In 2024, the max temperature in
Phoenix sat at or above 100 degrees for approximately 30% of the year —
and that non-stop consecutive heat has environmental advocates and
doctors worried about the years to come as climate change continues to
make the world and Arizona hotter.
Last year saw Arizona break a number of heat related records
and Phoenix experienced 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees or hotter,
the longest run ever recorded. The next highest run was set in 1993 and
was 76 days, the third longest run is from 2023 at 66 days.
In fact, a number of the most recent heat-related records all come from more recent years. The top 10 for
the most consecutive days with temperatures at or above 110 includes
2020, 2021 and 2022. The record was shattered in 2023, when Phoenix
experienced 31 consecutive days of 110 degrees or higher heat.
This year has already had a 17-day run of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, including seven where highs were above 110.
The records have also taken a grim toll.
While 2024 was the hottest year on record for the state, there was a slight decline
in the number of heat-related deaths from the record-breaking 2023,
where 645 people lost their lives in Maricopa County due to the heat.
Those 645 deaths in 2023 made up more than half of all heat-related
deaths reported nationally, according to Centers for Disease Control
data.
Overall temperatures have been rising
across the globe, contributing to what we are seeing in Arizona. The
global temperature has risen by approximately 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, but in Phoenix you can add another 5 degrees to that number due to the urban heat island effect.
The urban heat island effect
is when the temperatures in an urban area increase due to the heat
retained by structures and ground coverings, lack of vegetation and
other impacts of urbanization.
That heat island also leads to other
environmental effects, such as more and more days where pollution
lingers in the atmosphere.
A previous analysis
of data from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality showed
that Phoenix in recent years has experienced more days where the level
of ozone in the air exceeds health and safety standards.
For example, in 2015, Phoenix
experienced 33 exceedance days for the whole year. In 2022, the region
experienced 53, a 60% increase.
“We are at the epicenter of this
crisis in the United States and there is nothing that kills more in
regards to global warming or extreme weather than heat,” Dr. Jack Tuber,
a Phoenix pulmonologist and member of the Sierra Club said to the
Mirror.
A ‘People’s Hearing’
On a hot Thursday evening when
temperatures outside were a sweltering 103 degrees, local environmental
advocates, students, physicians and more were gathering at South
Mountain Community College to discuss the impacts of extreme weather.
The event featured a large number of
groups from the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter to the Union of
Concerned Scientists, and even religious leaders who have opened their
doors to vulnerable populations who often find themselves endangered by
extreme heat.
The event, dubbed the “People’s
Hearing” on extreme heat, featured representatives of Democrats Sen.
Mark Kelly and Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari. State Sen. Priya Sundareshan, a Tucson Democrat and former attorney who focused on
climate issues, also attended.
While the event focused on the
stories of those impacted by climate change and extreme weather, it also
had another major goal: to implore policy makers to pay attention to
the climate crisis and bring into focus concerns about President Donald
Trump’s plans to roll back environmental protections.
Trump’s head of the EPA has vowed to eliminate regulations meant to curtail pollution, fire staffers that serve overburdened areas and push EPA scientists to approve new chemicals, moves that former and current employees have begun to voice their concerns over.
“I’m actually horrified at the
administration’s planned rollbacks,” Vernon Morris, a climate scientist
and Arizona State University professor. (Morris said at the event that
he was speaking on behalf of himself and not the university.)
Morris voiced concerns over rollbacks to agencies like the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which scientists have warned could harm weather prediction models, leading to further harms and even deaths.
“There is no precedent for what we
are experiencing today,” Dr. Ryan Glaubke, a paleoclimatologist and
member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the audience. “We are
pushing the climate into uncharted territory.”
Glaubke and other scientists who
spoke all agreed that climate change is real, happening and that humans
are largely responsible — observations that have consensus among the scientific community.
However, how to go about addressing that crisis and helping those directly impacted by it is not as easy to answer.
‘The weight of the sun’
It takes less than 30 seconds of
being exposed to an object that 130 to 140 degrees to get a second- or
third-degree burn, according to Dr. Clifford Sheckter, a burn surgeon at
the Regional Burn Center at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in
California.
Sheckter is also the Burn Prevention
Committee Chair for the American Burn Association and does health policy
research focusing on the prevention and health economics of burn care.
When the Mirror took the temperatures
of common objects in Phoenix at midday in late June, temperatures
regularly were dangerous. A sidewalk registered 136 degrees, the road
was a blistering 146, a bike rack was 125 degrees, a mailbox clocked in
at 136 and sand in a kid’s playground reached 131 degrees.
Those temperatures are already
causing severe burns on people, particularly among the unhoused, those
with drug and alcohol addiction issues and, as Sheckter pointed out,
those with neuropathy.
Neuropathy is seen largely in people
with diabetes and it is a condition where a person loses sensation in
their hands or feet. Sheckter said they have seen patients who don’t
realize they’ve burned their feet until it is too late.
The Phoenix Police Department has
also come under fire for ignoring the danger of extreme heat. In June
2024, two officers held a woman down on the hot pavement leading to severe burns — and it wasn’t even the first time officers had caused similar injuries.
For the family members of people who work in the heat, though, the dangers are known to them and they’re only getting worse.
“Try to imagine the weight of the sun
on your skin for 8 to 10 hours,” Jazmin Moreno, with the non-profit
environmental advocacy organization Agave Community Threads, said to the
crowd when speaking about her father who has worked in construction for
the past 30 years. “This isn’t just weather, it is a climate crisis on
full display… Climate change is real, and denying it won’t make the heat
go away.”
For doctors like Sheckter and local
pulmonologist Tuber, though, that crisis means an increase in certain
types of cases and a new need for more education.
For burns, it means getting
information to parents on how to make sure their kids are safe on
playgrounds, and that those who have neuropathy are paying close
attention.
“These are ways we’ve been able to
save countless lives, through prevention,” Sheckter said, although he
admitted that, “at the end of the day, there is no way you can force
somebody to put their shoes on when they go outside.”
But for Tuber, the challenge is a bit more difficult.
Vector borne illnesses — those illnesses that are transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas — are seeing a rise due to climate change.
The change in the earth’s climate has allowed for the insects that
carry these diseases to spread farther and wider than ever before,
impacting new populations.
Illnesses like malaria, Lyme disease
and the West Nile virus have all seen their numbers increase, with
climate change being cited as a major contributing factor.
Add to Arizona specifically that more heat, less rain and more building also translates to an increase in coccidioidomycosis, also known as Valley Fever, and you have what Tuber calls an “environmental disaster.”
The increase in heat is also not helpful for people’s lungs.
“The lungs are exposed, just like
skin, to the ambient air temperatures, and if you are breathing drier,
less moist air, you are going to be transpiring more humidity out from
the lungs into the environment,” Tuber said, comparing it to like
leaving a cut apple out. “There is a lot of truth to the heat causing
more trouble to the lung than if there was not so much heat.”
This week, the state got its first monsoon storms of the season as the majority of the state is still under heat advisories and wildfires, made more aggressive by the drier conditions created by climate change, rage in the state.