Simply living in the Phoenix area has turned deadly as fossil fuel pollution pushes temperatures to dangerous highs. Temperatures are 5 to 6 degrees hotter in Phoenix now than the already-scorching norm, and heat deaths in Maricopa County have more than quadrupled in the last seven years, leaping from 154 in 2016 to last year’s grim milestone of 645.
Phoenix has become a real-time experiment in adaptation as first responders, health care workers and city planners scramble to keep their city survivable.
“Buy the bigger ice machines,” Phoenix Fire Captain Robert McDade tells emergency managers who call for advice from around the world. “Be willing to change what you’ve done.”
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On some parts of an overheating Earth, the old complaint that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” gets truer by the year.
But in the hottest big city in the US, where sunbaked concrete sprawls across bone-dry desert, Phoenix is setting records in both [high temperatures and body count](https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/01/climate/phoenix-heat-ice-body-bags-unhoused/index.html) — and learning the hard way that it’s not *just* the heat, it’s the vulnerability.
Simply living in the Phoenix area has turned deadly as fossil fuel pollution pushes temperatures to dangerous highs. Temperatures are 5 to 6 degrees hotter in Phoenix now than the already-scorching norm, and heat deaths in Maricopa County have more than quadrupled in the last seven years, leaping from 154 in 2016 to last year’s grim milestone of 645.
Phoenix has become a real-time experiment in adaptation as first responders, health care workers and city planners scramble to keep their city survivable.
“Buy the bigger ice machines,” Phoenix Fire Captain Robert McDade tells emergency managers who call for advice from around the world. “Be willing to change what you’ve done.”
That’s a bit gruesome, an ice bag or a body bag.