Republican South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden signed a bill Thursday banning the use of eminent domain for carbon dioxide pipelines, ensuring land protections for farmers across the state. [emphasis, links added]

The bill, HB 1052, prohibits the government seizure of land for C02 pipelines. This leaves the fate of Summit Carbon Solutions’ $9 billion, 2,500-mile pipeline project potentially hanging in the air, as South Dakota was a key player in the plan.

Summit’s pipeline was to transport captured C02 from five Midwest states to an underground storage spot in South Dakota, which has been referred to as the world’s largest carbon capture project.

“South Dakota landowners feel strongly that the threat of involuntary easements for the proposed carbon dioxide pipeline infringes on their freedoms and their property rights,” Rhoden wrote in a letter to the legislature and to the people of South Dakota.

“I have said many times that Summit needs to earn back the trust of South Dakota landowners. Unfortunately, once trust is lost, it is a difficult thing to regain.”

“Here is my open message to Summit Carbon or anyone else who wants to try to come abuse our fellow South Dakotans,” Republican South Dakota House Speaker Jon Hansen wrote on X.

“Your green new deal boondoggle; your lawsuits; your threats; and your intimidation against our people, our counties, and our grassroots commissioners ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.”

Summit spokesperson Sabrina Zenor said in a statement that “it’s very unfortunate that, despite our approvals in Iowa, North Dakota, and Minnesota, South Dakota changed the rules in the middle of the game.”

“The governor has made it clear that HB 1052 targets one company – Summit Carbon Solutions,” Zenor continued. “It’s unfortunate that a piece of legislation has been framed around a single company rather than addressing broader infrastructure and economic policy.”

“This is definitely a win for the little guy,” Steve Milloy, a Senior Legal Fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF.

“Carbon capture is economically, politically, and physically impossible.” He said, referring to carbon capture as “totally bogus” and that “the only reason it’s happening is because oil companies can get taxpayer subsidies for it.”

Read rest at Daily Caller

Nearly half of young Canadians surveyed in a 2022 study said they believed humanity is doomed because of climate change, while more than three-quarters said they were frightened. No wonder. [emphasis, links added]

They have grown up bombarded both by footage of natural disasters, not just in Canada but around the world, and by activists’ claims that climate change is making the planet unliveable. But that’s just wrong.

The ubiquity of phone cameras and our ability to communicate instantly — the “CNN effect” — means the media can show more weather disasters now than ever before.

But that doesn’t mean the disasters are deadlier or costlier.

As we saw in the first article in this series, deaths from climate-related disasters have dropped precipitously. On average in the 1870s, five million people a year died from such disasters.

A century ago, about half a million people a year did. In the past decade, however, the death toll worldwide was fewer than 10,000 people a year.

As the global population has more than quintupled, disaster deaths have declined 500-fold. This dramatic decline is true for all major disaster categories, including floods, flash floods, cold waves, and wind disasters, and for both rich and poor countries. But you never hear about that during disaster reporting.

Floods are the most costly and frequent Canadian disasters. But the common claim that flood costs are rising dramatically ignores the obvious fact that when a floodplain has many more houses on it than decades ago, and the houses are worth much more, then the same flood will cause a lot more damage.

We need to keep these changes in mind and measure costs in proportion to GDP. Even the UN says that’s how to measure whether cities and towns are safer.

Though peer-reviewed analysis for Canada is lacking there is plenty to draw on elsewhere. As so often, the U.S. has the most comprehensive data.

It shows that while flood costs have increased in absolute terms, that’s only because more people and property are in harm’s way. In the country’s worst year for flooding, 1913, damage exceeded two percent of GDP, though the yearly average in that era was 0.5 percent.

Today it’s less than 0.05 percent of GDP — just a tenth of what it was a century ago.

We know adaptation makes disasters much less threatening over time. Consider sea level rise, which threatens to flood coastal zones worldwide.

A much-cited study shows that at the turn of this century an average of 3.4 million people a year experienced coastal flooding, with $11 billion in annual damages. At the same time, around $13 billion, or 0.05 percent of global GDP was spent on coastal defenses.

By the end of this century, more people will be in harm’s way, and climate change could raise sea levels by as much as a meter. If we don’t improve coastal defenses, vast areas may be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing $55 trillion in annual damages, more than five percent of global GDP in 2100.

This finding does routinely make headlines.

But it ignores adaptation, which research shows will cost much less. On average, countries will avoid flood damage by spending just 0.005 percent of GDP.

Even with higher sea levels, far fewer people will be flooded — by 2100 just 15,000 people a year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and damage will be just 0.008 percent of GDP.

Enormously ambitious emissions-reduction policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars could cut the number of people flooded at century’s end from 15,000 to about 10,000 per year.

But notice the difference: Adaptation reduces the number currently being flooded by almost 3.4 million and avoids another 184 million people being flooded annually by 2100. At best, climate policy can save just 0.005 million.

We often hear that the “world is on fire” because of climate change. New Liberal leader Mark Carney repeated that in his acceptance speech Sunday. And it’s true that in 2023 more of Canada’s surface area burned than in any year since 1970, with climate change probably partly to blame.

Even so, two points need to be kept in mind.

First, most studies projecting an increase in wildfires ignore adaptation. Humans don’t like fire and make great efforts to reduce it, which is why since 1900 humanity has seen less burned area, not more.

The data from the last century involve historical reconstruction, but since 1997 NASA satellites have tracked all significant fires.

The record shows a dramatic fall in the global burned area. Last year it was the second lowest, and in 2022 the lowest ever. And studies find that with adaptation the area burned will keep falling, even without climate action.

Second, reducing emissions is a terribly inefficient way to help.

Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that even drastic cuts in emissions would reduce the burned area only slightly this century.

Simpler, cheaper, faster policies like better forest management, prescribed fires, and cleaning out undergrowth can help much more.

The flood of disaster porn is terrifying our kids and skewing our perception, and that can only lead to bad climate policy.

Read more at Financial Post

For most U.S. homes, heat pumps are a no-brainer: They can lower energy bills and eventually pay for themselves all while slashing carbon emissions. But the economics don’t work in favor of heat pumps for every home — and particularly not for those in states that have high electricity prices relative to those of fossil gas.

Adjusting the structure of customer electricity rates could turn the tables, according to a report out today from the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE.

The ratio of average electricity prices to gas prices (both measured in dollars per kilowatt-hour) is known as the ​“spark gap” — and it’s one of the biggest hurdles to nationwide electrification. A heat pump that is two to three times as efficient as a gas furnace can cancel out a spark gap of two to three, ensuring energy bills don’t rise with the switch to electric heat. But in some states, the gulf is so big that heat pumps can’t close it under the existing rate structures.

Worse, heat pump performance can decrease significantly when it’s extremely cold (like below 5 degrees Fahrenheit), so without incentives, the economic case is harder in states with both harsh winters and electricity that’s much more expensive than gas, like Connecticut and Minnesota. In these places, heat pump adoption is ​“hit by double whammy,” said Matt Malinowski, ACEEE buildings director.

The weather might be hard to change, but the spark gap is malleable: Utilities, regulators, and policymakers can shape electricity rates. By modeling rates for four large utilities in different cold-climate states, ACEEE found that particular structures can keep energy bills from rising for residents who switch to heat pumps, without causing others’ bills to go up.

Flat rates punish heat pump owners

Flat electricity rates are a common practice. They’re also the worst structure for heat pumps, Malinowski said.

When utilities charge the same per-kilowatt-hour rates at all hours of the day, they ignore the fact that it costs more to produce and deliver electricity during certain hours. That’s because, like a water pipe, the power grid needs to be sized for the maximum flow of electrons — even if that peak is brief. Meeting it requires the construction and operation of expensive grid infrastructure.

Flat rates spread the cost of these peaks evenly across the day rather than charging customers more during the high-demand hours that cause a disproportionate amount of grid costs. 

But heat pumps aren’t typically driving peak demand — at least, not for now while their numbers are low. Demand usually maxes out in the afternoon to evening, when people arrive home from work, cook, do laundry, and watch TV. Households with heat pumps actually use more of their electricity during off-peak hours, like just before dawn when it’s coldest, than customers with gas, oil, or propane heaters.

Heat pumps ​“provide the utility a lot of revenue, and they do that at a time when there isn’t that much electricity consumption,” Malinowski said.

Under a flat-rate design, cold-climate heat pump owners ​“are basically overpaying,” he added. ​“Adjusting the rates to better reflect their load on the system — and the benefits to the system that they provide — is only fair.”

Alternative rate designs can improve heat pump economics

A rate design that bases charges on when electricity is used would help course-correct. Known as ​“time-of-use,” this structure charges more for power consumed during periods of peak demand and less for power consumed at other times, or ​“off-peak,” coinciding with heat pumps’ prime time.

Utility ComEd serving the Chicago area is working to finalize time-of-use rates for households, joining the ranks of several other U.S. providers that already offer this structure, like Xcel Energy in Colorado, Pacific Gas and Electric in California, and Eversource in Connecticut.

But solar started growing in Florida long before Democrats passed the IRA in 2022, and that’s thanks to favorable state policies.

Municipalities and counties have little say over power plants, giving the Florida Public Service Commission ultimate control over siting and permitting. Plus, solar plants with a capacity under 75 megawatts are exempt from review and permitting altogether under the Florida Power Plant Siting Act.

The latter policy in particular has made building solar farms easy and inexpensive for the state’s major utilities, said Leyva Martinez. Companies such as NextEra Energy–owned Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest electrical utility, have for years patched together gigawatts of solar with small farms.

“We’re seeing this wave of project installations at gigawatt scales, but if you look at what’s actually being built, it’s a small 74-megawatt [project] here or 74.9-megawatt project there,” she said. ​“It’s just easier to permit in the state, and developers have realized that they can keep installations at this range and they don’t need to go through the longer process.”

The solar buildout has prompted some backlash in rural parts of the state. A bill Republican state Sen. Keith Truenow filed last month proposes granting some additional local control over siting and permitting solar farms on agricultural land.

“You’re starting to see a lot more complaining about the abundance of solar installations in more rural areas,” Colletti said. The legislation, he said, ​“would add some hurdles and ultimately add costs” but ​“wouldn’t necessarily reverse the state’s preemption” of local permitting authorities.

NextEra and Florida Power & Light did not respond to an email requesting comment. Nor did Truenow return a call. 

While the bill is currently making its way through the Legislature, DeSantis previously vetoed legislation that threatened Florida’s solar buildout.

In 2022, the governor blocked a utility-backed bill to end the state’s net metering program, which pays homeowners with rooftop solar for sending extra electricity back to the grid during the day.

“The governor did the right thing by vetoing that bill that would have strangled net metering and a lot of the rooftop solar industry in Florida,” Colletti said. ​“I know Floridians are much better off for it because we are able to offset our costs very well and take more control and ownership over our households.”

A telephone survey conducted by the pollster Mason-Dixon in February 2022 found that among 625 registered Florida voters, 84% supported net metering, including 76% of self-identified Republicans.

“It’s not about left or right,” Arditi-Rocha said. ​“It’s about making sure we live up to our state’s name. In the Sunshine State, the future can be really sunny and bright if we continue to harness the power of the sun.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration’s restrictive energy policies during a keynote speech to energy industry leaders Monday, explaining how the Trump administration’s approach is oriented around unlocking human flourishing. [emphasis, links added]

Wright made the speech to kick off the 2025 CERAWeek conference, one of the premier annual summits for the energy industry.

He characterized the Biden administration’s maniacal focus on climate change as counterproductive and impoverishing for ordinary people, pledging to take a radically different approach than his predecessor by unleashing U.S. energy and private sector innovations to make life better and more affordable for Americans, announcing that he is approving a liquefied natural gas (LNG) permit during the speech to prove his point.

“The previous administration’s ‘climate’ policies have been impoverishing to our citizens, economically destructive to our businesses, and politically polarizing. The ‘cure’ was far more destructive than the disease,” Wright said.

“There are no winners in that world, except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups. The only interest group that we are concerned with is the American people. Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad.”

Wright explained how much of the world’s population lives in poverty in large part because they do not have access to the cheap, efficient energy that powers modern life and its conveniences that only a fraction of humanity enjoys at present.

The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is: a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world…

The new energy secretary — who has worked with nuclear, oil, gas, solar, and geothermal energy throughout his private sector career — argued that the U.S. can and should play a leading role in proliferating prosperity with energy instead of regulating the sector too aggressively in the name of climate change.

“Recently I have been called a climate denier or climate skeptic. This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist. I have been studying and writing about climate change for over twenty years.

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is: a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” Wright said.

“We have indeed raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting most of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains, and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade-offs. Everything.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens. Running the math on what might have been the benefits from these policies yields perhaps only a few hundredths of a degree reduction in global temperatures in the year 2100,” Wright continued.

“The Trump administration intends to be much more scientific and mathematically literate.”

While former President Joe Biden said that climate change poses a threat to humanity that exceeds that presented by nuclear war, Wright’s remarks make clear that the Trump administration will not be treating climate change as an existential threat that takes precedence over other priorities.

The vision Wright laid out in his speech represents a stark departure from the positions of the Biden administration on nearly all fronts, including on the issue of approvals for LNG export projects.

The Biden administration unilaterally froze approvals in January 2024, keeping the pause in place for most of the year, in what critics characterized as an election-year move to shore up support from the well-funded climate lobby.

Read rest at Daily Caller

NOAA’s summary of winter 2024-25 for the contiguous 48 states, released on March 10, closed the books with a verdict you might have guessed: despite some prolonged chilliness at certain times and places, and one winter storm for the ages, it was far less fierce than most of the winters dished out through the late 20th century.

The average 48-state temperature for meteorological winter (December through February) came in at 34.09 degrees Fahrenheit (1.16 degrees Celsius). That’s the 27th highest reading among the 130 winters in the NOAA database extending back to 1895. Just one year ago, the nation wrapped up its warmest winter in contiguous U.S. history.

For most Americans, winter 2024-25 was marked less by brutal Arctic outbreaks and more by some long stretches of chillier-than-average weather in midwinter, especially toward the eastern U.S. The nation’s fourth warmest December was followed by the 33rd-coldest January and the 52nd-warmest February.

No state had a significantly cooler-than-average winter compared to the past 130 years. Arizona and Nevada had their fourth warmest winter on record and Nevada its eighth warmest.

The standout event of the winter was the bizarre, historic snowstorm that swept along the upper U.S. Gulf Coast on January 21. For most locations, it was a once-in-a-generation to a once-in-a-century snowfall, rivaled only by a similarly freakish storm on Valentine’s Day 1895 that dropped 10 to 20 inches from roughly Houston to New Orleans. Among the locations that broke all-time records for a single storm this time were Mobile, AL (7.5”), Pensacola, FL (8.9”), and the New Orleans airport (8.0”). Several locations in Florida smashed the state’s previous snow record of 4.0” set in Milton in March 1954; one of those was Milton itself, which racked up 8.9”.

In the wake of this quick-hitting storm, fresh snowpack and clear skies allowed temperatures to plunge to absurd values for coastal Louisiana, including all-time lows of 2°F in New Iberia, 4°F in Lafayette, 7°F in Jennings, and 7°F at the Baton Rouge airport. Nationwide, however, the month of January was only modestly colder than the long-term average, and much of the northern U.S. tier got markedly less snowfall than usual.

As we’ll see in the global climate roundup later this week, there was a dramatic contrast between a chillier-than-average U.S. winter and a warmer-than-average one in Canada. This topsy-turvy setup, more typical of El Niño than La Niña winters, bears some hallmarks of the kind of warm Arctic/chilly midlatitude pattern studied for over a decade as a potential byproduct of human-caused climate change (see our recent deep dive on this research topic).

Another calamitous California firestorm – but this time in January

Winter 2024-25 was on the arid side for most parts of the country, ranking 20th-driest for the contiguous U.S. as a whole out of 130 years of recordkeeping. Arizona and New Mexico had their second driest winter on record and Utah its eighth driest; no state had a top-ten wettest winter.

By far the biggest U.S. disaster of the winter was the pair of devastating wildfires that swept through parts of Los Angeles in early January. Based on preliminary data, CALFIRE has ranked the Eaton and Palisades as the second and third most destructive wildfires (by number of structures destroyed) in modern state history, respectively destroying 9,413 and 6,833 structures and taking 17 and 12 lives. Although the Camp Fire of 2018 destroyed more structures than the Eaton and Palisades fires combined, the L.A. fires will be far more costly given the high property values of the area; preliminary estimates of insured losses have averaged about $31 billion, which would make them the costliest wildfires in world history.

The stage was set for L.A.’s twin fire disasters by one of the driest starts to the winter wet season on record, dessicating a landscape that had been nurtured by ample moisture in early 2024. Overlaid on that tinderbox was a rare meteorological setup producing mountain-driven atmospheric waves that pushed high winds much further into Los Angeles than usual for Santa Ana wind events. This unusually intense windstorm might not have led to such disastrous fire if the landscape had already been moistened by winter rains, as is much more typical for early January.

“All evidence is pointing to them.” Los Angeles County filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Southern California Edison, alleging the utility caused the devastating Eaton fire in Altadena, which destroyed about 9,000 homes and killed 17 people: www.latimes.com/california/s…

— Laura J. Nelson (@laurajnelson.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T22:52:53.118Z

By the end of February, a sequence of Pacific storms had given much of coastal California some much-needed relief. However, the interior Southwest remained parched. In Arizona, this was the second driest winter in 131 years of recordkeeping for Tucson (0.25”) and the third driest in 130 years for Phoenix (0.03”).

As of the first week of March, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed that close to 45% of the contiguous U.S. was undergoing some level of drought. That’s similar to the 44% of early December, but still a less-than-comforting value given how quickly drought can intensify in spring and summer. NOAA’s latest seasonal drought outlook (see Fig. 4 below) projects drought to expand from the Central Rockies through the Southern Plains as well as across Florida over the next three months.

Severe outbreak on Friday and Saturday could bring multiple tornadoes

A strong jet stream will be shuttling upper-air disturbances across the nation over the next couple of weeks. It’s a cranked-up version of a classic March pattern, and it’s not too early in the year for such a pattern to spawn multiple rounds of severe thunderstorms.

The biggest concern right now revolves around what could become one of the most powerful early-spring storms on record across the Central Plains. Multiple runs of the GFS model over the weekend depicted a surface low intensifying to pressures in the 970-975 mb (hPa) range over Kansas and Nebraska late this week. That’s close to the lowest values ever recorded in these locations at any time of year. The European model hasn’t been quite so fevered, but it’s still been predicting pressures in the 975- to 980-mb range.

These central pressure values wouldn’t be out of line for a Category 1 hurricane – but of course this won’t be that. In a non-tropical midlatitude cyclone, the wind-producing pressure gradient is much broader than with a hurricane. This means winds won’t be sustained at hurricane strength, but they could still be fierce enough across large parts of the Plains to bring down tree limbs and power lines and blot out highway visibility with blowing dust.

On the northwest side of the low, blizzard conditions could push across parts of the Central and Northern Plains from eastern Colorado to North Dakota.

Meanwhile, along the cold front extending south of the low, intense thunderstorms are likely to erupt on Friday and sweep across parts of Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas and into western Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee by evening. (Note that this rough timing could shift by 12 hours or more). A second upper-level disturbance may spawn another round of severe weather on Saturday further south and east, perhaps from eastern Arkansas and Louisiana into Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee.

A slug of just-in-time Gulf moisture will be pulled north just ahead of the front on Friday. It’s possible the system will end up moisture-starved that day, limiting the northward extent of the most intense severe weather. But with such an intense, cold upper-level low racing through, only a modest amount of moisture could be enough to generate thunderstorms – and the wind shear that nurtures supercell thunderstorms will likely be at or near extreme levels. Given the size and strength of the parent storm system, tornadic supercells could erupt over a broad area before congealing into one or more intense squall lines.

On Monday morning, March 10, the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center flagged areas centered on Arkansas for Friday and Mississippi and Alabama for Saturday with the highest severe probabilities allowed this far in advance (see Fig. 5 above). Ample moisture should be in place by Saturday, which will boost the odds of torrential rainfall, but severe weather on Saturday will be highly dependent on interaction with any storms left over from Friday night.

Jeff Masters contributed to this post.

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Two white men in their 60s live hundreds of miles away from each other, one in Arizona and the other in Washington state. They are the same age and have identical socioeconomic backgrounds. They also have similar habits and are in roughly the same physical shape. But the man in Arizona is aging more quickly than the man in Washington — 14 months faster, to be exact. Neither man smokes or drinks. Both exercise regularly. So why is the subject living in the desert Southwest more than a year older at the cellular level than his counterpart in the Pacific Northwest?

A study published in the journal Science Advances makes the case that extreme heat is aging millions of Americans more quickly than their counterparts in cooler climates. The impact of chronic exposure to high temperatures, researchers found, is equivalent to the effect of habitual smoking on cellular aging. 

As global average temperatures continue to rise due to the greenhouse gas effect caused by burning fossil fuels, wider swaths of the global population are being exposed to extreme heat, which has killed more than 21,000 Americans since 1999. In 2023, Phoenix, Arizona, where some of the people analyzed in the study live, saw 31 days straight of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That year was the warmest year on record globally — a record that was quickly surpassed by 2024. 

Exposure to above-average heat has serious short-and long-term health repercussions. People may experience heat-related illness, such as dehydration and fainting, or sustain heat stroke — the most serious form of heat-related illness that can lead to death. Older adults and young children are particularly vulnerable to these impacts because they have trouble thermoregulating, or maintaining a steady internal body temperature. Over months and years, heat exposure can exacerbate existing chronic conditions like kidney and cardiovascular disease, and raise a person’s risk of mental health issues and dementia. 

Eun Young Choi, a postdoctoral gerontological researcher at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the lead author of the study, wanted to find out what might be driving the long-term health consequences of exposure to extreme heat on a cellular level, particularly in people approaching their 60s. She was particularly interested in “nonclinical manifestations” of heat exposure, meaning she hoped to capture how heat was affecting people who weren’tshowing up in emergency rooms with heat-related illness or heat stroke. Her hypothesis was that heat was chipping away at overall health, whether or not someone could feel it acutely. 

In order to test that theory, Choi analyzed blood samples from more than 3,600 people over the age of 56 who had participated in a large national health and retirement study. Those participants had taken a blood test in 2016 or 2017. Choi and her coauthor, Jennifer Ailshire, then used weather and climate data to estimate how many “heat days,” as defined by the National Weather Service, each participant had been exposed to in the years, months, and days leading up to the date of the blood test. They sorted the participants into demographic groups based on race, socioeconomic status, exercise habits, and other factors, and then compared the people in those groups to each other using a series of biological tests that determine how quickly a person’s cells are aging. 

“With longer-term heat exposure — one year and six years — we see a consistent association between heat and [cellular] age” across different biological tests, Choi said. People living in places where temperatures are at or above 90 degrees F for half of the year have experienced up to 14 months more biological aging compared to people living in areas with fewer than 10 days of temperatures at or above 90 degrees. 

“This study is one of the first empirical assessments suggesting that longer-term exposure to heat is directly associated with an acceleration of the aging process,” said Vivek Shandas, a professor at Portland State University who studies the effects of climate change on cities and was not involved in the study.  It “adds to the existing work by suggesting that near-term mortality may be the result of older adults having longer-term and periodic exposures to heat.”

Two previous studies found that people exposed to heat age more quickly, and studies in mice consistently show that heat ages cells, but Choi’s study is the first nationally representative research to draw the connection. The size and diversity of her pool of subjects helped drown out many of the factors that usually sully this type of data. Choi didn’t find any major differences between demographics — an indication that heat damages cells across the board in older individuals. 

What Choi didn’t account for, however, are all the ways people adapt to protect themselves from heat. Some people, particularly wealthier Americans, might stay inside with the air conditioning blasting all day and night. 

Previous research has shown that above-average temperatures don’t affect all populations equally. Extreme heat is particularly dangerous for people who live in urban areas with patchy tree cover and lots of concrete. These zones, in places like New York City and Chicago, are called urban heat islands, and they can get up to 7 degrees F hotter than surrounding rural areas. Urban heat islands tend to coincide with neighborhoods where nonwhite communities were historically confined by racist zoning practices, which is one reason that the average person of color is exposed to more severe heat in urban areas than the average non-Hispanic white person. These populations are also less likely to be able to afford air conditioning. 

“We know that some demographics, such as those working outside, unhoused populations, people living in urban heat islands, incarcerated populations, and lower-income residents generally have longer periods of exposure to extreme heat (over decades),” Shandas said. “Accordingly, we might draw on these findings to suggest that some certain populations will need greater attention and care as we see forecasts for heat waves.”

Choi hopes future studies will continue to tease out these differences, particularly because by 2040, 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older — up from 1 in 8 in the year 2000. The results of Choi’s study also have implications for all age groups, not just people in their 50s and older. “I don’t think the underlying biology is significantly different,” she said. “We would expect to see some significant effects of heat in younger adults. And we really need to track people from their birth to older ages to see whether any of these effects can be reversible.” 

This story was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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