Season 4, Episode 3: Jesse Keenan: Climate Migration and the Impacts of Extreme Heat on U.S. Cities
Jesse Keenan, Tulane University
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Jesse Keenan, the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning and the Founding Director of the Center for Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, joins John to talk about the second transformation: How extreme heat is moving north due to climate change. Jesse’s work focuses on climate change adaptation and the built environment, including design, engineering, and planning. He and John discuss what this heat transformation means for communities in the sunbelt and across the U.S.
“What we see now is, not only has the value of sunshine waned in its influence on consumer preferences in location choices, but in some cases we’ve actually seen a reversal.”
Key Topics
Heat Moves North: Jesse and John discuss the challenges cities face as they adapt to rising temperatures and more frequent heat events due to climate change.
Economic and Social Impacts: Extreme heat is impacting labor productivity, housing stability, and migration patterns, with notable effects on labor economics and public health.
Urban Planning and Adaptation: City planners must now consider extreme heat’s impact on infrastructure and livability, especially as high night temperatures exacerbate urban heat effects.
Climate Gentrification and Bluelining: Jesse discusses how financial and real estate markets are responding to climate risks, often leading to displacement and limited resource access for vulnerable communities.
Links to Relevant Studies and Resources:
Learn about the Center for Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University
Jesse talked about the differences in skin responses between people who live in colder versus warmer climates. Learn more about how a warming climate can impact skin.
Jesse talks about losing labor hours due to heat. Read more about heat stress and productivity here.
John asks Jesse about the term climate gentrification. Read more about it in this research paper.
They also discuss the term bluelining. Learn more about bluelining in this report by the Greenlining Institute.
Jesse mentions research that indicates mortgage officers are more pessimistic in their underwriting on hot days. Read the research paper here.
Further Reading:
Jesse referenced Brian Stone of Georgia Tech and David Hondula from Arizona State University when he was discussing research on the built environment and extreme heat.
“There’s an opportunity to shed ourselves of the structures of isolation and segregation and carbonization and try to rebuild, and in the interest of affordability, accessibility, whatever those values are that advance a more sustainable world and way of living.”
Transcript
START (AUDACIOUS WATER EPISODE 2, SEASON 4)
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University. On today's show, the 2nd Transformation, heat is moving north due to climate change, affecting regions and cities unprepared for prolonged high temperatures. Rising temperatures are straining public health systems, housing stability, and economic resilience, and driving new migration patterns across the U.S. My guest is Jesse Keenan, associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning, and the founding director of the Center for Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University. Coming up we'll discuss the effects of heat moving north, what it means for city planning, and how it impacts where people want to live.
JOHN: Jesse, welcome to the show.
JESSE: Thank you so much for having me.
JOHN: Yeah, this is going to be fun. So maybe to start out it's worth noting that we're Tulane University colleagues. I lead the ByWater Institute and you're leading the newly minted Center for Climate Change and Urbanism. Let's talk a little bit first about how those two efforts intersect. How do you see those two efforts intersecting?
JESSE: That's a good question to the extent that I'm not quite sure how our center itself is really going to come to life. You know, I think it's like a piece of musical composition--you can write it, you can tune it, you can put it in the right key, but someone's always going to arrange it in a way that the ultimate composition comes out sort of different than the way you intended it or wrote it. And that's sort of the beauty of running research centers I think is that, you know, because it's a team effort and it requires an awful lot of input and engagement across, you know, disciplines and faculty, and faculty with their own interests and their own motivations, it sort of takes on a life of its own. So I've written the composition, we've put it together. We're humming a tune right now, and that tune is - you know, it's catchy. And we're starting to get research and programs out the door, and engaging people. But it's hard to know where they'll exactly land, you know? And I think in dialogue with ByWater and other centers on campus we all have our own niche that we fill in terms of our own disciplinary expertise. But we all project and I think also have a track record, to some extent, on inter-, multi-, and maybe even trans-disciplinary engagement around core themes and topics. When you look at the intersection of water and the built environment, these are inseparable issues thematically. It requires a lot of disciplinary contributions at the intersection of the problem-solution nexus, if you will. And certainly colleagues at the law school and science and engineering, and elsewhere, are engaged in this. And ByWater historically--as you know; I'm preaching to the choir here--has played a big part of that community of people. And I think, you know, why do a center in the first place? We couldn't just be, you know, a series of projects that are sort of independently or autonomously run, sure. But I think one of the real advantages of having the center is actually the socialization part of it. It's actually just a kind of conduit for people to get together, share what they're doing, their research, their interest, and try to build something that has some momentum behind it. I think when you look at climate change more broadly across Tulane I think we have some real challenges. Because we really haven't had the kind of executive leadership that I think we need from the top down to unite these various forces. And on some level that's appropriate to the extent that there's a lot of experimentation going on, there's a lot of complementarity that naturally arises when you have different faculty searches that are sort of overlapping. But I think where we are now is I think across the university and what these centers represent, and institutes and the like there (inaudible) the take on climate work, is that we've reached a kind of maturity where now the question is, well, what's next for the university, and what's the broader role for the university when it comes to climate change, when it comes to fundraising, when it comes to broader mechanisms of a kind of institutional impetus? So it's a very exciting time in that regard because we're right on the cusp of sort of growing into that next phase, and that feels healthy and it feels productive.
JOHN: That's a great answer, and I couldn't agree more with respect to where we are on the journey at Tulane. And I think at any institution it's - you know, coordination is key. It's hard. You know, I come from a - before Tulane I was at Arizona State University, which is enormous, and it was much more of a challenge there. And I think for that reason, too, we have a lot of potential because we're of a size I think that will allow us to take advantage of where we are on the journey.
JESSE: Yeah. And I think if you look at other universities around the country that are organizing around climate as a curriculum, or a degree, a major, a minor, across interdisciplinary faculty development, or just the organization of climate within the university, and particularly in cross-cutting terms, a lot of universities struggle. Stanford is really struggling. Columbia has a supreme track record, but it's not going to be easy for the climate school to get to that next stage. And part of this is the weight of the institutions itself. And that comes in a lot of different forms, both structurally and culturally. But, you know, take Stanford for example, the extent to which I think they find it difficult to try to recruit and hire interdisciplinarians and then force them into a disciplinary bucket when it comes to the ultimate, you know, development of tenure cases and the like. And so I think recruiting is hard in those terms. I think Tulane has a much more flexible culture and a flexible administration that can reward and can recruit the kind of faculty that we need that sit on these boundary areas in disciplinary terms but are sufficiently rigorous in one discipline or the other to be able to advance more formal cases for tenure and endowed professorships and everything else that comes along with faculty development. So I think, you know, just that's one example. But I think the university itself is sort of the right scale and has the right institutional structure to be flexible. And that's really a key asset these days.
JOHN: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, back to the original question, you know, institutes and centers can be effective in that realm, attracting those people that sit on boundaries. Especially if, I think as you pointed out, the appointment structure is flexible and it's clear that the expectation is to sit on the boundary, and that is reflected in the decision-making process about promotion and tenure, right?
JESSE: Mm-hm.
JOHN: And that challenge that you just articulated, kind of the siloing of promotion and tenure, is a challenge that I think every university faces. ASU faced it as well, and it really took, you know, I think creating school structures that were parallel to the institutes that understood those boundaries to make it work together. I'm not suggesting that for Tulane--there are other ways to do it I think--but that's great. So let's get to the topic of today, which is heat. It's not a topic that I've talked a lot to you about, so let's see if we can dig in. It was a hot summer, and we've been saying that for many summers in a row now. Can you sort of dial me into what the big effects are going to be in cities from heat and what kind of timelines we're talking about there?
JESSE: Well, the timelines here are now, right? And so whenever you see that particularly as it relates to observations with shifts in mean average temperature or daytime temperature, nighttime temperature, whatever that may be, and we see the greater propensity for (tail)-risk in extreme heat events, skewed to the right with very hot events. I think there's a lot of avenues of research in the built-environment extreme heat that are quite profoundly important or have profound implications for public policy. I think immediately of, like, Brian Stone at Georgia Tech, and David Hondula at Arizona--I guess he's at Arizona State now--and the City of Phoenix formally as their chief heat officer. And, you know, what are the impacts and what are the implications? The primary range of impacts that people tend to look at are public health impacts, and those are vast. I mean, you have heat strokes formally, and heat stress, but you also have interacting sort of causal mechanisms associated with a variety of physiological responses. They're cardiopulmonary, they're interacting with heightened air quality, or impacts from air quality, right? There's an interaction between extreme heat and air quality itself. And so there's a whole multitude of implications. I mean, for instance, in looking at just people staying hydrated in the context of extreme heat people are often not drinking enough water, they're drinking too many sugary beverages along the way, and that has massive implications on your kidneys and, you know, systematically throughout your body. So you can break this down, the kind of pathophysiological responses in enduring stress. Interestingly enough, some of the more interesting emerging research is not just in, like, looking in the Southwest in these areas that historically have had some measure of extreme heat independent of climate or current climates. But also in areas like the Northeast or the Midwest, which really haven't had the same level of intensity of heat events, and from which they're socially less-adapted or have a lower adaptive capacity. So people generally in the Southwest, for instance, have a pretty robust adaptive capacity for heat. They can endure really a fair amount. But comparatively the tricks of the trade, if you will, whether it's social behavior, or institutional support, or the organizational structures, for instance just having cooling shelters, those types of adaptations don't really exist, or exist to the same extent in the upper Midwest, for instance, as they do in the Southwest. And as a consequence of that, those populations actually are arguably in equal measure of risk, and sometimes even a higher measure of risk to extreme heat. So in geographic terms the risks are quite widespread, but very often for different reasons. Now, when you're looking formally at the built environment, yeah, you know, "urban heat island effect," that's a phenomenon. I think one of the things that is most interesting to me with heat and extreme heat is because the nighttime temperatures are warming at a good clip--so it's not cooling down as much at night--the thermal mass of the built environment is not sufficiently cooling off in the morning. And so we're just amplifying that heat and amplifying urban heat island effects because we're simply not having that thermal exchange that would normally happen. And, you know, there are so many implications for this. And going back to human health, like, for instance there's a whole line of research that looks at nighttime temperatures relative to sleep, right? And, you know, if you don't get enough sleep or your sleep is not sufficiently sound or of a high quality, I mean, it has widespread implications on your health in psychological terms, but more broadly in physical terms. So these are real impacts that are just widespread. And we start I think looking at it through the condition of the human experience. But once we scale that up, you know, we also look at it in terms of labor economics, for instance. So at a different perspective or scale you say, okay, yeah, we're losing labor hours. It may not be necessarily impacting productivity, but probably does. But we're certainly losing the amount of capacity that people have to work outside during extreme events. And for people who are on hourly wages, who are already, you know, working outside with a different kind of labor or structure (inaudible) themselves, you know, these are real wages out of people's pockets when you lose time and an inability to work outside, for whatever reason. So the implications are widespread in the built environment, and in the economy, and certainly in terms of public health.
JOHN: That's a couple of things that I want to hit on there. The first is, you know, you talked about some examples I think that are super relevant to the context of ByWater, which is the Mississippi River Basin in general, and the Midwest in general. Some of your examples were scattered across the country. How do you see it playing out in the heartland of the U.S.? You brought up the Midwest at least once there.
JESSE: Yeah, I brought the upper Midwest up in the context of when they have extreme heat they don't have the same adaptive capacity. And you can look at that kind of at an individual level. Literally people's skin who live in a hot environment is quite different from the skin responses in terms of shedding heat from people who live in colder environments. You just - you retain a lot more heat in your skin. It takes some period of time for your skin to adjust when you move. But I think, you know, for the Midwest and for the upper Midwest extreme heat--and that propensity has always been there--but I think as you see greater likelihoods, particularly in successive extreme events being over longer periods of time and concurrent days, I think it just becomes pretty challenging. I mean, just think about the Midwest in the context of ag and the ag economy and labor, right, and the extent to which that heat stress plays out on, you know, migratory labor, working the fields. You know, those are real responses. Think about ag housing. You know, the USDA has a whole program of housing, and weatherization, and supporting higher-quality housing for people who work in the ag economy, particularly migratory workers. You know, if it's not cooling down at night and it's getting warmer and warmer, and hotter and hotter, and you're already living in pretty poor-quality housing and conditions, that's going to have implications on people's lives and livelihoods. And that's just one example. You know, that's just going down one path.
JOHN: Yeah, let's talk about - you brought up migratory works, let's talk about migration, and how do you see heat driving migration demography, let's say, over the next 20 or 30 years?
JESSE: Yeah, I mean, I’m not a demographer, but I think to me the clearest case, or the sort of most cogent case is that--and what I'm about to say is based in part on just interviews and talking to people--but I think it also plays out a little bit in fairly robust terms I would actually argue, in surveys that have been done, in some emerging economic - pretty good economic evidence, which is this: certain cohorts of people are more sensitive to extreme heat. Those tend to be people in 60s and older. And they're sensitive for a lot of different reasons. They're sensitive because their bodies just can't endure the heat, the sweating. You know, the physical endurance of getting from place to place in the heat can be exhausting for people, particularly when your walking or your physical mobility is slowed by some (inaudible). But also the heat has all kinds of implications in socialization, right? If we can't get outside or congregate with others, or our ability to even get around is limited by heat, it limits our ability to socialize, particularly in groups. I mean, you can even extend that, you know, the political geography, or just the ability to have massive rallies with people out in the heat, as we saw this summer; lots of casualties along the way from doing that. But for whatever reason--and we're just going to pick on one cohort, slightly older cohort--that's a sufficiently arduous sort of contextual environmental condition that's driving the demand for more moderate temperatures, that is to live in a place with more moderate temperatures, lower humidity, and interesting enough, in at least one research study I've seen a higher wind velocity. Because if you've ever lived in a hot stagnant environment, which New Orleans can be sometimes, just a little bit of wind can go a long way. So what we see in economics is that the marginal willingness to pay, sort of value we assign to things, is shifting, and people have greater and greater preferences for more moderate, cooler weather, lower humidity, and again, at least in this one study, a little bit of wind velocity - greater wind velocity. Now, it's really about heat and humidity and ambient temperature at the end of the day. And I think when you contextualize this to the broader realm of sunbelt migration, and when I present this thesis, right, people are moving - they're moving to more moderate weathers for (inaudible) reasons. People say, "Oh, but what about sunbelt migration?" And sunbelt migration we understood happened in two distinct eras. In the first era, from the 1960s and '70s, air conditioning really did allow people to reinforce changing consumer preferences for sunshin4e and the marginal willingness to pay. There was a value for people who are caught in cold climates - colder climates to move to lower-humidity, warmer places like Phoenix. That was a thing. It was initially what drove that. And we know that in popular culture; that's well understood. But by the 1990s, the 2000s, and the like, it was not the willing- it was not the value that we assign to sunshine. And I’m using that broadly as a kind of proxy for weather and climate. It was not the value of sunshine, it was cheap, affordable housing that drove the growth in the sunbelt. With cheap, affordable housing brought in economic development, labor, particularly non-union labor jobs, and the like. But the origins of it, at least in urban economics and among economists, is that the sunbelt grew because it was just cheap. And this is where people moved, a cheaper tax base, lower wages if you're an employer, because people have a lower cost of living, etc. etc. So what we see now is not only has the value of sunshine waned in its influence on consumer preferences and location choices, but in some cases we've actually seen a reversal. So people in their twenties are beginning to shift their preferences away from - and their actual location and relocation decisions away from warm areas, or hot areas, into cooler areas. People in their sixties, as I mentioned a minute ago, and older are... And it makes sense, right? If you're in your sixties and your seventies you're thinking about, okay, where am I going to retire? Where am I going to be for the rest of my life? Own (inaudible) home, a community, a place that I am sort of fixed in place for a while. And I'm also sensitive to a variety of other conditions that we can talk about in terms of physical-risk exposure and indirect economic costs with that. But at the end of the day when you sort of add all this up, what we see is that people from county-to-county movement, state-to-state movement, we're beginning to see a reversal in people moving from essentially cold climates to warm climates. And in the case of rural counties, that is rural county-to-county movement, it's already reversed. More people are moving in this country from hot--and I'm using "hot," again, as a kind of proxy for a lot of geographic environmental specificity--but they're essentially moving from hot climates to cold climates in rural counties. And in fact it's a net-positive migration in favor of people moving into cooler climates.
JOHN: Give me an example of that, like, rural-to-rural. Is it, like, across states? Or is it within states?
JESSE: Well, interesting - it happens across states, but it also happens... So this is happening state-to-state, county-to-county. And when I say "rural" I mean generally rural county-to-county. But it's happening--I mean, just backing up for a second--it is happening within states, too. So for instance, in Arizona people are moving from southern Arizona up into the mountains, northern Arizona, right? So Tucson to, what, Flagstaff or something like that.
JOHN: Right.
JESSE: But it's also happening that people are moving from west Texas to Minnesota, right, or whatever that may be, right? And those connections can be drawn from one place to another. But the bottom line is that we're beginning to see pretty robust evidence of the reversal of sunbelt migration, or at least an acknowledgment that it's coming to an end in some segments, and in some geographic terms it's already reversing. So, you know, that's the landscape of demography and migration, and heat plays a role in it. There are other, of course, climate impacts that play very important roles that also drive much higher implications - economic implications. But I think, interestingly enough, between a combination of extreme heat and wildfire smoke inundation, which is as much of an East Coast problem as it is a West Coast problem, I think soon enough--this hasn't really manifested in the empirical literature--but I think soon enough we're going to start to see a health insurance response, that is a pricing response in health insurance associated with extreme heat in terms of healthcare utilization, underlying cost structures associated with the impacts. It has to happen. I just haven't seen that, but it's only a matter of time. So I'm speculating in this sense, but I don't think we're too far away from that.
JOHN: Wow, that is kind of a scary vision. But it makes sense, and it makes sense certainly in your realm of expertise and in insurance. And I'm sure the listeners will appreciate that vision.
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Up next, Jesse explains the terms "climate gentrification" and "bluelining," and the importance of effective communication to inspire action.
JOHN: Let's shift gears to a couple of things that I know that you've invented or said in the press. Climate gentrification is one of them, bluelining is another, and then more recently in the New York Times you said you can't hide from climate change. Relate those concepts to heat for me in the context of this conversation that we just had with migration.
JESSE: Yeah, I mean, climate gentrification is a phenomenon where there's a shift in demand. So conventional modes of climate gentrification are supply-driven--developer comes in, investors come in, they see an under- sort of tapped or under-captured market that has values, amenities to it. They create supply and that draws in demand. And that has, you know, good and bad things about it. Sometimes it leads to displacement. That's what we understand in sort of rhetorical terms. Climate gentrification is about shift in demand. So it's a broader recognition and internalization of the costs and the risks associated with climate, and people are shifting - it can manifest a couple different ways. I don't want to necessarily get into it; I don't know if we have the time. But it means that people are re-evaluating the value assets, where they live, how they live. Sometimes that can lead to crowding out. So as people move into, let's say, comparatively lower-risk areas, they can crowd out people who are already there. And there's a great deal of evidence that this has occurred. This isn't just a theory; it has a pretty robust empirical foundation now. "Bluelining" is a concept to where banks are making concerted efforts to manage their risks; they're adapting. And that feels good--banks need to adapt just like we need to adapt as a society, household, and whatever it may be. And part of their adaptation in management of risk, particularly physical risk--you could probably assign this also to transition risk--but really for physical risk there's a geography at play. And in some places in this high-risk geography they're either not lending or they're re-pricing their products to account for that risk. I mean, basic finances is on a risk-return profile or scale. And so, yeah, for sure, in some places banks are just not wanting to lend. And if they do lend--for instance in the context of mortgage lending--they tend to underwrite and drive the transaction, but then dump the asset to the secondary market or the capital market. So for both of these phenomen(on) climate is being internalized by the market, and it's sending signals, and those signals are driving different types of adaptations that may be adaptive to one party, but may even be maladapted to another. So in the context of bluelining, you know, the banks are adapting, but it may drive or feel like a kind of maladaptation for people who now it's more expensive to get credit, or they may not be able to get credit at all, or on the terms that they want. And climate gentrification, certainly the adaptation of the market more broadly in a kind of movement towards derisking the market, and particularly, as I cited, crowding out, can be quite painful for people. That can certainly lead to measures of displacement. So with adaptation there's always this risk of a parallel universe subjectively of maladaptation. If climate, in our understanding, but the perception of reality of climate impacts--and those are not always the same thing, and that's a fruitful area of research that we've been engaged in--are driving it, certainly then heat could be assigned to that. Interestingly enough, there is some research out there--and this is a bit of a random citation--but there is some research out there that on hot days mortgage officers, or lending officers tend to be a little bit more pessimistic in their underwriting. And there are actual responses associated with levels of credit, associated with - on hot days, and successively hot days. This plays out in both residential and commercial lending, interestingly enough. It turns out that heat, like, really impacts people's perception of risk. And so it's really interesting, because on, you know, belief systems about climate are one thing, but actual experiences, it turns out, with extreme heat itself can actually shape people's orientation to risk that places out in how they make decisions, particularly when there's discretionary implications within those decisions that impact people's credit and their underlying economic viability. So heat is one dimension of many dimensions that shape our belief systems and our behavior on climate.
JOHN: Wow. So most of that conversation - most of what you just said was sort of focused on the lending side of it. Talk to me about the consumers there, and in particular those that are moving and those that are receiving migrants from places that are hotter, for example. How does heat play into how they view real estate, how they view investment over a 30-year mortgage, that sort of thing?
JESSE: Yeah, I don't know in terms of the context of receiving zones. Right, there's sending zones, receiving zones. People are leaving some places and they're going other places. What does it look like in terms of the receiving side of it? I think that's really sort of yet to be explored. People take with them their perceptions, they take with them their knowledge, their adaptations. I mean, it's very likely that people moving from the Southwest, for instance, that move to Minnesota or (Indianapolis) - you move from Phoenix to (Minneapolis) or something, they're going to bring with them the techniques that they utilize to stay cool in the summer, right? And they're going to socialize that knowledge, and in a way that's a real thing. But beyond that it's hard to really - it's something I really haven't probably given enough thought about, just because heat's not my core area of expertise. But it is interesting to contemplate how those local adaptations get socialized across time and space.
JOHN: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm thinking right now sort of while you're talking about time that I spend in Minnesota, we have collaborations with the University of Minnesota, and I have a brother who lives in Minneapolis. And I would bet a lot of money that that number of days that they use air conditioning has gone up since they've lived in Minneapolis, you know, over the last more than two decades. And being from Arizona I’m always, like, why isn't the AC on? [LAUGHTER]
JESSE: Yeah. And the USGCRP tracks heating and cooling days. There's a kind of index to that, and it's a reasonably good indicator across various geographies. Interestingly enough, talking about air conditioning, you know, there's places--and Phoenix is a good example of this--where the in the summertime there's some component of households that spend more on air conditioning and their energy bill than they do on rent or their mortgage payment for certain months of the year. And that cost burden, which, you know, the cost of adaptation of air conditioning, is something that will increasingly be felt in places like Minneapolis, right, where they'll have to run the air conditioning more frequently. There's a real good paper (inaudible) that, you know, adaptations are never friction-less; there's always some tradeoff. We can understand that sometimes (there's) maladaptation implications. And of course as people use more air conditioning in places like (Indianapolis) or the Midwest, particularly if they have coal as a component of their energy generation, you know, that demand drives more air pollution, and that air pollution kills some segment of the population prematurely. There's pretty good models about, you know, how increased air-conditioning use, you know, kills people indirectly, and what those numbers are going to look like in the future. So yeah, you know, this is all a brand-new landscape of behavior and consequence for people who've just never dealt with these kinds of extreme temperatures before.
JOHN: I want to shift gears a little bit before we close and think about some of the other impacts of climate change and how heat relates to them, or ranks next to them. And in particular, you know, in our back yard we can see sea-level rise and we know what it's going to look like in 2100, for example. How much impact do you think heat has when you compare it to sea-level rise, for example?
JESSE: Yeah, maybe a different way of framing that is, to what extent does one's experience drive an attribution or an association with climate, right?
JOHN: Exactly, yes.
JESSE: When you experience something you draw a substitution, your ability to attribute it to climate change as a phenomenon. And this is well-understood, or I would say pretty well-understood in behavioral science and behavioral economics. I think heat is probably one of the most profound associations there is. We've seen this in the survey data. So one of the things we've done in our research--we've got a bunch of this research right now in peer review--which is, like, okay, you have actual risk and then you have one's perception of risk, and you can measure that in longitudinal terms with survey data that goes back a long time, decades. How do these things align or misalign? And I would say with heat people in the Northeast generally have a misorientation to the extent that their perception doesn't line up with their true risk. But for people who live in the sunbelt, for instance, it's pretty well-aligned. So I think that tells me that the response is uneven geographically, but it tells me that in a way, given the alignment statistically, that it's probably - heat has a great deal of attribution. And there's other areas of research and social-science research that would reinforce that, that people's perception of heat and heatwaves more precisely is greatly attributed to climate change, particularly when the heatwaves fall out of seasonal context, right? And I was talking to a woman the other day in Tucson--an investor or, you know, local kind of community leader--and she was, you know, what was bothering her more than anything was that it was - when the heatwaves were striking out of season - you're prepared for it when it's in-season, but when it's out of season it's much more shocking, or your perception is heightened in a way. And for her, you know, this was pushing her towards the threshold of relocation. And in fact, this wasn't just her, this was her whole - it was a whole friend group, you know, who were having a very similar conversation. And this was one of the things that was kind of driving their perception.
JOHN: That's so interesting. Follow-up question to that is, so many different things happening, right? The heat, sea-level rise, intensifying storms. And their impacts - you know, if you read national papers or international papers they're sporadic in space and time, right? Asheville, heatwave in Phoenix, fire in Colorado that has smoke that goes to New York, or in Canada that goes to New York. How do you communicate to people sort of the whole that's greater than the sum of the parts of that to get people to buy into the idea that these changes are already here and they're only going to get worse?
JESSE: Yeah, I don't think it takes much to make that argument. And survey data supports that in part because, yeah, we have science communicators that are engaged in the public realm that are making and repeating comparable arguments in both kind of positive and negative terms, and under a lot of different rhetorical styles. But probably one of the greatest reinforcing mechanisms of this information, or communicating this information, is the media itself. And some of it's, you know, clickbait journalism and the reproduction of journalism that can get science wrong. But for the most part there's enough coverage out there, there's enough people working the climate beat to cross the major media sources, and including among local meteorologists. So, you know, local meteorologists on your local news station are some of the most trusted people in America, and they rank very high among public officials or, you know, quasi-public figures. They're much more engaged than they were ten years ago or more on climate issues. Now, some can not be, because they're owned - a lot of TV stations in America are increasingly owned by just a handful of private or family-owned enterprises that control a disproportionate amount of the media across networks. And that's a challenge. And they've in some cases taken steps to limit the discussion on air of climate. But for the most part the combination of things like local meteorologists talking about it and just the media propagation is sufficient to drive a broader awareness and to begin to connect the dots. People are not stupid--they may not always tune in, or they may not always have the bandwidth to tune in at the depth necessary to understand the complicity, but I think the sheer onslaught of the information is sufficient to significantly increase people's general awareness.
JOHN: You don't think the information is overwhelming, too much for that to, like you said, take the time to dig in deep or have the bandwidth to dig in deep, to understand that?
JESSE: Well, awareness comes a couple different forms. Awareness about the general issue externally is one thing, but a general awareness about whether it'll impact me is another thing. And that's where you do see a divide, particularly in the survey data. The question is whether it's overwhelming. People are pretty efficient at tuning in and tuning out what they want to hear. And as we sit at the later stages of the information revolution we're very efficient at tuning things out as much as we are tuning things in. So I don't think it's an onslaught; I think people have just adapted over time to follow certain channels. Now, those channels - of course once you get on the wrong channel you could be manipulated, and that's a whole other separate discourse about national security and climate change, and misinformation, and the channels of misinformation, and the extent to which, for instance, foreign state actors--this is public information--foreign state actors, for instance in Asheville, have driven targeted misinformation to create chaos. That's a whole other problem all together. But in terms of the general public, effective climate communications are showing robust responses.
JOHN: That's a topic maybe for another podcast down the road; it's super interesting. A question to close: what are you working on right now that gives you hope?
JESSE: I'm trying to find a lot of optimism. I've built my career in climate change with an inherent optimism that - or maybe a little bit of a reflection that much of what I have seen and observed, and people's intuition in terms of research is to look at impacts and to look at vulnerability and exposure. I've always been interested and found myself squarely within the realm of adaptation sciences. I'm curious what we do about it. And, you know, people have always adapted since the dawn of humanity, either adapt or you fail. And for me, you know, my own research in adaptation is try to project a kind of optimism. You know, where there's a geography of risk there's a geography of opportunity. And in the landscape of what we leave behind and where we choose to move forward there's an opportunity for sustainable urban development, for instance. There's an opportunity to shed ourselves of the structures of isolation and segregation and carbonization, and try to rebuild in the interest of affordability, accessibility, whatever those values are that advance a more sustainable world and way of living. So, you know, in the ashes of what we leave behind we have the opportunity to build something new. And that's a kind of optimism that I think many people share. And without it we will be just paralyzed by fear. So that's what I'm excited about is the opportunity to correct some mistakes that we've made along the way.
JOHN: That's a great point to wrap this discussion up. Jesse, thank you for being on the show.
JESSE: Thank you for having me.
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JOHN: So we land on optimism, and I couldn't agree more with Jesse on that point. Our nation's heartland is faced with an enormous challenge of adapting to higher daytime temperatures, higher nighttime temperatures, out-of-season extreme temperature events, and more. Some of the consequences of these changes (and norm) will include way more than just needing to drink more water. We can expect to see changes in workforce productivity--you just don't want to work when it's hotter. We can also expect to see changes in livability and the choices people make about investing in real estate and where they live. These changes will occur through conscious choices and also through subconscious effects of heat on the decision-making process itself. But through all that firestorm there is hope, Jesse says. Humans have been adapting to changing conditions since the dawn of time. We will continue to do this, but the pace at which adaptation occurs needs to and can accelerate. That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show please rate and review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious water and to find in-depth show notes from this episode, visit our website at AudaciousWAter.org. Until next time, I'm John Sabo.
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END (AUDACIOUS WATER EPISODE 3, SEASON 4)