Here Comes Summer 2020
Join Climate Tucson for a 3-Day Series on — What Else? — Heat
The best way to keep in touch with Climate Tucson is to join us. It’s simple, you won’t get spammed, and, importantly, you will receive automatic notifications about our meetings.
To join, visit Meetup.com/Climate-Tucson. Then click on the Events tab to see the list of upcoming programs.
If you don’t want to join, you can log in to Meetup.com/ClimateTucson and simply press the “attend” button. No commitment (but you won’t get advance notices about the great meetings to come).
Or you can fill out the form at the bottom of the page for this 3-day series only.
Day 1: Tuesday, May 26 | 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
“What’s in Store for Summer 2020: Climate Update and Monsoon Outlook for Southern Arizona”
Our first of 3 meetings on Summer 2020 features Michael A. Crimmins, climate science specialist at the University of Arizona, whose research areas include our region’s summertime package — heat, drought and monsoon. Crimmins will look at our climate over the past few years, including precipitation patterns and temperature trends, and provide us with insight into how the North American Monsoon works and what is shaping up for the 2020 season.
Bio
A climate science specialist, Michael A. Crimmins is a professor of Environmental Science, Geography, Arid Lands Resources Sciences, Global Change, and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Areas of research include Arid and Semi-Arid Agriculture and Climate Change and Drought Impacts. To read more about Professor Crimmins, visit https://profiles.arizona.edu/person/crimmins
Day 2: Wednesday, May 27 | 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
“Heat, Covid-19 and the Most Vulnerable Among Us”
Our second of 3 meetings on Summer 2020 features Mark Kear, with the UA School of Geography & Development, who will discuss heat and its impact on the most vulnerable among us in his presentation, “The Manufactured Housing Gap: Intersecting and Cascading Vulnerabilities.” Trailers and mobile homes make up 10 percent of all housing units in Tucson and provide affordable housing for many of our residents.
But research by Kear and colleagues finds that the mixture of manufactured housing, heat and the coronavirus creates a new public health challenge. As they write in a recent AZCentral opinion piece, “Manufactured home residents are already over-represented among indoor heat-related deaths.”
See “Self-isolating from COVID-19 in a mobile home? That could be deadly in Arizona.”
Bio
Mark Kear is an assistant professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. His research explores the variegated landscape of experimentation in the financial borderscapes of housing and consumer finance. His most recent work can be found in Urban Geography, the Journal of Cultural Economy, as well as Economic Geography and Economy and Society.
Day 3: Thursday, May 28 | 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
“Heat Kills. Don’t Become a Statistic!”
As a member of Rural Metro’s search and rescue team, Battalion Chief John Walka experiences firsthand the effects of heat on the human body. Summer is the busiest season for rescuing Tucsonans who ignore the weather report and head outdoors, woefully unprepared. Chief Walka’s talk on outdoor safety is a cautionary tale on how insidious heat can be, and how deadly it is when underestimated.
He will also give us plenty of great advice on how to stay safe, beyond what think we already might know — for instance, to be truly well hydrated requires more water than most of us can even carry.
(If you want to know just how awful it is to die by heat, get a copy of The Devil’s Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea, and read chapter 9, “Killed by the Light.” Brutal.)