Time will come when the temperature will no longer fall lower than 100 degrees in Phoenix during the night. This was according to professor of social and cultural analysis, Dr. Andrew Ross, from the New York University.
Ross wrote "Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World Least Sustainable City," added, "That will be a threshold of some kind."
For quite sometime now, according to a report from Salon.com, the American Southwest has been a protection for those who seek the "health benefits of warm, dry air and sunny days."
The said report also specified that "too much of a good thing is not a good thing" for humans' health or the natural ecosystem.
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The 'Heat Island Effect'
To date, the Southwest is faced with a reckoning: many years of human development, paired with increasing global temperatures resulting from carbon emissions. Meaning, many major cities in the Southwest may turn out to be uninhabitable for humans this century.
According to senior scientist Dr. Juan Declet-Barreto from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the reason may have to do with something known as the "Heat Island Effect," a notion describing the impact in which the heavily populated, central parts of a city that has lots of concrete and asphalt, "will have higher temperatures" than the less populated areas.
The term "island," Declet-Barreto explained, "is not a metaphor here," since, when one looks at a thermal map of lots of cities, the temperatures inside a city's central parts look like an island surrounded by a cooler ocean around more rural places. Evidently, such an effect is suitable to be direr in desert cities, including Phoenix.
Indiana University's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs associate professor Sarah Mincey said, the "Heat Island Effect" is a result of urban centers that gradually lose their "tree canopies," which means that sunlight is "absorbed and held in by materials" such as rooftops and roads, which usually have a darker color.
When they eventually emit that heat back into the air, it raises the temperature people to experience in those urban environs.
Tree canopies, explained by Mincey, alleviate this as they can shade the surfaces preventing the absorption of heat, first and foremost, and "through the cooling impacts of transpiration," discharging moisture into their surrounding environments.
Worsened by Climate Change
The School of Architecture at Clemson University associate professor Dr. BD Wortham-Galvin explained, the Heat Island Effect is worsened by climate change.
Over the coming decades, he continued climate change will augment extreme weather occurrences, cause a rise in temperatures while cities, all at the same time, "increase population density."
This coming together of occurrences means that all cities, except for US Southern cities, specifically, will start experiencing the "Heat Island Effect" more often and within more intra-urban locales.
More urban inhabitants will suffer adverse health and economic effects in the absence of a Heat Equity and Resiliency plan.
Particularly in Phoenix, the Heat Island Effect's adverse impacts will be exacerbated too, by ongoing infrastructure projects that worsen resource scarcity problems. According to the said report, Arizona's water infrastructure is already weak, as human occupancy in both Phoenix and Tucson is reliant on the Central Arizona River Project, a gigantic infrastructure project that diverts the water to central and southern Arizona from the Colorado River.
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