Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
For years public health researchers have studied the link between extreme temperatures, and people’s health, in order to understand how a warming planet will impact people. Traditionally they’ve done this by taking temperature data, and comparing it to records about people’s health.
But there’s a bit of a problem. Those temperature readings come from only a handful of specialized weather stations, many of them at airports. Researchers can take that data, and use it for research.
Allan Just: And they might look at the relationship between temperature and health in Rhode Island, but under the assumption that all of us live at TF Green Airport and very few people live at TF Green Airport.
Megan Hall: This is Allan Just, he’s an environmental epidemiologist, meaning he studies how the environment, mostly temperature and air pollution affect people’s health.
He works at Brown University, where he’s been developing a more accurate way for researchers to measure a place’s temperature, not just a whole city, but down to the buildings
Allan Just: Individual neighborhoods can be warmer or cooler, and that varies. It depends on how many trees there are and how much pavement there is, and whether you’re near a body of water, whether there’s a major roadway that goes through.
Megan Hall: Using satellite data and some complicated math, Alan and his team have developed a model that can create much more accurate estimates of a place’s temperature, that lets their research get really specific.
Allan Just: We’re doing lots of studies in which we’re using the location of an individual’s specific address or the school that their children. Attend, or we’re considering the location of every nursing home in the Northeast.
Megan Hall: By pinpointing the temperature not just for a region, but for individual neighborhoods or buildings, they’re able to find new connections between extreme heat and health impacts.
Allan Just: We think that when we get more specific, we’ve been underestimating the burden.
Megan Hall: From what researchers already know about extreme heat, the health impacts can be pretty serious.
Allan Just: And it’s sometimes easy to forget that, particularly for people who are very vulnerable to it, that warm weather can come with really severe health consequences,
Megan Hall: There are the extreme cases that you hear about in the news, like people dying from heat stress. But then there are also much harder to pinpoint things, like an increased likelihood of heart attacks and strokes after heat waves.
And then there’s the way that extreme heat can interact with your medications. Different medications can sometimes impact your body’s ability to handle hotter temperatures.
Allan Just: But there are quite a few medications that, through different mechanisms, they can alter our ability to feel thirst. They can change the ways in which we retain body fluids. They can impair our ability to sweat. I mean, there are just several really important mechanisms at play when we think about the ways in which people end up vulnerable to extreme heat.
Megan Hall: This work is especially relevant for studying the ways that the impact of climate change isn’t being felt evenly across our cities.
Allan Just: Underserved communities, they are systematically hotter, and that’s driven by land use decisions and structural racism that’s led to differences in where we’ve kept, uh, vegetation and where we’ve put pavement and roadways and those subtle differences are lost when we assume that everyone is living at the airport
That’s it for today. This episode was a collaboration with Humans in Public Health, a monthly podcast from the Brown University School of Public Health in celebration of Brown’s Climate Week.
You can find more information, or ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, at ask possibly dot org. You can also subscribe to Possibly wherever you get your podcasts or follow us on social media at “ask possibly”
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, Ocean State Media and WBRU.
