Everything in Texas appears to be extreme: Excessive heat, political extremism and gun violence

Why would anybody want to live or remain in Texas?

Echo report published in the Texas Tribune by Yuriko Schumacher, Alex Ford and Erin Douglas:

Record-breaking heat is becoming the new normal in Texas, an analysis of temperature data by The Texas Tribune shows, as climate change steadily warms the planet and shifts the range of typical temperatures higher.

A dust storm blows over cotton fields ahead of a late-summer thunderstorm in Terry County in August 2022. A Texas Tribune analysis shows that extreme heat is becoming more common across Texas due to climate change, but the effects aren’t felt the same everywhere. Credit: Justin Rex for The Texas Tribune

Some parts of Texas are seeing bigger temperature increases

A dangerous heat wave this month has brought three weeks of 100-degree temperatures from the state’s border with Mexico all the way to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The heat wave has shattered records and prompted excessive heat warnings across most of the state.

Such heat waves — and the record-breaking temperatures they bring — are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told the Tribune.

Over the last 10 years, there were more than 1,600 days when a heat record was matched or broken at one of 22 weather stations across Texas. That’s more than 1,000 more record-breaking days than the 561-day average at those stations in the decades prior to 2013, the Tribune’s analysis found.

Weather data shows that record-breaking cold is occurring less frequently.

Texas is burning up!

Those trends are being driven by climate change, experts said, as the planet warms due to decades of human activities that have pumped huge quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere peaked at 424 parts per million in May, continuing to reach levels that have not been recorded for millions of years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Heat is one of the deadliest consequences of climate change. It’s already the most dangerous type of weather, typically killing more people annually than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding. A Tribune analysis found that more than 275 people in Texas died from heat-related illness last year, a two-decade high that experts say is almost certainly an undercount.

Heat waves “are so large, they impact a huge swath of area, and they persist for so long,” said Hosmay Lopez, an oceanographer at the NOAA who has studied heat waves. “Heat has so [many] compounding negative effects on human health.”

Extreme heat is presenting new challenges for communities across the state that rely on infrastructure built for a climate of the past.

James Doss-Gollin, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University who has researched adaptation to extreme weather, said the state’s electric grid and dams are two examples of infrastructure that are greatly impacted by increasing temperatures. Just a few degrees of difference, he said, can jeopardize the availability of electricity and the structural integrity of dams.

The grid, for example, is stressed by higher demand when extreme heat causes more people to crank up their air conditioning. At the same time, when high temperatures arrive earlier in the spring and last later into the fall, power plants have smaller and smaller windows to make routine repairs.

“We have a lot of infrastructure that’s very, very sensitive to small changes in the underlying climate,” Doss-Gollin said.

Many dams are small, are privately owned and were built decades ago, when extreme rainfall events like the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — which dumped as much as 50 inches of rain on some parts of the Gulf Coast over five days — were much less common.

“You don’t know what sort of conditions it’s designed for,” Doss-Gollin said. “It’s a huge challenge.”

But extreme heat isn’t impacting every part of Texas the same. While every county in Texas has seen an average increase in temperatures over the last decade, three areas of the state have seen the biggest jumps in record-breaking temperatures: West Texas, the Panhandle, and the Gulf.

Amarillo, for example, had 100 days of record-setting heat between 2013 and 2022 — the most recent 10 years for which data is available. That’s more than four times the number of record heat days expected for an average decade in Amarillo prior to 2013, according to the Tribune’s analysis.

El Paso saw 113 record hot days in the last decade — more than five times the expected number of records in an average decade in the state’s westernmost city.

Areas of East and North Texas close to the Louisiana and Arkansas borders, with their forests and abundant rain, have seen comparatively fewer days of record-breaking heat.

For example, in Longview, less than 50 miles west of the Louisiana border, the Tribune’s analysis shows 27 record highs were recorded, slightly below the 30 that would be expected in an average decade there. At a weather station in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, only 35 record hot days were recorded between 2013 and 2022, just slightly higher than the 29 to be expected in an average decade there, according to the Tribune’s analysis.

But Nielsen-Gammon and other climate experts cautioned that precipitation, soil moisture and vegetation can’t explain all the variation in extreme heat trends. Other factors, like whether the weather pattern La Niña or El Niño is in effect and proximity to the Gulf of Mexico can also affect the number of days with extreme heat.

Lopez, the NOAA scientists, pointed out that the rapid growth in areas like Houston and Austin could be exacerbating the urban “heat island” effect, a phenomenon in which large cities tend to see more extreme heat than rural areas as buildings, driveways and roads absorb heat. Still, it’s “virtually impossible” to find a perfect correlation between weather, climate and extremes, he said.
As temperatures rise globally, places that have less rain and fewer trees to absorb excess heat are more frequently experiencing record-setting heat, experts said.

“Summers are getting drier faster in West Texas,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’ state climatologist. “That can contribute to increases in record high temperatures.

And, as Nielsen-Gammon pointed out, the variation among locations “could just be random.”

Nielsen-Gammon added that the relatively slow pace of warming in wetter and forested regions “is not something that is expected to continue.” In other words, scientists have projected that those ecosystem buffers will not be enough to offset climate change in the future.

(Unfortunately ❗ 😟😠😡) Politics still play a major role in perceptions of climate change: Some studies have observed Republicans and Democrats who experience the same extreme weather event characterize the impact of climate change differently. But Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said the program’s surveys show that an increasing number of Americans believe climate change is occurring.

Almost three-quarters of Americans think global warming is happening, according to a nationally representative 2023 survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University researchers, compared with 15% who think it is not. And 44% of Americans say they’ve personally experienced the effects of global warming, according to the same survey.

“The weather changes are not the same as what we’ve been seeing in the past,” Marlon said. “The heat waves are hotter, the spring [temperatures] are ending earlier, and nighttime temperatures are higher than they used to be.”

“So experience is starting to play a bigger role,” she said.

“More people are accepting the problem — and it is a process of acceptance for a lot of people, because originally, they were skeptical,” Marlon said.

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Texas are dying premature death caused by extreme heat

File this under "What Texas Governor Greg Abbott needs to know".

Echo report published in The Texas Tribune by Erin Douglas.

Firefighter and EMT William Dorsey lifts a migrant woman suffering from heat exhaustion onto a stretcher near the border city of Eagle Pass on Saturday. A stifling June heat wave in Texas has caused deaths and hospitalizations across the state. Credit: REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee Beal

Emergency room visits surge, Texans die amid dangerous heat wave. After weeks of extreme heat, Texas health officials have reported numerous deaths, while emergency departments across the state are seeing record numbers of people seeking treatment for heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

A dangerous heat wave that blanketed Texas this month has prompted a public health crisis that’s particularly affecting older people and outdoor workers across the state, local and federal health data shows.

At least nine people have died from the heat in one South Texas county, the local medical examiner reported, eight of them older than 60. In sweltering Texas prisons, at least nine inmates, including two men in their 30s, have died of heart attacks or unknown causes in facilities that lack air conditioning.

And in one particularly harrowing incident, a 14-year-old boy and his stepfather, 31, died after hiking in Big Bend National Park last Friday. The stepfather died after crashing his car as he raced to get help after the boy lost consciousness on the trail, while the boy’s 21-year-old brother attempted to carry him back to the trailhead on a day when temperatures in the area reached as high as 119 degrees, according to the National Park Service.

The unrelenting 100-degree temperatures across the state shattered weather records this month amid a heat wave that’s stretching into its fourth week in some parts of Texas. The heat dome is moving east, so Texans could finally see some relief after weeks of oppressive heat.

Such heat waves and the record-breaking temperatures they bring are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told The Texas Tribune.

Emergency department visits related to the heat also surged across Texas this month as alarmed medical examiners and local public health officials alike are warning residents about health risks from the life-threatening heat.

Heat is one of the most dangerous types of weather, typically killing more people annually in the U.S. than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding.

“Heat waves can have a significant impact on human health,” said Jesse Berman, an environmental epidemiologist and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota. He said the public should keep in mind that although the heat might not seem deadly, it’s just as dangerous as other types of extreme weather.

“Heat waves don’t have that major visible impact the way a hurricane or tornado can, but they certainly have major impacts on population in a sneakier way,” Berman said.

A dangerous heat wave blanketed Texas in June 2023. 

Thousands of Texans have sought emergency medical care in June related to the heat, data from the Texas Department of State Health Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. Only about half of health facilities report heat-related illness data to the state’s health department, meaning the real toll on Texans’ health is almost certainly much worse.

In the last two weeks, a CDC region that includes Texas and the states that border it set three new daily records for the number of heat-related emergency department visits since 2017, the first year for which data is available, according to the CDC.

On June 20, for example, more than 1,100 people per 100,000 emergency department visits were treated for heat-related illness by emergency departments in Texas and its neighboring states, a record high for the region.

Texas’ state health department does not yet have complete data on how many Texans died from the heat this month. Lara Anton, senior press officer for DSHS, said the state will likely have a more complete picture of the human toll from the heat wave in about six weeks.

In Webb County, where nine people have been pronounced dead due to the heat, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Corinne Stern, begged the public to take precautions at a commissioners court meeting in Laredo earlier this week.

“This is heat like we’ve not seen here before,” Stern said. “Deaths ruled by heat stroke are ruled accidents, and accidents by definition are preventable.

“All of these deaths could have been prevented,” she added.

Stern said for each of the nine deaths reported in Webb County this month, she heard family and friends recount how their loved one claimed they’d be okay because they’d endured the heat in the border community many times, or how the deceased person had meant to fix their air conditioning but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

The early-in-the-season heat wave likely left people underprepared, she said.

“Our county was caught a little off guard,” Stern told the commissioners. “These high temperatures are higher than what we normally see, and I think many of us thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be another couple hot weeks in our county.’”

Dr. Richard Chamberlain, Laredo’s health director, said that emergency responders noted that the patients’ homes were “extremely hot” or that the individual had worked outdoors prior to returning home.

Hospital Visits Soar, Cooling Centers Open In Searing Texas Heat Wave

“It’s an unfortunate situation — any loss of life that is abrupt is concerning,” Chamberlain said. “Myself and members of the community have become very concerned.”

In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, emergency rooms are swarming with workers suffering from heat exhaustion and other complications related to the high temperatures. Dr. Iván Meléndez, the health authority for Hidalgo County, estimated about 15-20% of the emergency department patients he’s admitted in recent weeks had medical complications related to heat.

For example, Melendez said, he saw a handful of patients this week with heart failure after drinking too much water “because it’s so damn hot.” And about a quarter of the psychiatric patients he admitted this month were those who became aggressive or violent, a symptom he attributed to the heat.

“When the temperature goes up, you see a lot more hostility, assaults, aggression and domestic violence,” Melendez said.

Melendez said that when he was growing up in Hidalgo County in the 1960s, his family didn’t have air conditioning, so they used fans and water to cool their rooms. Now, he said, “it’s impossible. There’s no way you’re going to sleep without an air conditioner.”

In Dallas County, a handful of people with heat exhaustion and heat stroke began to appear in emergency departments in early June.

But by the middle of the month, dozens of people were being rushed to medical help per day. On one particularly hot day when temperatures reached almost 100 degrees, more than 40 people in Dallas County sought emergency care for heat exhaustion or heat stroke, data from hospitals and the Dallas County medical examiner’s office shows.

In the last two weeks alone, roughly 130 people in Dallas County were treated by emergency departments for heat-related illness, county data shows. That’s more than double the number of cases the county had in all of June last year.

Most of the patients in Dallas were men between the ages of 18 and 44, data shows. Christian Grisales, a public information officer for Dallas County Health & Human Services, said that indicates most patients were likely exposed to the heat during the workday.

“We are encouraging the community to take [the heat] seriously because the heat can kill them,” he said.

Dallas County offers a program to assist low-income households with fixing air-conditioning units or providing air-conditioning window units. “We give priority to the elderly, disabled and families with small children,” Grisales said.

In Southeast Houston, some residents are taking precautions to avoid the emergency room. Erandi Treviño, 31, said that she’s waking up two hours earlier than usual to tend to the nursery that she owns, so that she can avoid the hottest part of the day. 

Even so, last weekend while she was working in the greenhouse, she said she quickly began to fall ill.

“I thought I was going to have a panic attack because of how hot it felt,” said Treviño. “It was hard to take a deep breath.”

Treviño, who is also a coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental organization that advocates for better air quality, added that she’s also concerned about the health impact of high ozone levels in the Houston area during the heat wave. 

Heat exacerbates ozone pollution.