In America's hottest city, the temperature has hit over 100 degrees. It is 1 o'clock in the afternoon in late June and the sidewalks are mostly empty, but an elderly woman carries an umbrella and walks her terrier, which has leather moccasins on its tiny feet.
In an air-conditioned conference room on the 11th floor of the building that houses city hall, Mayor Kate Gallego retells the story of her parents abandoning Chicago for the Southwest after the snowstorm of 1979. There are cars buried in snow. She told Yahoo News that trying to navigate the city was difficult.
After her predecessor was elected to Congress, she was appointed to her first mayor term at the age of 37. She suffers from asthma and credits her early interest in the environment for her condition. She said that the temperatures in the Southwest grew hotter as she grew up.
She said that there was a radio station that gave away money every time we reached 97 degrees. When they started the promotion it was not likely to happen, but it became more and more frequent.
According to data compiled by Climate Central, the average summertime temperature in Phoenix has risen by 3.8 degrees since 1970. The city experiences more triple-digit heat each year than it did in the 70's.
Since 1970, nighttime temperatures have gone up 5.7 degrees. Without adequate air-conditioning the body can't cool down before the mercury starts to rise each morning.
In about a decade, we have seen a sea change in the attitudes of residents who used to be skeptical about climate change. They want elected officials to do something.
Phoenix's climate change future is already here because of the rise in temperatures. If you look at the problem in that way, you risk downplaying the problem. Climate models predict that summer highs will rise by as much as 10 degrees in the city, which will lead to more heat related deaths.
Since the beginning of the year, deaths attributed to heat in the county have increased by 45%. In the last two years, the county has set new heat death records, with more than 300 people dying in Phoenix.
People are still flocking to the Valley of the Sun. According to Census Bureau data, Phoenix added 163,000 people between 2010 and 2020.
The United States is seeing a migration towards the sun. People are moving towards the south. It means talking about how we allocate resources.
The first of its kind in the U.S., the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation is the brainchild of David Hondula, a professor at Arizona State University.
In his first eight months on the job, Hondula, who resembles former Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, has put forth a heat response strategy. It focuses on reducing heat-related death and illness through measures such as opening air-conditioned cooling centers across the city where people can escape the oven-like summer conditions, and launching a hotline residents can call to arrange transportation to get them to one.
Climate change disproportionately affects people who don't have the resources to afford air-conditioning or transportation. Hondula has met with poor and unsheltered residents and seen how direct intervention can save lives.
He said that he might have had more education about the heat problem in the last eight months than he had in the previous eight years. For some people heat is an annoyance. People for whom heat is manageable and people for whom heat is a disaster.
In Phoenix, catastrophe is a fixture of daily life in the homeless camp known as "the zone". With a mixture of desperation, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and mental illness, the zone resembles similar tent outposts that have popped up in cities across the west. Roughly two-thirds of heat-related deaths in the city over the last two years were among the homeless, and Hondula is aware that if the city continues to break heat death records, his job may be in jeopardy.
He told them to move the numbers in the other direction as quickly as possible.
It will be difficult given that Phoenix has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, apartment and home rental prices continue to soar, and homelessness has risen over the last two years in the county. Hondula is realistic about the challenges but is optimistic that the city can address the problem, noting that heat-related calls to the Phoenix fire department are running 5% lower than last year.
Hondula said that the homeless case manager noticed a bunch of people crowded around the old Suburban when they showed up at the park. They were on their way to a shelter when we ended our outreach shift. There is no need to ask if this is a good use of our time.
A block from the zone, self-proclaimed "feisty" activistStacey Champion stands in the shade of a tree. The former library is an administrative space for the Arizona State Library but the grounds are always vacant.
This is the epitome of inequity. A public relations consultant who advocates on behalf of Phoenix's unsheltered community said that this is public space that could save people's lives. It was 168 degrees when we had temp guns out here. We measured the grass and it was 90 degrees. People's lives could be saved if they were just on the grass.
Champion has been pressing Hondula, city council members, elected officials, state lawmakers and anyone else who will listen to open the park to the homeless from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
I have been friends with David for a long time. David is a very smart person. She said that Hondula really cared. David's hands will be tied with politics and bureaucratic red tape.
She thinks the city isn't doing enough to implement Hondula's plans.
She said that the heat deaths are preventable. I'm pretty sure we're going to break the record.
While saving lives is Hondula's immediate focus this summer, his overall plan also includes long term strategies to cool the city over the coming years as climate change tightens its grip. The plan includes planting tree canopies to create shade corridors for pedestrians, expanding a new light-rail system, and painting roads white so that they don't get hotter than their rural surroundings.
It can be seen as a race between climate change and the many steps needed to retrofit a place so that it is still worth living there in the future. The decision to spend money insulates communities for the climate change future is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, perhaps because so many lawmakers refuse to admit what more than 99% of scientific research proves, that mankind's burning of fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is what
In the West, where researchers have linked the ongoing extreme dry to climate change, the 44 million people who depend on the Colorado River will soon be hit with a water shortage.
The Phoenix city council voted to allocate $13 million of the $90 million it received from the American Rescue Act for heat-related programs.
Chispa AZ is one of the local nonprofits that is pressing the city on how and where to spend the money.
Dulce Juarez told Yahoo News that Chispa worked with the city on a climate action plan. It is a starting point. They are talking about investing in cool corridors and cooling the streets. The city hopes to create an impact in the small ways.
Hondula was impressed by the fact that wealthier neighborhoods in Phoenix are mostly tree-lined, but poorer neighborhoods remain barren and bake.
The team members met with him to discuss what they do about trees. She said that was a big issue for them. Keeping in mind maintenance and water is one of the things we have to do.
The state lags when it comes to addressing its heat problem.
She said that Arizona doesn't have a very progressive Legislature. A lot of people don't believe in climate change and that's why we have a lot of problems. We're behind on the issue of climate change.
With the rate of climate change speeding up in recent decades as the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues, Juarez wonders how long living in Phoenix will last. She said that the question hit home in 2020 when the city recorded 53 consecutive days of hot weather.
I think it's great here. When you stop and think about it, you wonder if it's really the best place to live in the middle of the desert if our utility companies go out. She wondered how we were going to survive in the heat.
The ruins of a Native American civilization known as the Hohokam are located on the northeast border of Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport. The first people to settle on the banks of the Salt and Gila rivers were the Hohokam.
There is a platform believed to have housed tribal leaders, ball courts similar to those found farther south in Mesoamerica and the remnants of an elaborate series of irrigation canals that allowed the Hohokam to thrive in the Sonoran Desert.
The network of canals and irrigation grew to become the most advanced in America's pre-colonial history and helped the Hohokam grow 12 different crop species in an inhospitable environment. The population grew to a few thousand people who built adobe dwellings. The civilization nose-dived.
The population plunges from 1350 to 1450 and the Hohokam disappears from the archaeological record.
The collapse of the society is believed to be the result of widespread crop failure in the southwestern part of the country.
The modern city of Phoenix was founded in the late 19th century. The industrial revolution began burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate.
Hondula knows that the problem of heat death may get worse before he can come up with a solution.
He said that he wouldn't be surprised if we were worse off from a heat-associated-death standpoint than we were last year.
Climate change has the ability to take existing problems and make them worse. Politicians have to decide what to do about the dynamic that scientists are trying to demonstrate.
The first U.S. mayor to hire a taxpayer-funded position to deal with the effects of heat made worse by climate change must offer a hopeful spin on how her administration will make life better for residents.
The mythical bird that rose from ashes is what gave us our name. She hopes we make something that makes the world better. We are at the forefront of the solution when it comes to climate change. Climate change and heat are important issues for the people of Phoenix.
The National Weather Service sent out a dust storm alert after leaving city hall. The sky quickly turns a brownish orange, reducing visibility to a hundred yards or so, when it reads "Infants, the elderly and those with respiratory issues urged to take precautions"
Few people ventured out into the afternoon heat. After about an hour, the dust is gone, but it still shows the sun.
Videographer for Yahoo news.
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