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Heat Waves
Tue Dec 23, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton with The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global Climate Change. Why
is it that people in Houston can deal with 105 degrees Fahrenheit fairly well, but such
readings in Paris caused a disaster this past summer? The answer might be: it's not the heat,
it's the variability. Larry Kalkstein is a heat expert at the University of Delaware.
LK: Let's take the United States. Among the most vulnerable cities are Philadelphia, St.
Louis, Chicago--Midwestern and Eastern cities which have high summer variability of
climate.
By that I mean you have mostly days in the 80s punctuated by these extreme heat waves where
the temperature can go up to 100 or more. The big Question is, if climate change occurs, is
the climate of Philadelphia going to just get warmer, and the variability is going to stay the
same, or even get less? That is, will Philly's climate begin to imitate Jacksonville,
Florida's, where not many people die of the heat because it's consistently hot? Or, will just
the extremes get hotter in Philadelphia, whereas the rest of the baseline climate remains just
the same and the extremes get hotter? And this is one question that the climate modelers
can't answer with great precision, because they don't handle climate variability that
well.
So places like Philly should be able to cope if the typical summer day warms up but the
extremes don't get any worse. And what if the variations do get worse?
LK: Then I predict that there will be a much worse heat mortality and heat morbidity-related
problem.
Thanks to Bob Henson for today's story. Our Climate Change series is funded in part by the New
England Science Center Collaborative. Regular funding comes from The National Science
Foundation and Subaru: Driven by What's Inside.
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