America's hottest city is nearly unlivable in summer. Can cooling technologies save it?

[dalton99a]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/27/phoenix-arizona-hottest-city-cooling-technologies

America’s hottest city is nearly unlivable in summer. Can cooling technologies save it?
Phoenix’s new ‘heat tsar’ is betting on less asphalt, more green canopy and reflective surfaces to cool the sprawling heat island
Nina Lakhani
Thu 27 Jan 2022 05.15 EST

A surge in heat-related deaths amid record-breaking summer temperatures offer a “glimpse into the future” and a stark warning that one of America’s largest cities is already unlivable for some, according to its new heat tsar.

Almost 200 people died from extreme heat in Phoenix in 2020 – the hottest, driest and deadliest summer on record with 53 days topping 110F (43C) compared with a previous high of 33 days. Last year there were fewer scorching days, but the death toll remained staggeringly high, with people experiencing homelessness and addictions dying disproportionately.

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, is accustomed to a hot desert climate, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island.

Scorching temperatures have made summers increasingly perilous for the city’s 1.4 million people, with mortality and morbidity rates creeping up over the past two decades, but 2020 was a gamechanger when heat related deaths jumped by about 60%.

[YorkRd]

1. It's so hot in Dubai that the government is artificially creating rainstorms

With temperatures in Dubai regularly surpassing 115 degrees Fahrenheit, the government has decided to take control of the scorching weather.

[link:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dubai-rain-cloud-seeding-heat-weather/|

[Quakerfriend]

2. It would be great if they could convert large swaths of asphalt into something green.

I lived in neighboring Tempe the summer Mount St. Helen blew, and that caused unbearable heat- 109 degrees at night!!

We lived in a place with no AC, just a swamp cooler & and drove around in a Vega with black seats and no AC- had to wet the seats down to keep from burning our legs!

I used to go jogging in the afternoon (120 degrees at times)wearing a rubber suit!
Luck I didn’t die !

I never appreciated the cool shade of PA so much when I returned!

[jimfields33]

3. How about stop building in deserts.

It was pretty stupid to build in the first place.

[lees1975]

9. It was the weather that was the attraction

Corporations moved in droves to Phoenix to get away from losing money on bad winter weather days and because Arizona's Republican leaning legislature protected low wages, busted unions and lowered their taxes. It's still one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, along with Las Vegas. Same thing happens in Houston, tax incentives, low wages, and developers throwing up homes in swamp land along the guif of Mexico that's less than 30 feet above sea level. They've been warned for decades that draining swamps and covering them over with homes, yards and streets would cause massive flooding and they were exactly right. Literally hundreds of thousands of houses and businesses flooded when Hurricane Harvey dropped over 50 inches of rain on Houston in just a few days.

But this country is driven by money.

[mike_c]

10. and in flood plains and in forests and in coastal cities and in....

Residential water use in Arizona is small stuff compared to agriculture, just like in neighboring California and throughout much of the American west. There are few places to live in the U.S. and elsewhere that don't present environmental challenges for human habitation. Some of us love living in the desert, just like others love living in forests (wildfire risk), riparian plains (flood risk), coastal cities (rising sea level), the U.S subtropics (hurricane risk), the southern midwest (tornado alley), northern states (lethal winter temperature risk), and on and on. Global climate change is going to exacerbate all of those risks. The population follows opportunity wherever it arises.

Building in the desert is not the primary problem. Farming in the desert is the worse problem, by far. Residential water use in Arizona is about 1/10 of agricultural use, and the primary driver is-- not surprisingly-- greed. And it's not urban development, it's rural for the most part.

I'm in Phoenix right now. The weather is freaking awesome. We will have about four months of heat in summer. We're recent transplants from the cool, foggy California North Coast. Sitting on the patio recently, my wife remarked that fall, winter, and spring in central Arizona are a whole lot like summers on the North Coast. That's one of the reasons we moved here.

[NEOBuckeye]

4. This is actually one of the dumbest things about the US

We have literally invested countless billions of dollars in building up metropolises and infrastructure in the fucking desert, of all places.

I visited Phoenix and Las Vegas 20 years ago. I found them both to be beautiful places—and totally unsustainable. Too many people, too little water, and too damn hot. And that was then.

The dislocation and suffering that is going to take place in the SW is going to be very bad. And it could have been completely avoided if not for American hubris.

[dalton99a]

5. +1. There will be an exodus from Phoenix and Vegas

The water is running out

[Picaro]

6. According to this Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida are worse

The dark red is due to the measurement is for days over 90 F. If the graphic was changed to days over 100 F I’m sure Phoenix would win.

I haven’t been to Phoenix for over 20 years. Even then, since we were visiting during the summer, the highs during the day exceeded 115 F.

I remember playing golf in heat that made me feel as if my nose hairs were crisping with each breath. There were only a few groups out because no local was going to play in that heat.

That this city exists is insane. That it is a golf mecca is even crazier. Without modern air conditioning, Phoenix would be uninhabitable, of course. Those who can’t live in air conditioned habitations—well, a lot will die.

But, now, what this article is saying is that it has become dangerous to even venture out at all. Capitalism creates some strange deformities in the markets—Phoenix and Dubai probably top the list.

Cheap energy and brute force cooling technologies have allowed explosive urban development in areas that were considered essentially uninhabitable pre-global warming. Now that they exist in all their resource hogging splendor and sprawl—what will the future hold?

Will there be a mass exodus? That’s very doubtful in the near term.

But we’ll be reading a lot more articles like this one, not just about Phoenix and Las Vegas and Dubai and Qatar, but about much of the Southern U.S.

[Timewas]

7. That map

Is not all that accurate, I live in southern Oregon and it shows 0 for those temps and I can tell you it has gotten progressively worse the last 10 years. Lot of over 90 days and humidity is more constantly higher.

[IbogaProject]

8. Map Might be Heat Index

Map Might be Heat Index. It can get deadly when the "wet bulb" temp gets over the human body temp. That means sweat can't cool you. Even NJ has hit lethal wet bulb temps. This is going to be a crisis over most of the world and most of the USA.