Extreme heat is hitting the Eastern U.S. this week—we're feeling it here in Boston, and we can only expect higher temperatures to come. Days on end of temperatures over 90° F are historically quite unusual for June in this part of the world, and temperature records have already been broken in Chicago, Cleveland, and other parts of the Midwest, as CNN reports (https://lnkd.in/eAeggAER). But although these temperatures are unusual, they should come as no surprise. By burning fossil fuels and releasing billions of tons of climate pollution into the atmosphere, humanity has already raised the Earth's average temperature by over 1° C, and when the average temperature rises, it's the extreme outlier days like those we're experiencing now that change the most.
Right now, the priority is protecting the most vulnerable, like children, the elderly, and those without homes or access to cooling, with check-ins, access to cooling centers and emergency medical responses. And in the longer term, heatwaves like this will only continue getting worse until we stop our climate pollution altogether. But what about the medium term? Is there anything we can do to adapt to extreme heat short of solving the entire challenge of climate change?
There's actually quite a lot, especially in the cities and towns where most people live, say Dr. Randolph Kirchain of the MIT Materials Research Laboratory and Dr. Hessam AzariJafari of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub. We can literally build our environments to be cooler. Plants and water features naturally cool the air around them through the process of "evaporative cooling," so large green spaces like parks and denser greenery along streets and rooftops can provide needed protection from the heat. And we can also make our cityscapes less dark. Black asphalt and dark rooftops and pavements absorb sunlight, heating up the spaces around them—which is the main reason cities are generally hotter than the surrounding countryside. But we can build with brighter and more reflective materials, or use bright paint and coatings, to make our built-up spaces reflect more sunlight away. Taken together, measures like this can make an entire city several degrees cooler, enough to prevent many medical emergencies.
The best part is, this doesn't have to be a major added cost. Cities are constantly renewing themselves by maintaining and rebuilding their infrastructure, which creates the opportunity to put cooling solutions in place little by little during routine maintenance. “[With] the billions that we spend to maintain our urban surfaces,” says Kirchain, “we need to make sure we're adding in climate considerations into those decisions and be open to new approaches.”
Read more at Ask MIT Climate: https://lnkd.in/ggaxgt3g
