then loose fitting clothing on top of that. He says the first signs of heat-related illness can go unrecognized or even ignored. Things like slight fatigue, dizziness, nausea, or a headache. Those are the telltale signs of heat, exhaustion creeping in. That's a way of your body telling you you need to cool down. So Dr. Momin says don't ignore the signs. The worst of the symptoms can come on very quickly without realizing it. And all of a sudden, you know, your body's overheating to a point where you won't really be able to drink enough fluid at that juncture to kind of reverse what's already gone on.

That's how people end up in the ER. So he says be safe rather than sorry by acclimating, planning ahead to stay hydrated, and then recognizing when it's time to get out of the heat. That was NPR's Alison Aubrey. The world is a flashing display of unpredictable extremes right now, with heat waves, droughts, and floods hitting countries all around the globe. There's wildfires, too. NPR's Elsa Chang spoke with Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment,

about the role that climate change plays in all of these events. Can you just talk about, like, how does climate change make all these simultaneous events more likely? Climate change is a strong driver of heat waves. When we have a chance to look in detail at individual heat waves and ask whether or not climate change has increased the probability of that kind of event, we see the signal of climate change increase in the odds at least 95% of the time. Climate change is also an important driver of the heaviest precipitation events. We know that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and an atmosphere that holds more moisture can dump more. And a large fraction of the heaviest rainfall events also have their odds increased by the climate change that's already occurred. And the extremeness of the weather events that we're

seeing right now, are they along the lines of what climate models have been predicting for quite some time now? They are. And we can be unfortunately confident that until we get climate change under control, we're going to be seeing more and more of these. Okay, so to be more specific, what would you say is in store for us during summer, say 5, 10, 20 years from now? It's important for people to understand that this is not a new equilibrium in climate, that we are continuing to warm as long as we continue to release heat trapping pollution, and that as it gets warmer, we will see an increasing number of these extreme events, and we can expect these to continue to increase in severity and frequency as long as the warming increases. Even when we bring

the emissions of the heat-trapping pollutants down to zero, that will stabilize the temperature, and we can expect the trend in the extremes to stabilize. But what we really need to do eventually is bring the temperature back down if we want to decrease the exposure to these extreme temperatures and heavy precipitation events. Okay, so to bring the temperature back down, to actually go in reverse so that this is not the new normal and the new normal keeps getting worse and worse, what do we need to do now besides just stop burning fossil fuels? The first step to cooling the climate is to stop burning fossil fuels and to decrease other sources of emissions, including emissions from agriculture, manufacturing, all the sources of greenhouse gases. After that, we need to start working on removing the accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We can do that through a wide variety of technologies. The best and the safest ones are growing more forests, taking better care of our agricultural and grassland soils. The process isn't going to be quick, and it's not going to be simple,

and nature can't provide everything we need, but it's important that we start making investments in carbon dioxide removal. At the same time, we're working hard on decreasing emissions. I feel like we ask this question to every climate expert in this moment that we're in, and that is, how optimistic are you that there is the will and the money to adapt quickly enough? There's no question that we have the technology and that the technology is affordable. There's no question that we've seen meaningful progress in many countries around the world, including in the United States. But there's also no question that we're going much more slowly than we should

be. Personally, I hope that the kinds of damaging extremes that we've seen in the last few weeks and are likely to see in the future really will be ringing an alarm bell that will mobilize the kind of resources that we need to deploy to deliver the solutions that are within our grasp. That was Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, speaking to my co-host Elsa Chang. Earlier in this episode, we heard reporting from Madison Ahmed of station KVCR in San Bernardino, California.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.