WANT TO SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE? YOU’LL NEED A GOOD COMMUNITY

Wired: IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis “failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened.”

Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was the way they were distributed across the city. Several of the most deadly areas were entirely black and disproportionately poor, but so were three of the least deadly. Adjacent areas that looked alike—like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two hyper-­segregated black South Side neighborhoods with high poverty and crime—suffered vastly different effects. Read more>>

Translate