You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 172 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city
Reaction Guidelines for Heat
This is a resource for heat and heat events. The goal is to have procedures you can pick up off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
Glossary of terms used
albedo
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a measure of how reflective a surface is, given as a number between 0 and 1, with higher numbers meaning greater reflectance
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evaporative cooling
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heat dissipated as phase change (liquid to gas) energy, limited by external temperature and humidity
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heat-adaption
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the ability of the hypothalmus to adjust to maintain a constant core temperature (homeostasis)
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hyperthermia
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overheating due to failed thermoregulation, the leading cause of climate change deaths
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thermoregulation
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the ability of the body to maintain homeostasis
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wet-bulb temperatures
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the lowest temperature that can be reached under current conditions by evaporation only (i.e. sweat)
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SF will get hot
SF is 2°F hotter than in the 1950s. CO2 pollution has locked in increasing temperatures for the next few decades ahead, even should the world cut all CO2 pollution to zero tomorrow. How much hotter SF will get depends on how much more CO2 we dump into the atmosphere.
San Francisco is forecast occasional 100°F days in the coming years. San Francisco will get hot.
SF has a few resources available for dealing with heat
- There are places that have been used as cooling centers before, notably some libraries, Rec and Park pools, and the JCC and Davis Senior Center. They are all daytime access only, and are unevenly distributed.
- BayREN is offering rebates on heat pump purchases and installations. Both this program and the need for heat pumps are inadequately advertised.
- If the ocean temperature stays cool enough relative to inland air temperatures, we get fog. As the planet heats, the number of days of fog in SF has been decreasing.
SF does not have sufficient resources for extreme heat events
- San Francisco has inadequate shade, especially in areas that were redlined or yellowlined.
- San Francisco has a sparse and poorly cared for urban forest.
- San Francisco has a low albedo (0.18), meaning we absorb much more than we reflect. This is why San Francisco has a large urban heat island effect.
- San Francisco does not have air conditioners.
- People in San Francisco are heat-adapted to cooler temperatures and fare poorly in sudden temperature shifts.
- Getting to cooling spaces is a problem for many in SF. Public transportation is inadequate and slow, especially from former redlined and yellowlined areas, many buses have inadequate air conditioning, and the majority of bus shelters are open to the sun.
- The number of cooling spaces available is inadequate to the population needs, and the location of these spaces is not where the greatest needs are/will be.
- San Francisco is in a megadrought and will have problems with water resources and energy as a result, so neither hydration nor energy for cooling are assured.
- San Francisco has inadequate geographic health resources, especially in former redlined and yellowlined areas.
- There is little public knowledge of the symptoms of hyperthermia.
SF does not have sufficient resources for extended heat events
Sparse urban forest, few to no heat pumps or air conditioners, tightening water supplies, low albedo, a population heat-adapted for cooler temperatures facing sudden temperature swings, and no long-term plan to solve any of these problems means that if an extreme heat event in SF lasts longer than a week, many people will die. Especially if our usual high humidity creates a local wet-bulb temperature spike, making evaporative cooling impossible.
Human thermoregulation fails when nighttime temperatures stay higher than 80°F, especially in high humidity. These heat events kill tens of thousands.
It’s not quite the fire
But it is the frying pan.