Over the past century, the fossil fuel industry has made a habit of letting others clean up their messes. Today, the U.S. is dotted with millions of “orphaned wells,” crevices in the earth that companies once used to extract oil and subsequently abandoned once they were no longer considered profitable. But additional help appears to be on the way: This week, the Biden administration announced it would make nearly $660 million in funds from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law available to states to plug more of these polluting fissures.
“These investments are good for our climate, for the health of our communities, and for American workers,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a press release on Monday. “With this additional funding, states will put more people to work to clean up these toxic sites, reduce methane emissions and safeguard our environment.”
Unless they are plugged — filled with concrete and stripped of unused equipment — abandoned oil wells can seep hazardous compounds into their surroundings. A growing body of research has shown that orphaned oil wells are a major source of planet-warming emissions, since the steel and concrete walls that reinforce them are prone to cracking over time and releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A 2020 Reuters investigation found that in 2018, orphaned wells emitted an estimated 280,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of the emissions from the total amount of oil that the U.S. uses on a typical day.
Legally, companies are required to plug their wells after they finish extracting fuel, but regulators have long struggled with enforcement. Part of the challenge is financial: It costs an average of $20,000 to seal a single well, and many companies file for bankruptcy before following through. As a result, experts estimate that there are 2 to 3 million abandoned oil wells across the country, with the majority concentrated in oil-and-gas producing states such as Texas and Pennsylvania.
The Department of the Interior said that the new funding is part of its goal to advance environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate pollution borne by low-income people and communities of color across the country. Numerousstudies have demonstrated that past practices like redlining — in which financial services such as loans and insurance were systematically denied to people in certain neighborhoods of color — have concentrated oil and gas wells in majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in places like Los Angeles.
The hazards of living near abandoned wells go beyond their contribution to climate change. Orphaned wells are a public health threat since they can emit dangerous chemicals like benzene and toluene, which have been linked to conditions such as blood cancer and liver disease. In rare cases, they can leak methane into nearby buildings, allowing the gas to build up to dangerous levels.
This week’s announcement marks the second major round of funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law to plug orphaned wells. States used the first set of funds, which was announced last August, to plug approximately 3,000 wells. Officials have until the end of the year to apply for this new round of grants, which range from $1 million to $80 million, depending on the number of wells in the state.
“At the end of the day, it’s a lot of money, but it’s nowhere near enough,” Josh Axelrod, a senior policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “The big question is whether the federal government should really be in the business of cleaning this up since technically, the industry was supposed to be on the hook for these wells over the years.”
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A new study by scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Durham University and Princeton University asserts that bolstering the protections of current conservation areas is as important for keeping biodiversity intact as establishing new protected areas, a press release from Durham University said.
The researchers found that, of the approximately 5,000 species studied, about 70 percent of them are either completely unrepresented in protected areas; are found in protected areas that have been downsized, downgraded or have lost their official status — known as PADDD events; or would be particularly at risk of extinction if land use were to shift in the future.
However, the team found that, by strengthening the protections that already exist in conservation areas, and enlarging current park networks across one percent of the land on Earth, crucial habitats for 1,191 wildlife species that are at a heightened risk of extinction can be protected.
“We looked at ~5000 species of terrestrial vertebrates and mapped out where their suitable habitats occur across the world. We find that of these species, 1463 species have less than 10% of their habitats currently in protected areas (which we feel is insufficient representation in protected areas), 2308 species have at least 100 hectares of their habitats falling within parks with documented PADDD events (which means some or all of their nominally protected habitat is not actually being protected), and 407 species have not been affected by PADDD events but are reliant on parks that might experience increased land use change in the future (that is, they occur in parks that are likely to experience degradation in the future),” lead author of the study Dr. Yiwen Zeng of NUS told EcoWatch in an email.
The study, “Gaps and weaknesses in the global protected area network for safeguarding at-risk species,” was published in the journal Science Advances.
When a government decides to take away some of the legal protections for a park and it is downgraded, downsized or “degazetted,” it can become more vulnerable to potentially damaging human activities. These can include mining, forest clearing for the expansion of infrastructure and other destructive actions.
“A majority of PADDD events globally are linked to industrial-scale resource extraction or development. In some cases, PADDD events are not necessarily harmful to biodiversity — for example, when countries restore land rights to displaced Indigenous people by giving them control over protected areas. But certainly in those cases where a protected area is downgraded in status or degazetted in order to make way for logging, mining, and other harmful extractive activities, biodiversity will be harmed,” Zeng told EcoWatch.
The study found that PADDD events have occurred on more than 687 million acres of parks as of 2021.
One example is the habitat of Cambodia’s critically endangered frog Megophrys damrei. The protected habitat sits within a national park, but is experiencing ongoing habitat loss and degradation.
“Unfortunately, across the world, nations are not doing an adequate job of protecting their parks, which leaves those special places open to habitat destruction. And in many cases, countries are downgrading the protected status they have given to parks. So, as a result, lots of sensitive species suffer,” Zeng told EcoWatch.
The researchers found that if another 127 square miles of wild spaces in Indonesia were given protection, suitable habitats for 53 additional species that currently have limited, unprotected habitat could be preserved, the press release said.
The critically endangered songbird Sangihe golden bulbul is found in just one place on Earth: Sangihe Island in Indonesia. The entire population is estimated to be from 50 to 230 individuals living in one unprotected area. There have not been any of the birds documented on plantations, which suggests it only thrives in intact forests, meaning enhanced conservation would benefit the species.
“There are many wonderful examples in conservation of people fighting to protect species, but there is always a risk that when you take your eye off the ball, pressure builds, and hard-won protection is lost,” said Dr. Rebecca Senior of Durham University in the press release. “Designating parks on paper is not enough; they need to be in the right places, with the right management, and they need to last.”
It is a make or break time in human history to create and preserve protected areas in order to safeguard the world’s biodiversity.
“This study establishes a geography of arks: Where new parks can be created, and where to restore and reinforce existing parks, to boost wildlife conservation,” Zeng said in the press release. “Many global discussions on conservation rightfully center around the need to create new protected areas. These include discussions at the COP15 United Nations biodiversity conference in December 2022, where a target to protect 30% of the planet’s lands and seas was adopted. But our study also shows the importance of ensuring that protected areas remain effective at keeping out harmful human activity.”
So how would the expansion of park networks across only one percent of Earth’s land mass lead to the protection of essential habitats for nearly 1,200 species that are at risk of extinction?
“This can be achieved if the expansion and strengthening of park networks is done in key locations. These are locations that target places where the largest number of potentially vulnerable species occur. Note, however, that we are absolutely not saying that the world’s protected areas should be expanded by only 1%. For many reasons, we are big supporters of the 30×30 idea,” Zeng told EcoWatch.
What parts of the world contain the most potentially effective conservation areas that are not yet protected in terms of number of species?
“There are critical areas for biodiversity around the world that need protection. It’s not as though one continent or one country holds all or most of these places. Having said that, though, we can single out a few nations that can greatly contribute to saving the world’s biodiversity by protecting key places. These include Madagascar, Malaysia and Peru just to name a few examples,” Zeng said.
There are actions individuals can take to help strengthen the protection of existing parks, Zeng told EcoWatch.
“People need to let their political leaders know that they care about biodiversity and want to see more wild places protected to save species, sustain healthy ecosystems, and provide opportunities for people to connect with nature. And, of course, they can show their support for parks by visiting them and enjoying all they have to offer, just so long as they do so in accordance with park rules,” Zeng told EcoWatch.
Zeng emphasized that the bottom line is that effectively managed parks are essential to the planet’s biodiversity.
“There [have] been a lot of promising developments with the signing and adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This gives us a target and guide towards increasing biodiversity conservation efforts worldwide, but of course this needs to be backed up by action and proper financing as well. What is clear, though, is that parks need to be protected, and if they are not, they will be damaged or destroyed, and biodiversity will suffer,” Zeng said.
Plastics are everywhere. They’re used to make food packaging, bags, water bottles and for many other common applications. As they break down, their tiny particles — known as microplastics — end up in the ocean, on the highest mountaintops, in our lungs and in our blood.
The problem with plastics is that they stay in the environment for years, posing hazards for humans, animals and the environment. But what if there were a different kind of plastic that would biodegrade in your backyard compost bin about as quickly as a banana peel?
A group of researchers led by scientists at the University of Washington have come up with new bioplastics that biodegrade naturally and relatively quickly — unlike traditional plastics, which do not biodegrade, or other types of bioplastics, which need to be processed in commercial facilities in order to biodegrade — and they’re made from the cells of the blue-green cyanobacteria known as spirulina.
“We were motivated to create bioplastics that are both bio-derived and biodegradable in our backyards, while also being processable, scalable and recyclable,” said senior author of the studyEleftheria Roumeli, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering, in a press release from the University of Washington. “The bioplastics we have developed, using only spirulina, not only have a degradation profile similar to organic waste, but also are on average 10 times stronger and stiffer than previously reported spirulina bioplastics. These properties open up new possibilities for the practical application of spirulina-based plastics in various industries, including disposable food packaging or household plastics, such as bottles or trays.”
For the study, the researchers formed spirulina powder into a multitude of shapes using heat and pressure, which is the same way conventional plastics are processed and created. The mechanical properties of the spirulina plastics are similar to single-use plastics derived from petroleum.
The study, “Fabricating Strong and Stiff Bioplastics from Whole Spirulina Cells,” was published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
The scientists chose spirulina for their bioplastics because it is already being used for cosmetics and foods and can be cultivated on a large scale. As they grow, spirulina cells also sequester carbon dioxide, which means as a raw material for plastics spirulina is not only carbon neutral, but has the potential to be carbon negative.
“Spirulina also has unique fire-resistant properties,” said lead author of the study Hareesh Iyer, a UW materials science and engineering doctoral student, in the press release. “When exposed to fire, it instantly self-extinguishes, unlike many traditional plastics that either combust or melt. This fire-resistant characteristic makes spirulina-based plastics advantageous for applications where traditional plastics may not be suitable due to their flammability. One example could be plastic racks in data centers because the systems that are used to keep the servers cool can get very hot.”
Because the research team used a similar processing approach as traditional plastics with their bioplastics, large-scale manufacturing of the spirulina-based materials would be easier.
“This means that we would not have to redesign manufacturing lines from scratch if we wanted to use our materials at industrial scales,” Roumeli said. “We’ve removed one of the common barriers between the lab and scaling up to meet industrial demand. For example, many bioplastics are made from molecules that are extracted from biomass, such as seaweed, and mixed with performance modifiers before being cast into films. This process requires the materials to be in the form of a solution prior to casting, and this is not scalable.”
Making bioplastics out of spirulina has been done before, but the bioplastics the UW-led research team came up with are stiffer and stronger. They are also recyclable. The researchers changed processing conditions like time, pressure and temperature to improve the bonding and microstructure within the bioplastics, studying their stiffness, toughness and strength along the way.
The plastics still have some hurdles before they will be ready for industrial use, like being sensitive to water and somewhat brittle.
“You wouldn’t want these materials to get rained on,” Iyer said in the press release.
The researchers are still examining the bioplastics’ fundamental principles, and hope to create an assortment of bioplastics for various uses, similar to petroleum-based plastics.
“Biodegradation is not our preferred end-of-life scenario,” Roumeli said. “Our spirulina bioplastics are recyclable through mechanical recycling, which is very accessible. People don’t often recycle plastics, however, so it’s an added bonus that our bioplastics do degrade quickly in the environment.”
One of the world’s busiest airports, Los Angeles International (known by its airport code LAX) has banned sales of single-use plastic water bottles.
On June 30, LAX officials shared on Facebook that a ban on single-use plastic bottle sales in the airport would take place immediately. Officials recommend that visitors bring reusable alternatives and use the water bottle refill stations located in the various terminals.
The ban follows a previous policy, adopted in 2021, to phase out single-use water bottles and reduce plastic waste at Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which includes LAX and Van Nuys Airports. The policy is part of LAWA’s Sustainability Action Plan (SAP), which includes targeting a zero-waste future.
“Eliminating single-use plastic water bottles is the right thing to do for our airports, our communities and our environment,” said Justin Erbacci, CEO of LAWA, as reported by KTLA.
According to Erbacci, the LAWA Board of Airport Commissioners plan to make the airports zero waste by 2045.
LAWA reported in its single-use plastics water bottle phase-out policy that more than 9 million plastic water bottles were sold at LAX in 2019 alone, averaging more than 24,000 bottles each day.
“Moving away from single-use plastic water bottles and towards reusables reduces plastic waste and pollution to help passengers reduce their environmental impact while traveling,” LAWA officials said in the policy document.
The ban of plastic water bottle sales includes vending machines and events happening at the airport. The ban does not extend to other bottled drinks outside of water, nor does it impact bottled water from flight services on aircrafts. Water will still be available in single-use cartons, glass bottles and recyclable aluminum bottles.
LAX is the second airport in the world to enact a ban on plastic water bottle sales, following San Francisco International Airport (SFO) which banned plastic water bottles in 2019. In 2021, SFO’s policy extended to include other types of beverages as well.
The ban is one part of LAWA’s sustainability plan, which also includes net-zero carbon emissions from LAWA operations by 2045, 100% renewable electricity use by 2045 and no drinking water used for non-potable purposes.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
More than 61,000 people died because of record-breaking heat in Europe last year, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. The summer of 2022 was the hottest period ever recorded on the continent.
Researchers looked at heat-related deaths during the summer of 2022 and found that women in Europe made up more than 60 percent of deaths and that adults over the age of 79 made up over half of all deaths. Study authors said that this is a jump of more than 25,000 heat-related deaths from the period spanning 2015 to 2021.
Italy, Spain, and Portugal had the highest mortality rates linked to the heat, emphasizing the vulnerability of Mediterranean countries to heat-related mortality.
“Our study highlights the accelerated warming observed over the last decade, and emphasizes the urgent need to reevaluate and substantially strengthen prevention plans,” said Marcos Quijal, a co-author of the paper. “These trends also suggest that without effective adaptive responses, Europe could face a significant increase in premature deaths each summer, reaching more than 68,000 by 2030 and over 94,000 by 2040.”
Average surface temperatures have been rising for years due to climate change, but this summer’s extreme heat has been rapidly breaking records. In addition to average hotter temperatures, the reemergence of the weather phenomenon known as El Niño is poised to drive up temperatures even more.
The human body is not meant to survive long periods of extreme heat, mostly because it already produces heat from daily activities like circulating blood and digesting food. Sweating can be an essential tool to cool down and prevent overheating, but when humidity levels are also high the body can’t produce the adequate amount of sweat needed to manage its temperature.
While temperatures throughout Europe were sky-high during the summer of 2022, the average daily temperature in southwestern Europe that year was the highest recorded since 1950, according to the European State of the Climate report for 2022.
Older people can be more vulnerable to heat stress because of cultural differences — they may not hail from a warm region and might not know how to adjust — and biological ones, as aging can impact the body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Justin S. Mankin, a researcher at Dartmouth University who was not involved with the study, said that heat waves like the one in Europe last summer are part of a trend that has been worsening for years. As the planet continues to warm, extreme heat will only get worse.
“You could throw a dart at the map and probably find a heat wave somewhere,” said Mankin.
Though the conditions of last summer’s European heat wave and 2021’s heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest were extreme, Mankin says there is a lot of science to support the fact that temperatures won’t rise in a straightforward fashion.
“We have a really good understanding of why the likelihood of extremely rare heat events should increase nonlinearly with warming,” said Mankin.
The study authors noted that last year’s heat wave bears a striking resemblance to the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed 70,000 people, which in France led to the resignation of the nation’s health chief and spurred the country to redesign their approach to heat.
Mankin also noted that despite the astounding figures, there is a lot that researchers can’t account for –– including a completely accurate total death count.
“In all likelihood, these death counts are probably an undercounting to some extent,” said Mankin.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
In late June 2021, a high-pressure atmospheric system settled over Seattle to create an inescapable heat dome. Jean-Paul Yafali, a resident of nearby Kent, Washington, thanked his good luck for the two secondhand air-conditioning units that a friend had given him back in 2019. He wasn’t used to this kind of stifling heat — not in Seattle, and not even in Kinshasa, Congo, where he grew up.
“I’m from a country where it’s really hot,” Yafali told Grist. But during Seattle’s heat dome, “it was impossible for me to last a couple minutes” outside.
By Monday the 28th, the temperature in Seattle would climb to a record-breaking 108 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 40 degrees above normal for that time of year. National Weather Service officials warned that the pavement could reach 170 degrees in some places. Yafali and his family found respite in their AC, but they were fortunate outliers; Seattle, known for its cool, wet winters and mild summers, is one of the least air-conditioned big cities in the country. To avoid overheating, people boarded up windows with cardboard boxes. They soaked their feet in buckets of cold water and bought squirt bottles. They took refuge in shady parks or in community cooling centers.
The blistering weather had many people wondering: Is this climate change?
People rest at the Oregon Convention Center cooling station in Portland on June 28, 2021, as a heat wave moved over much of the United States. Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images
The short answer is yes. Although the event was exceedingly abnormal — a 1-in-1,000-year event in today’s climate, according to some estimates — researchers say that without global warming it would have been at least 150 times rarer and several degrees cooler.
Indeed, heat waves around the world are happening more frequently and reaching higher temperatures because of climate change. We know this thanks to the rapidly growing field of attribution science, which allows scientists to examine the link between rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and extreme weather events. When a heat wave strikes — or another disaster, for that matter, be it a hurricane, drought, or very heavy rain — attribution scientists can determine the role that climate change played in its intensification.
With extreme heat in particular, the answer is often tens or even hundreds of times more likely, thanks to a complicated mix of factors like abnormally dry soils and hotter-than-usual air. In fact, scientists are now comfortable assuming that all heat waves are being made more severe or likely because of climate change.
At any given time, extreme heat is now affecting about one-tenth of the Earth’s land area, and scientists have observed an eightfold increase in record-breaking hot months over the past decade, compared to what would be expected in a world without climate change. Already, the U.S. is experiencing periods of abnormally hot weather at least three times more often than it did in the 1960s. Researchers estimate that another 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) of warming could turn something like the Pacific Northwest’s freak heat dome into a once-in-a-decade affair.
A cooling weather pattern called La Niña has suppressed global temperatures since 2020, but scientists announced this spring that a new, hotter pattern — El Niño — is emerging to replace it. Although experts say its full effects won’t be felt until next summer, it may already be contributing to some of this summer’s heat extremes.
El Niño, climate change, and extreme heat
El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon that fuels above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the world. It is characterized by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.
The planet’s weather over the past three years has been dominated by El Niño’s opposite extreme, La Niña, which has had a cooling effect on the globe. Even so, the past eight years were the hottest in recorded history, the result of the warming effects of climate change.
Now, in conjunction with accelerating climate change, El Niño means a wide array of exacerbated hazardsmay be coming down the pike. El Niño’s impacts differ by region but can range from extreme rainfall to severe drought and increased wildfire risk.
Earlier this month, Earth logged its seven hottest days ever. And in June, a punishing heat dome brought triple-digit temperatures to more than 55 million people across the Southern U.S., straining emergency services and causing more than a dozen deaths. The heat was exacerbated in states like Louisiana, where high humidity combined with searing temperatures to create a heat index of up to 125 degrees F, meaning what the body feels, not just what the thermometer says.
Heat, one of the best-understood extreme weather events tied to climate change, doesn’t tend to draw the same attention as other disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. But that may be starting to change. In the U.S., scorching temperatures cause more deaths than any other weather-related disaster, claiming nearly 170 lives every year. And as climate change drives global temperatures even higher, heat waves will only become more lethal, disrupting the lives of billions of people across the planet.
Unlike other extreme weather events, heat waves are highly context-dependent. That is, they’re defined by their deviation from what’s considered a normal temperature for a given place. When the mercury hits 95 degrees F in San Francisco, for example, that might be considered a heat wave — but not so in Phoenix, where summertime temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees F.
Most heat waves do share a common origin story, though. Broadly speaking, they form when a high-pressure air system parks itself over land, forcing air to sink to the ground. This air heats up as it compresses and becomes trapped, unable to dissipate into the upper atmosphere. Such a system also makes cloud formation less likely. (Cold air forces water out relatively quickly compared to hot air, and this water becomes clouds.) This allows more sunlight to reach the ground and exacerbate warming.
A 2020 California heat wave brought temperatures of 116 to the Los Angeles area.
Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Radley Horton, a scientist who studies ocean and climate physics at Columbia University, said there are a few additional “ingredients” that can converge to create a heat wave. Drier conditions, for example, mean more of the sun’s energy can go toward heating the air rather than evaporating water from plants and the soil. The time of year can also play a role: At latitudes farther from the equator, the Earth’s tilt can lead to summer days with 15 hours or more of sunlight — a long time for heat to build up.
All these factors in combination are “a recipe for a lot of sunlight and warming, stagnant air,” Horton said.
Huge atmospheric wind patterns called jet streams also play a role in forming heat waves. These jet streams — like the subtropical jet stream that affects the U.S. — are driven by temperature gradients between the warm tropics and the colder poles. They carry air from west to east across the globe, but also wobble from north to south. When the subtropical jet stream bulges north, it can invite warm air from the south and trap it in place, leading to what scientists call atmospheric blocking.
“When the jet stream meanders, it creates a heat dome, a pool of very warm air under this displaced jet stream,” said Noboru Nakamura, an expert on atmospheric and environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Chicago. “It’s almost like a warm blanket.”
This is what happened to an extreme degree in the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. A particularly strong blocking pattern called an omega block — so named for its resemblance to the Greek letter of the alphabet — anchored itself above Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia for several days, combining with other favorable factors like dry air and proximity to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. The result: “unheard of” surface temperatures, as Nakamura put it, that reached as high as 121 degrees F in Canada. A similar phenomenon was behind last month’s heat dome in the South, where temperatures climbed to 119 degrees F in parts of Texas.
In a way, it seems intuitive that extreme heat would be getting worse in the face of climate change. Global warming, after all, involves warming. But scientists have a way to more rigorously test that intuition: They use computer models to reconstruct the global climate with and without human-added greenhouse gas emissions, and then compare the likelihood of a heat wave in either scenario.
There are a few ways to go about these analyses. The most common, known as probabilistic analysis, is used to produce statistics about a heat wave’s increased likelihood and intensity under climate change. First, scientists identify an extreme heat event and chart it against other observed extremes going back 50 or more years (the longer the better, depending on the data available). Then they use climate models to simulate how anomalous the event would be in today’s climate versus the climate of the preindustrial 1800s, before global warming.
Consider the “1-in-400-years” heat wave that hit Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Algeria this April. Over the course of a few days, “superheated air” from the Sahara Desert swept through the region, bringing temperatures that were up to 36 degrees F above normal for that time of year. At the Córdoba airport in Spain, the thermometer hit 102 degrees F — the hottest April temperature ever recorded in Europe. Researchers at World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration among climate scientists, plotted the region’s highest expected three-day temperatures in today’s climate against the expected time interval between those temperature extremes. (The higher the temperature, the less frequently you’d expect it to occur.) When they compared this to simulations of a world with 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) less warming, they found that a heat wave like April’s is now likely to occur every 100 years, rather than every 400, and is about 3.5 degrees C (6.3 degrees F) hotter.
A field of half-dried sunflowers during a 2022 heat wave in Mallorca, Spain.
Clara Margais / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Scientists have reached similar conclusions for dozens of other heat waves. Out of more than 150 heat-related attribution studies that researchers have conducted since the early 2000s, more than 93 percent have shown evidence of human influence. “You can be confident that heat waves are increasing everywhere globally due to climate change,” said Sarah Kew, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and a core contributor to World Weather Attribution, an academic collaborative.
According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, heat waves that used to happen once every decade in the preindustrial era are now happening nearly three times as often and are 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) hotter. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming — the upper limit that nearly 200 countries have agreed to as part of the Paris Agreement — they’ll happen 5.6 times per decade and will be 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) hotter.
Although rapid weather attribution studies don’t usually consider the specific reasons why climate change is making heat waves worse, Horton, the Columbia University professor, said there are a few heat wave ingredients that can be reliably linked to climate change: drying soils and vegetation, for example, or warming bodies of water that can’t cool the air as much as they used to. Some experts also suspect that the warming Arctic — which has heated up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979 — could be causing a slower, wobblier jet stream, which would be more conducive to atmospheric blocking. But this is still an area of debate.
Other researchers are also beginning to show how heat waves can have knock-on effects for other natural disasters. Marine heat waves, for example — which have become more common over the past decade — may contribute to stronger hurricanes, since they warm up air above the water. This extra heat lowers the pressure and can create swirling, hurricane-force winds. High heat is also a key ingredient in tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that cause lethal flooding, making it possible that these disasters will get worse with more frequent and intense heat waves.
Vehicles drive past a sign on the 110 freeway in Los Angeles warning of extreme heat. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Droughts and wildfires also interact with heat waves in sometimes complicated ways: A heat wave can often exacerbate drought, drying out soils and plants by increasing “evaporative demand,” a measure of how thirsty the atmosphere is. This in turn can create conditions that are ripe for wildfire, as forests and grasslands dry out. But, as noted above, these parched conditions can also make heat waves more powerful — creating a feedback loop in which dry conditions and scorching temperatures reinforce each other. Researchers estimate that, under 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming, compound events where both heat waves and drought occur simultaneously will become more severe and happen about once every eight years — four times more often than in the mid-20th century.
As heat waves worsen, so too does the sense of dread they bring to vulnerable populations.
“Even before it happens, there’s a lot of anxiety,” said Esther Min, director of environmental health research partnerships for the nonprofit Front and Centered, a coalition of Washington state-based organizations led by communities of color. “It’s already brutal on the physical body when it is hot, but if you know it’s going to be difficult and you might not be able to escape it? … There’s that mental health aspect that I hear people these days talking about a lot more — that anxiety, that grief, that frustration.”
This only compounds the physical risks of heat waves, she added, which may include everything from dehydration to heat stroke. As with virtually every other climate impact, these risks are inequitably distributed. They fall disproportionately on poor people, many of whom can’t afford an AC unit or the added electricity costs that come with it, or on people of color, who may live in redlined neighborhoods that experience an urban heat island effect thanks to a lack of cooling tree cover and green space. Such areas can feel up to 20 degrees hotter than other neighborhoods — usually whiter, more affluent ones with more greenery.
Children, the elderly, and people experiencing homelessness are also ill-protected from extreme heat. “We need to think of how we can protect these vulnerable populations,” said Yafali, who works for the organization Nested Communities to provide rental assistance, transportation services, and other aid to Seattle-area youth of color who are at risk of losing their housing. He said many of the people he works with have struggled to cope with the region’s increasingly frequent bouts of extreme heat.
As the heat gets worse, community organizers like Yafali and other groups across the country are calling for a range of solutions, including more heat pumps in apartment buildings — which provide both heating and cooling — and community monitoring systems to check in on at-risk neighbors. Seattle is looking at some of these solutions as part of its first-ever extreme heat mitigation strategy. Martha Lucas, executive director of the Washington State Coalition of African Community Leaders, said something as simple as better communication systems could also help. A lot of the people she works with don’t use email or don’t speak English, she said, making it harder for them to receive temperature warnings and guidance on how to keep cool. “They have a wide range of ages and abilities, and not everybody understands,” she said.
Still, progress is slow and some people are already being pushed to their limits. Even with his AC units, Yafali is nervous for Seattle’s next heat wave — especially how it will affect his young daughters. Back in 2021, he saw them through the extreme heat by checking in compulsively, making sure they were drinking enough water and not spending more than 30 minutes at a time in the blazing sun. “We were able to navigate the heat dome,” he said, even as he witnessed many others deal with crippling heat cramps and exhaustion.
“I’m really worried,” he said. “We have to better prepare.”
