Climate Point: Heat, smoke are overwhelming us

When my strapping teenager tightened his backpack this week and walked down the gangway in Richmond, Virginia, he was leaving behind an East Coast storm full of lightning, hail and tornado worries. Luckily, his plane got out just ahead of nature’s summer atmospherics.

On his way to visit grandma, he also would miss a predictable Round 2 of Canadian wildfire smoke and dangerous particulate.

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and environment news. I'm William Ramsey, editor of the Paste BN Network climate crisis project called Perilous Course.

My son landed three hours later, ready to eat “real barbecue” and swim with his cousins. As the sidewalk doors opened at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, he was almost bowled over by the conditions: the heat index was 114F.

A short flight had moved him from rainy, soon-to-be-smoky East Coast to a scorched landscape in Texas that was 40 degrees — forty! — higher on the “real feel” temperature scale.

The climate crisis is worsening all these dynamics, experts tell us. Our East Coast Perilous Course team is spending the summer exploring the connections between these extremes and carbon emission-driven catastrophe, focusing on the human experience.

We’ve so far found people in temperate zones like our home in the lush Shenandoah Valley unprepared for worsening drivers of misery like urban heat islands created by racial injustice. And municipal governments are not ready with sufficient cooling centers, whether for heat crisis or choking air pollution.

We have found people in warmer zones (like my Dallas relatives) surprised by the uptick in already difficult conditions they face every summer.

Here are some of this week’s most informative stories on this intersection of climate and seasonal crisis:

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME? Get ready to hear much, much more in the future about the weather pattern called a heat dome. Our graphics team made a helpful explainer about this "cauldron of misery ... that (had) parked itself over portions of Texas and Mexico this month, sending temperatures skyrocketing." The heat dome over the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in 2021 killed an excess 1,000 people. New studies showed that excess mortality was much higher than originally thought.

HOT FOURTH IS COMING: Prepare for holiday gatherings to be roasting in some parts of the U.S. from this weekend through the Tuesday July 4 celebrations. Triple-digit heat index numbers spread Thursday into Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Cities like Springfield, Missouri, were preparing for possible record heat Friday and warning of physical danger.

HOME INSURANCE? DON'T BET ON IT: It will be harder in coming years to find home insurance on the normal commercial market in some areas and for some homeowners. And, if you have a mortgage, your lender requires you to have home insurance. It's a tricky problem for the middle and working class that shows signs of getting more pronounced amid climate crisis and extreme weather damage claims.

VULNERABLE AMERICAN WORKERS: The epicenter of climate-fueled heat shock in recent days, Texas, decided to remove protections for workers in some cities where water breaks are mandated. The protections had followed worker deaths in the unrelenting conditions.

• There were 436 work-related heat deaths in the U.S. between 2011 and 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The number is likely an undercount because of the way some deaths are classified if there are other contributing factors.
• Of those deaths, 42 were in Texas, making it the state with the most heat deaths in the U.S.

HOW TO STAY SAFE & COOL: Our graphics and health team really broke down what you must know about staying cool this summer and avoiding injury. We explore the science and the straightforward things you can do for yourself and your loved ones.

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