Tag: heat waves
Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi
This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.
And valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful
The Quest to Build a Better Birdhouse
This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely
Life and Death in America’s Hottest City
The record-setting heat wave in Phoenix this summer, thirty-one consecutive days of temperatures exceeding a hundred and ten degrees, finally broke on Monday, July 31st. But, by the following Friday, August 4th, the thermometer was creeping up toward a hundred and fifteen degrees. Residents liked to joke that anything below the “teens” was comfortable. Jessica Lindstrom, who was thirty-four, was no longer a resident. She and her husband, Daniel, had bought a house in Central Point, Oregon, in 2015. But
What Will It Mean to Drive an EV in a More Extreme Climate?
Every Texan I know has what you might call “grid anxiety,” a low-humming preoccupation with electricity that emerged after brutal winter storms kneecapped the state’s isolated power grid in February 2021. That frigid disaster triggered highway pileups and runs on grocery stores; people inadvertently poisoned themselves with carbon monoxide by running grills and cars indoors to keep warm. My hometown of San Antonio, like so many places across the state, simply wasn’t equipped to deal with several days of freezing
Heat Waves and the Sweep of History
I’ve been travelling by train across Central Europe this hot summer and, as often happens with Americans, I’ve been reminded of the sheer density of human history in older corners of the world. On Sunday morning, for instance, I spent a few hours at Hrad Devín, or Devín Castle, a stone ruin a dozen kilometres upriver from the center of the (low-key and utterly charming) Slovakian city of Bratislava, on the Austrian border, at the spot where the bluish-green Danube
Turkey’s Honey Apocalypse – The Atlantic
When the wildfires crashed down the mountains above Marmaris, the beekeeper İbrahim Şahin was returning from a funeral to his home in the village of Osmaniye. At first, he was unconcerned—fires happen frequently in this part of southwestern Turkey, and rarely become cataclysmic. Then Şahin received a phone call from the head of his village. The fires were already upon Osmaniye. Everyone needed to evacuate.
The fires continued to spread. Pinecones exploded as if the trees were lobbing hand grenades.
When Summer Becomes the Season of Danger and Dread
The end of summer arrives, as every child knows, when the first bell rings on the first day of the school year. But where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the season shows few signs of departing. The triple-digit temperatures that descended for a week in late July and intermittently in August returned to the West last week, breaking records from Southern California to Montana. This week, Sacramento reported an all-time high temperature of a hundred and sixteen degrees, and
The legacy of Europe’s heat waves will be more air conditioning. That’s a problem.
Climate change is making extreme heat the norm across more of the world, increasing the need for adaptation. But in the case of AC, some experts are concerned about how to balance that need with the harms the solutions can cause.
Global AC sales more than tripled between 1990 and 2016, according to a 2018 report from the International Energy Agency. That growth is likely to continue, with energy use for cooling worldwide expected to triple again between now and