Writing about a warming climate and the places people live and work.
This site is about the parts of climate change that show up in ordinary life: heat on a job site, water in a street that has never flooded before, a grid that has to hold on the coldest morning of the year, a rebuild that takes four years. Most of it comes down to buildings and infrastructure designed around weather records that no longer hold, and to the slow work of updating them.
A street is part of the drainage system, and the overflow is supposed to run down the pavement. The standard that set how often that happens was written from a rainfall record that has since moved.
Storm sewers were sized for a rainfall record that no longer describes the rain, and the pipe under the street will still be there in 2100.
Cities rarely run out of water all at once. They run out of the assumptions their supply was built on.
Crash risk climbs with the temperature. The report has a field for rain and no field for 108 degrees.
Heat kills more American workers than any other weather, and most of it happens in the first few days on a job.
Wildfire smoke travels thousands of miles and turns air quality into a scheduling question for everyone downwind.
Summer peaks used to be the whole problem. Winter mornings now compete with them, and the winter version fails worse.
Cars last fifteen years, so the fleet turns over slowly no matter what people buy this year.
Some upgrades pay for themselves in comfort and bills. Others only pay off once, on the worst day.
The storm takes a day. Getting a neighborhood back takes three to five years, and most of that time is paperwork.
