As the Southwest grapples with climate change, rising temperatures are a warning to everyone

For millions of Americans in the Southwest, the extreme heat due to climate change is a literal matter of life and death. Just ask Amy Dishion, whose 32-year-old husband Evan died unexpectedly from the heat while walking six miles with friends Phoenix. Dishion had to raise their three-month-old baby.

“I lost my life partner, my favorite person and the father of my child to extreme heat because he went for a walk during hot weather,” Dishion told Salon. “My life will never be the same again. It has been incredibly difficult and I’m not sure how I will ever bounce back from this loss. Evan is someone no one expected this to happen. He was a marathon runner in his prime. My husband was exceptional – he overcame so much to become a doctor. And now, because of the heat, he can’t see his daughter grow up and I have to clean up the pieces.”

Even if not fatal, the heat can reduce the quality of life for people in the desert. Hazel Chandler, a 77-year-old field organizer from Arizona for the climate organization Moms Clean Air Force, lives in Phoenix with stage four cancer and has many other health problems that make her particularly sensitive to heat. As a result, whenever she goes outside, she must take oven mitts with her in case she is forced to touch metal railings as the metal will burn her hands.

“My metal internal spinal fusion heats up if I’m outside for even a minute or two and it feels like someone is holding a hot poker on my spine,” Chandler said. “Two summers ago the air pollution was so intense that I coughed so much that I broke my spine. We must take heat safety seriously and do everything we can to clean the air we breathe.”

There are undoubtedly many more stories, like Dishion’s and Chandler’s, that are simply not known to the general public. The American Southwest has experienced it unprecedented heat waves in 2024largely due to human-induced climate change. Even when the heat is not at its peak, it can still be brutal for those trapped in it.

Lisa Materna and her husband moved from one Arizona city to another in July — specifically from a third-floor apartment in Goodyear to a one-story house in Glendale — and didn’t expect a tough move as peak temperatures in Phoenix were still had not been achieved. West Valley in the metropolitan area. Yet they moved right at the beginning of the monsoon season, with high humidity and temperatures of 40 degrees.

“We had no elevator, and I was able to get little to no help since I had just found out I was pregnant and the nausea had gotten bad in the first trimester,” Materna recalls. “My husband, God bless him, moved 90% of our apartment down those three flights of stairs by himself. There were moments of exhaustion and dehydration, but all you can do is take your time, schedule a good time of day to exercise (preferably early in the morning because nights are still 90+ degrees) and tons of have water on hand.

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Four months later, the Maternas still find it too hot to comfortably unpack their home. “Our goal is to achieve everything in the coming weeks now that it has cooled down,” Materna recalls.

Between June and August 202426 major US cities had at least one dangerous extreme heat wave. According to Climate Centralanthropogenic climate change is so extreme that one in four people on Earth would not get relief from the heat caused by climate change in the summer of 2024. On August 13, global exposure peaked when half of all living humans – 4.1 billion people – were forced to endure “unusual temperatures that are at least three times more likely to result from climate change.”

This problem is especially prevalent in the Southwest, as epitomized by the Phoenix metro area. Maricopa County, the state’s most populous area, has a population of 4.5 million and is the fastest growing county in the United States. About 400 Arizonans died against heat throughout 2023, many in Maricopa Countywith some climate activists insist fossil fuel companies are held legally responsible for these deaths. As humans continue to burn fossil fuels for transportation, manufacturing and agriculture, emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap heat and unnaturally warm the planet.

If you live in the Southwest, chances are you are well aware of this. According to Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, this is because living in a desert as the Earth warms unnaturally poses many logistical problems.

“Climate change is threatening water resources, increasing challenges to food and fiber production, and endangering human health in the Southwest through drought, wildfires, intense precipitation, sea level rise and marine heat waves,” Declet-Barreto said. “These changes impact ecosystems, infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries and other economic sectors. Effective adaptation requires flexible decision-making and the integration of technological innovation with indigenous and local knowledge.”

Declet-Barreto explained that as extreme heat increases in the Southwest, there is a high likelihood that “drought, floods and wildfires,” as well as climate change, “will shape the region’s demography through the migration of people from Central America to Central -Encourage America. the southwest.”

Poor and older people who work outside the home will therefore be particularly vulnerable to health problems.

“This year during what we at (the Union of Concerned Scientists) call Danger seasonwe have seen a lot of heat and wildfires in the (southwest),” Declet-Barreto said. “Rescue helicopters could not fly to save motorcyclists in Death Valley because it was too hot,” almost 130ºC.)

Because people have that It has not been possible to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissionsthese conditions will only get worse in southwestern states like Arizona.

A billboard shows the current temperature of over 100 degrees on June 5, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. According to the National Weather Service, Phoenix will experience record temperatures above 100 degrees as a pattern of high pressure builds over the region. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Even people without serious health problems are suffering from the increased heat. Jackie Grinder, a 48-year-old marketing professional who lives in downtown Phoenix, told Salon that she’s “watched it get hotter and hotter, and seen how little — if anything — the cities here have done to combat it or to help. citizens have to deal with it. In fact, they’ve contributed to it by doing nothing but adding more concrete, taking away greenery, and letting utilities raise prices over and over again to the point where you can pay $500 to $700 a month to build your house keep it a little below 80. in the summer.”

Grinder added that every year she has seen less rain, more dust and skyrocketing electricity rates as residents try to stay cool.

“This is a time bomb and no one is doing anything about it,” Grinder said. “Meanwhile, citizens pay taxes and suffer.”

The ticking clock may be more noticeable in the southwest, because there are already very high temperatures there for most of the year, but there it is hardly limited. Peter W. Reiners, professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona, explained that this region is not warming faster than parts of the American Northeast and Alaska.

“The kind of temperature we normally associate with extreme heat (dry bulb temperature) is only part of the story and can mislead us about where the greatest threat from warming really lies,” Reiners said. “While there is some debate over whether dry or moist heat (as measured by wet bulb temperature) will kill more people in our warming world, it is clear and ‘scary as hell’ that high wet bulb temperatures have the potential to make large parts of the world – parts where vast numbers of people now live – uninhabitable much of the time.”

From the northeast to the southwest and for large areas in between, the extreme heat will test human adaptability to the limit.

“The human toll and the threat of massive geopolitical disruption resulting from its increasing frequency and intensity is a truly frightening prospect,” Reiners said. “Even in the US, I think it is underappreciated that many parts of the country are expected to experience many more dangerous heat days per year, as measured by wet bulb temperature. (They) are not in the Southwest, but in the Southeast, the East Coast and much of the Midwest.

But people can still adapt to the rising heat. Reiners pointed out that narrow streets reduce the amount of heat people experience, trees and vegetation can cool the environment by “evaporationWhile providing shade and painting roofs and materials white increases the albedo (the sunlight reflected into the room), so that people there experience less heat. Yet these mitigation measures can only achieve so much; Short of cutting carbon emissions, there’s no way to turn back the clock on heat.

Likewise, it would be a mistake to assume that humans can simply escape climate change by avoiding obviously warm areas like the Southwest. As Reiners noted: climate change will affect you wherever you live.

“There is a danger in channeling all our (very well-founded and legitimate) concerns about climate change into some kind of consolation by disparaging the supposedly ignorant people who live in places with extreme heat,” Reiners said. “The smug feeling that only people in places like Phoenix are susceptible to the dangers of global warming is simply wrong. As the number of warming-related weather disasters and wildfires increases around the world (and just look at Vermont, North Carolina, Canada as a few examples) it should be crystal clear: there is no refuge from climate change.”

Materna understands this all too well. She has already seen how her quality of life has changed because of the heat.

“There are laws that require pets not to be walked when temperatures reach 95 degrees,” Materna said. “Outside time is limited for students when it gets too hot. Most people here have learned not to go outside on hot days. You acclimatize. Find a friend with a pool and carry water everywhere.”

She added: “My heart goes out to those who are unhoused as there is little to no relief as temperatures rise.”