Extreme Heat – News Agency nabakhabar

How to Keep Your Home Cool in Extreme Heat

News Agency nabakhabar — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 22:28:39 +0000

global temperatures have reached alarmingly high levels across the U.S., Europe, and Asia as heat waves set record highs this week.

Parts of European countries including most of Italy, eastern Croatia, southern Spain, southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro are under red alert, the European Union’s Emergency Response Coordination Centre said on Wednesday. Meanwhile, as of July 18, Phoenix had experienced 19 consecutive days of 110°F temperatures or higher. And Beijing is also experiencing a record stretch of 95°F heat.

The extreme heat comes as the weather phenomenon El Niño, which occurs every two to seven years and brings higher global temperatures along the northern hemisphere, takes place. It also arrives at a critical point in global warming.

“Extreme heat events in the United States are already occurring and expected to become more common, more severe and longer lasting due to climate change,” said Claudia Brown, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some scientists say that 2023 could be the warmest year on record, posing a problem for millions across Europe where air-conditioning is relatively rare. Only about 3% of homes in Germany and less than 5% of homes in France have an air cooling unit in their home, according to the Washington Post. That’s compared to 90% of homes in the U.S.

TIME spoke to experts about how to keep cool in your home. Here’s what they said.

Block out sunlight

The main thing to do when attempting to keep your house cool is to block sunlight from entering the home.

“What you want to do is stop the heat before it gets through the glass or any other wall,” David Wright, a solar environmental architect, says. “You can use outside shading techniques or shades that go up and down and block sunlight at certain times of the day, or horizontal shading devices like arbors, trellises, and awnings.” Any sort of plant life that can absorb sunlight before it hits a wall is helpful, he adds.

While blocking sunlight and heat from the outside before it has a chance to enter the home—such as by having trees around your house—is the most efficient way to keep your home cool, there are tricks for people living in apartments too, says Wright, pointing to blackout curtains as a good option.

“If sunlight is allowed to come through the glass into the house, once it gets inside and strikes an object,” explains Wright, “the wavelength goes from long wave to short wave. And the short waves don’t go back through the glass. That’s what traps heat.”

Homeowners can opt for insulated glass or Low-E glass—which has a thin coating that reflects heat—to prevent heat from entering the home. Applying a tint to windows in your home may also be beneficial, Miami Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert writes to TIME in an email statement.

Gilbert adds that residents can paint their roofs a reflective white to help block out sunlight, while Wright suggests people invest in a heat pump or air conditioner to help with additional cooling.

Improving insulation in ceilings, attics, crawl spaces and even walls, will also reduce heat, according to Gilbert. Residents can also get a deal when fixing their homes as “utilities offer rebates and the IRS provides tax credits for insulation,” Gilbert tells TIME.

Use the nighttime to your advantage

If you live in a house with thermal mass (meaning it’s made of brick or concrete and retains heat well), Wright says that you can try to cool your home at night without air conditioning. He suggests homeowners take note when the outside temperature drops below the interior temperature, and then open all the windows and doors that you can.

Of course, Wright mentions, this should only be done if safety is not a concern. Low-lying windows or doors are especially beneficial when doing this technique because hot air rises.

Wright also mentions that any part of your house that is built into the ground, like a basement, is going to be much cooler than other parts of your house because it is touching the surrounding earth, which is likely cooler than the air temperature. Spending time there may be optimal for cooling.

Know when a fan is efficient

Wright says that ceiling fans with large paddles, or Casablanca fans, are most helpful. “It pushes the heat up toward the ceiling and provides evaporative cooling around the body of the person,” Wright tells TIME.

Sonia Singh is the marketing communications supervisor for Maricopa County, Ariz., where Phoenix is located. There, it can get so hot that simply slipping on the concrete can lead to second-degree burns. Singh says that fans “become insufficient for cooling the air at a safe temperature” when its hotter than 90°F. At that temperature, residents without air conditioning should move to a space with air conditioning.

Know when to move to a cooling center

Brown emphasizes that air conditioning is the most efficient way of staying cool when temperatures are particularly high.

“When it’s extremely hot, spending time in locations with air conditioning, particularly during the hottest hours of the day, is going to be your best line,” Brown says. “If you do not have air conditioning in your home, we do recommend going to public places where there is air conditioning such as shopping malls, public libraries, or public health-sponsored heat relief shelters (sometimes these are referred to as cooling centers). Gilbert adds that anytime there is a heat advisory or heat warning and you do not have air conditioning, you should move to a cooling center.

Brown adds that staying cool should be a community effort, and asks that residents check on their neighbors who may not have any family members nearby or live alone.

If you or someone you know is feeling confusion, headache, or dizziness, they may be facing a heat-related illness. People should also watch out for muscle spasms, nausea, or profuse sweating.

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Extreme heat sweeps the world from Europe to the US and Japan

News Agency nabakhabar — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 18:05:35 +0000

Record heat is forecast around the world from the United States, where tens of millions are battling dangerously high temperatures, to Europe and Japan, in the latest example of the rising threat from global warming.

Italy faces weekend predictions of historic highs with the health ministry issuing a red alert for 16 cities including Rome, Bologna and Florence.

The meteo centre warned Italians to prepare for “the most intense heatwave of the summer and also one of the most intense of all time”.

The thermometer is likely to hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Rome by Monday and even 43C (109F) on Tuesday, smashing the record 40.5C (104.9F) set in August 2007.

The islands of Sicily and Sardinia could wilt under temperatures as high as 48C (118F), the European Space Agency warned – “potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe”.

Acropolis closed for the second day

“Parts of the country could see highs as much as 44C [111F] on Saturday,” according to the national weather service EMY. The central city of Thebes sweated under 44.2C (111.6F) on Friday.

The Acropolis, Athens’s top tourist attraction, closed for a second day straight Saturday during the hottest hours with 41C (106F) expected, as did several parks in the capital.

Regions of France, Germany, Spain and Poland are also baking in searing temperatures.

Parts of eastern Japan are also expected to reach 38 to 39C (100 to 102F) on Sunday and Monday, with the meteorological agency warning temperatures could hit previous records.

Meanwhile, the northern city of Akita saw more rain in half a day than is typical for the whole month of July, Japan’s national broadcaster NHK reported. The downpours also triggered at least one landslide, forcing 9,000 people to evacuate their homes.

Torrential rains described by the meteorological agency as the “heaviest rain ever experienced” have also hit southern Japan in recent weeks, leaving at least 11 people dead.

Relentless monsoon rains have reportedly killed at least 90 people in northern India, after burning heat.

The Yamuna River running through the capital New Delhi has reached a record high of 208.66 metres (685 feet), more than a metre over the flood top set in 1978, threatening low-lying neighbourhoods in the megacity of more than 20 million people.

Major flooding and landslides are common during India’s monsoons, but experts have said climate change is increasing its frequency and severity.

Americans are watching as a powerful heatwave stretches from California to Texas, with its peak expected this weekend.

In Arizona, one of the hardest-hit states, residents face a daily endurance marathon against the sun.

State capital Phoenix was to record its 15th straight day above 43C (109F) on Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

Hannah Safford, White House climate policy adviser, told Al Jazeera that low-income communities were hardest hit by heatwaves.

“People have been experiencing record-breaking heat for weeks now. It’s not just a geographic region where we’re seeing communities being disproportionately affected,” Safford said.

“We know that the lowest income, the most vulnerable Americans who have historically borne the brunt of climate change are also bearing the impacts of heat. These are people who have to work outside, who don’t necessarily have coolings in their homes, so we’re paying special attention to those communities.”

Deadly danger

Authorities have been sounding the alarm, advising people to avoid outdoor activities in the daytime and to be wary of dehydration.

The Las Vegas weather service warned that assuming high temperatures naturally come with the area’s desert climate was “a DANGEROUS mindset! This heatwave is NOT typical desert heat”.

“Now the most intense period is beginning,” it added, as the weekend arrived with record highs threatening on Sunday.

California’s Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, is also likely to register new peaks Sunday, with the mercury possibly rising to 54C (130F).

Southern California is fighting numerous wildfires, including one in Riverside County that has burned more than 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) and prompted evacuation orders.

Morocco may be used to hot weather, but it was slated for above-average temperatures this weekend with highs of 47C (117F) in some provinces – more typical of August than July – sparking concerns for water shortages, the meteorological service said.

Jordan wildfire

In the Middle East, water-scarce Jordan was forced to dump 214 tonnes of water on a wildfire that broke out in the Ajloun forest in the north amid a heatwave, the army said.

In Iraq, where scorching summers are common, along with power cuts, Wissam Abed told AFP he cools off from Baghdad’s brutal summer by swimming in the Tigris River.

But as Iraqi rivers dry up, so does the age-old pastime.

With temperatures near 50C (122F) and wind whipping through the city like a hair dryer, Abed stood in the middle of the river, but the water only comes up to his waist.

“I live here … like my grandfather did before me. Year after year, the water situation gets worse,” said the 37-year-old.

While it can be difficult to attribute a particular weather event to climate change, scientists insist global warming – linked to dependence on fossil fuels – is behind the multiplication and intensification of heatwaves in the world.

Hottest June

The heatwaves come after the EU’s climate monitoring service said the world saw its hottest June on record last month.

Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading told Al Jazeera “Weather patterns are more severe than they usually would be, because of the greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere due to human activity.”

“This extra heat is kind of supercharging these weather extremes … We need to treat the cause, which is the increases in greenhouse gases that are heating our planet up and making heat waves hotter but also making intense rain and flooding more severe.”

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How Extreme Heat Puts Pollinators—and Crops—at Risk

News Agency nabakhabar — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 18:46:50 +0000

As the American West grapples with another dangerous heat wave in the midst of a megadrought, official advisories rightly focus on short-term measures to keep people cool and hydrated.

Yet as record-breaking heat waves become more common in a warming world, they pose a longer term threat to human well-being. Excessive heat interferes with pollinator interactions with plants that produce about a third of the world’s food crops. Scientists are scrambling to understand the complex ways spiking temperatures are disrupting those relationships.

Extreme heat can have multiple knock-on effects that disrupt the intricate interplay between bees and the flowering crops they feed on, researchers at Michigan State University warned in a review of heat’s effects on the pollinators and their host plants published in Insect Science last month.

“Extreme heat can indirectly limit plant reproduction by disrupting the pollination services of bees through reduced access to floral nutrition,” the researchers noted. And the bee’s reduced supply of food could exacerbate yield loss from heat-stressed crops.

These indirect effects urgently require research attention, they argued, yet scientists have focused mostly on direct effects of heat on crops and their pollinators.

Bees support about 100 commercial nut, fruit and vegetable crops, from almonds and blueberries to tangerines and zucchini. As bees collect nectar and pollen for larvae back in their nests, they fertilize crops by distributing pollen from flower to flower.

Extreme heat can directly reduce both pollinators and plants’ ability to reproduce, develop and survive. Heat stress can hinder photosynthesis in crop plants and diminish the nutritional value of their flowers. If flowers produce less nectar and pollen, bees will have less food to support the development, survival and reproductive success of their colonies.

Fewer bees means less pollination, and lower crop yields.

“We know that heat is directly impacting the quantity and the quality of floral resources,” said Jenna Walters, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University’s Pollination Ecology Lab who led the review. “How that indirectly impacts specifically understudied bees, like solitary specialist bees, is one of the biggest neglected problems in our field and one of the biggest things we need to focus on.”

Most studies focus on honeybees and bumblebees. But most of the world’s roughly 20,000 bee species are solitary, some of which depend on just one plant. Squash bees, as their name implies, feed exclusively on pollen from squash and other gourds. If larvae are fed other types of pollen in the lab, they don’t develop. Undernourished bees get smaller over generations, which means they can’t fly as far. And that means they’ll pollinate fewer crops.

“We simply don’t know how heat is impacting the nutrition of bees and how that is impacting development of bees and populations and communities of bees in our landscapes,” Walters said.

Making matters worse, the megadrought that’s gripped the West is likely compounding the negative effects heat has on plants. Droughts reduce nectar production for one thing, and an extreme heat event is likely to reduce it further, Walters said.

Extreme heat and drought are likely to become more common as climate change accelerates. Scientists across disciplines have to start working together to figure out how these extreme conditions may alter pollinator-plant interactions, Walters said, because the future of pollinator-dependent crops hangs in the balance.

An ‘Insane’ Development

Walters, 25, came of age when the dire consequences of climate change were becoming harder to ignore. It was always in the back of her mind as she pursued undergraduate work on pollinators and ecology at Michigan State.

Then, she saw an unprecedented event devastate Michigan’s blueberry crop.

Blueberries, native perennials in temperate regions like Michigan, bloom in the spring when temperatures typically hover in the mid-70s. But during the 2018 blueberry bloom temperatures soared past 95 degrees.

Everyone worried about how the temperature spike would affect the harvest, Walters said. “But literally no research had been done at that point on how heat impacts blueberries, because it’s just so uncommon for that crop to be exposed to heat when they’re flowering.”

Researchers and growers alike had to wait for the harvest to gauge the impacts. What they saw shocked them. Some growers lost 50 percent of their crop. Across Michigan, the crop yielded about 30 million pounds less than normal.

That’s a “massive” deficit for a specialty crop, Walters said. “Thirty million pounds in just one state is insane.”

When Walters and her colleagues looked at all the other conditions needed for pollination—not too much wind or rain, plenty of bees on the wing—everything pointed to a “great year” for yields, she said. Heat was the only thing that could explain the loss.

Cascading Effects

Excessive heat can interfere with photosynthesis and diminish the nutritional value of flowers, which in turn can impair the survival, development and reproductive success of pollinators that feed on them, including bees. It can also change the size of bees’ legs, wings and proboscis and even hinder their memory, all of which support efficient pollination.

“How extreme heat is affecting plant-insect interactions is super important,” said Matt Forister, an expert on plant-insect ecology at the University of Nevada who did not participate in the review. “Especially the timing of it.”

It seems that extreme heat in late summer or early fall may be particularly devastating, Forister said. “In our last big look at butterflies across the West, we found that warming temperatures in the fall in particular predicted the worst butterfly season the following year,” Forister said, referring to his Science paper published last year analyzing decades of monitoring data from scores of locations in the West.

As for why fall heat seems to be driving the declines, he added, “We don’t really understand it.”

Excessive heat can also upset the synchronized pollination schedules critical to producing the almonds and citrus that earn California farmers billions every year. If bees and other pollinators reach peak abundance before or after crops flower, the altered timing will leave the insects without food and crops without pollinators.

This can be a particular risk for ground-nesting species like squash bees. Rising spring temperatures heat up the soil, telling bees it’s time to emerge from their nests. Warmer than normal temperatures may send bees out to forage before flowers emerge, Walters said. “And they’re going to starve for some amount of time.”

Bees that survive will be malnourished and produce fewer eggs. Those eggs are likely to result in a higher ratio of males to females, because males require less pollen than females to develop. But it’s possible that pollen quantity and quality cause the male bias, Walters said. It’s a question she’s working on now.

Looking for Answers

Walters is also trying to figure out how excessive heat caused the 2018 blueberry crop crash. She started by exposing blueberry pollen to different temperatures in the lab to see how heat affects fertilization. Successful pollination triggers the growth of a structure called a pollen tube, which carries plant sperm to fertilize ovaries at the base of a flower.

The results, which Walters hopes will be published soon, show that exposing pollen to extreme heat for a mere four hours—replicating what happened in 2018—was enough to significantly and permanently stunt pollen tube growth.

Walters dug into the scientific literature to understand how heat could do that. She discovered that pollen grains need proteins, carbohydrates and amino acids. Suddenly, everything clicked. The primary and almost exclusive resource for bee nutrition is pollen, which contains proteins, carbohydrates, amino acids and lipids, Walters said.

“So the same things that are fueling fertilization, this pollen tube growth, are the same things that bees are visiting these flowers for nutritionally,” she said.

Walters started thinking through the implications. If heat is inhibiting this physiological response in the plants, there has to be some sort of response in the bees as well. But what is it?

Again, Walters dug into the literature. “What I found when I looked into that was literally nothing.”

The vast majority of research in Walter’s field focuses on heat’s direct impacts on either plants or bees, she said. She and her colleagues were shocked to find so little research on how these direct effects ripple through the complex interactions between pollinators and their host plants that are fundamental to the success of so many food crops.

It’s absolutely critical to ramp up investigations of the cascading effects of these stresses right now to identify ways to enhance agricultural resilience, Walters said.

That will require not only reducing the fossil fuel emissions that exacerbate climate change, she said, but also boosting floral resources and habitat for pollinators.

Growers should invest in “rescue resources” for bees, like wildflowers, clover and other native flowering plants, Walters said. That will help supplement their diet, minimize their nutritional stress and reduce the negative effects of climate change.

On the bright side, University of Nevada’s Forister said, there’s a lot of resilience built into natural ecosystems. “It’s surprising.”

He recalled working on restoration projects in California’s Central Valley and seeing nothing but monocultures of pesticide-treated tomatoes stretch toward the horizon.

“And if the farmers have allowed just one field edge to go back to some kind of feral vegetation, where there’s flowers, you look down, and there’s a bee,” Forister said. “They’re always waiting around the edges for us to give them a chance to come back. We just have to give them that chance.”

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