ROMAN MARS: This is Episode 6 of Not Built For This: Maximum Temperature.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Last summer, temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, got above 110 degrees for more than 30 days in a row. A couple of times in July, the thermometer nearly cracked 120. It is always hot in Phoenix in the summertime, but this was a new and unwelcome record. And as the city endured this string of unbearably hot days, there was this one image that I became fixated on.

NEWSCASTER (AZFamily): All right, check this out. Even the saguaros here in the valley can’t take the heat anymore…

NEWSCASTER (ABC15 Arizona): It’s become a summer trend that just won’t seem to stop. Our beloved saguaros toppling to the ground and it’s leaving many neighbors…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: All across the city, saguaros were keeling over in the heat. These massive, stately cacti can grow up to 60 feet tall and weigh thousands of pounds. And they were coming down left and right, crushing cars and denting roofs. 

GLENDALE RESIDENT #1 (AZFamily): I just started hearing a loud crack. So, I looked up and I just saw the cactus falling over. A good amount of the roof, like the drywall, fell off.

GLENDALE RESIDENT #2 (AZFamily): Our next door neighbors thought it was, like, a minor earthquake. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The saguaro is a master of desert survival. There’s literally nothing about its physical being, from its waxy skin to its spongy interiors, that isn’t adapted to Arizona’s furnace-blast temperatures. And yet, here they were…dying.

PHOENIX RESIDENT (ABC15 Arizona)I thought it would outlive me by 100 years. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It seemed like a pretty ominous sign. If the saguaros couldn’t survive in the heat, what did it mean for us?

JEFF GOODDELL: I first got interested in heat in Phoenix. I had been covering climate change for 20 years and didn’t give heat much thought, as strange as that may seem. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is the climate writer, Jeff Goodell. He’s the author of the book “The Heat Will Kill You First.” And he got interested in heat when he was in downtown Phoenix, in the middle of summer, and decided to walk 20 blocks to a meeting. Rookie move.

JEFF GOODELL: I mean, it was like walking into a kind of solid wall of this invisible force that just surrounds you and envelops you and kind of suffocates you and makes your body… I mean, the only word I can use to kind of describe it is “freak out.” And by the time I got to my meeting, I was dizzy, my heart was pounding, and I was a little off balance. And I realized, “Oh my gosh, heat is dangerous. If I had to go another 20 blocks, I don’t know if I would make it.” So for me, that was the beginning of everything.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Specifically, the beginning of Jeff trying to understand what climate change will mean for us on a physiological level. The impacts of climate disasters are often assessed in terms of property damage. When a hurricane hits a place like Florida, the news shows images of gas stations ripped open like tin cans, homes flattened by the wind, cars floating down a flooded main street. We talk about the “millions of dollars of damage.” But in places like Phoenix and in hot places all over the world, climate change is wreaking a very different kind of havoc…on living things…on people’s bodies. Heat kills more people every year than any other weather event. The best estimate on the annual death toll is around 500,000 people globally, but that’s almost certainly an undercount. And yet, even as we’re freaking out about our warming world, many of us still don’t really think about heat itself as an existential threat. And I think that’s at least in part because of the language that we used for many years to describe this crisis.

JEFF GOODELL: The phrase “global warming” does not sound very alarming. It sounds like maybe we should get our beach chairs and go to the beach. It sounds like time for shorts and flip flops. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In other words, if our global temperatures increase by–say–a few degrees, is that really something to get all bent out of shape about?

JEFF GOODELL: No, it doesn’t sound dangerous at all. It just sounds like,you know, I have other, bigger problems to worry about than whether it’s 78 or 80 degrees outside.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But a few degrees do matter. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year ever recorded in human history. The last time the world was this hot was 125,000 years ago. And as we build on a hotter baseline, heatwaves also get more extreme and more deadly.

Phoenix, Arizona, has the dubious distinction of being the hottest major city in America. And it’s perhaps the best place in the country to investigate our confused relationship with heat and its effects on our health. It’s a place that’s marketed itself as a warm and pleasant escape from the snowbound north. But now, there are people in the Valley of the Sun looking at these warming trends and they’re worried. As Phoenix continues to grow, with thousands of new residents arriving every year, there are advocates pushing the city and even the federal government to recognize extreme heat for what it is: a force that is testing our biological limits. Because our bodies were not built for this. This is the final episode in our series. I’m Emmett FitzGerald.

99PI Senior Editor Delaney Hall is also our in-house desert correspondent. She lives in New Mexico. And last year, she made a trip to Phoenix to try and understand how heat went from being the city’s number-one selling point to a public health crisis.

DELANEY HALL: Last summer, on a hundred degree day, I went out driving around Phoenix with a guy named Sergio Armendariz.

[car engine]

DELANEY HALL: So, are we going to some Circle Ks?

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: Yeah. We have a list here of store addresses. I’ll check in with a manager, and I’ll let them know that I’m here doing outreach.

DELANEY HALL: Sergio does street outreach with the Phoenix Rescue Mission. It’s an organization that works with homeless people in Phoenix. And today, I’m tagging along with him while he hits up a number of convenience stores.

DELANEY HALL: And is there a reason people kind of tend to group around the Circle Ks? What’s going on there from a homeless person’s perspective?

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: You know, on a hot day, you grab a bunch of ice and grab some soda, you know? It’s pretty cheap. Polar Pops is my favorite thing. And so, if you got food stamps, you can go get some quick food real quick, you know?

DELANEY HALL: This is, like, turning into a Circle K advertisement. [laughter]

DELANEY HALL: The City of Phoenix is trying all sorts of ways to make itself cooler as the planet heats up. They’re painting streets with reflective coating to repel the sun, they’re planting lots of trees, and they’re building out a network of cooling centers where people can go hang out during the heat of the day. They’ve even got a new “heat tsar” whose job is to help cool the city down. But when it comes to saving lives during the hottest summer in history—at least the hottest one so far—it’s hard to imagine anyone with a more important job than Sergio.

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: We’re gonna go get some ice. I think it’s important that I have some cold water. It’s a good icebreaker. [laughs] No pun intended, right?

DELANEY HALL: Sergio is a remarkably chill guy. He drives all over the city, cranking the AC, cracking jokes, and talking about Jesus. But his work also has high stakes. Every summer, hundreds of people in Phoenix die from the heat, and many of them are homeless. Sergio knows firsthand how hard it can be to survive when you have nowhere to go to escape the heat. 

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: I’ve slept at this park before. 

DELANEY HALL: He did it himself for five years. 

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: My stomping grounds weren’t too far from here. 

DELANEY HALL: And now he works in a lot of the same neighborhoods where he once camped or hung out or spent hours looking for scraps of shade. 

[car door closes]

DELANEY HALL: When we pull up at the Circle K, there are a couple people hanging out at the side of the store. Sergio approaches a man to see about getting him into a shelter for the night, while I sit and talk with a middle-aged woman. She has a repurposed baby stroller packed full of her stuff, including a cute, scruffy, little dog. 

DELANEY HALL: What’s that little guy’s name?

BUNNY: That’s Chupacabra. Hey, he goes nuts when he sees another dog.

DELANEY HALL: This is Bunny. She came to Phoenix in 1986 and then says that she got stuck. She’s been living here for almost 40 years, homeless on and off. And so, by now, she’s developed a lot of tricks for beating the heat. She carries an umbrella, she wears a rag dipped in cold water around her neck, and she makes sure she stays hydrated.

BUNNY: You know all we can do is find a shady spot to sit if the cops don’t run us out. Most times, we’re stuck out in the sun. It really sucks because there’s nowhere out there to really cool down. It’s hot, nasty, muggy, dirty, filthy—just all around bad news

DELANEY HALL: You know, I feel like Arizona has this thing where people come because they love the sun and they love the life here. Have you found that or…

BUNNY: Yeah, I’ve found a few people that like it, yeah. But there are very few of them that like it whenever it hits 120, 125. Then they want to scurry inside, where their air conditioning is, you know? We’re out here 24/7. They get to go home to their nice, comfortable air conditioners.

DELANEY HALL: Bunny has hit on a central fact about life in modern Phoenix, which is that the heat affects people in profoundly unequal ways. For some, it’s an asset. For others, it’s a liability. And this inequity goes back a long way in Phoenix’s history. 

Nearly a thousand years ago, indigenous people found ways to live with the heat of the Sonoran Desert. They created cliff dwellings where the temperatures were cooler. They built homes with thick walls of stone and mud. And for centuries, the population of central Arizona stayed relatively small. The extreme heat provided a check on development, and Phoenix remained a sleepy outpost. 

But fast-forward to the 1950s and ’60s and that began to change. City boosters began selling Phoenix precisely because of its climate. They pitched it as a land without winter, where you could play golf year-round. And it turned out that hundreds of thousands of people wanted in on that vision. And if it got a little toasty in the summertime, there was a newfangled technology that could help you with that.

ANDREW NEEDHAM: So, you can find people in the early ‘60s talking about living, you know, completely air-conditioned lives.

DELANEY HALL: This is Andrew Needham, a historian who studies the environmental and indigenous history of the American West. And Andrew told me about this old article he found in the Saturday Evening Post. It included an interview with a local banker. He boasted about how he got through the summer days. 

ANDREW NEEDHAM: He says, “Well, I wake up in my air-conditioned room. I get in my air-conditioned car. I go to the air-conditioned garage of my building. I go to my air-conditioned office. At night, I go to an air-conditioned restaurant. Maybe I see a movie in an air-conditioned theater.” And so, you know, this kind of life entirely encased in the summer in refrigerated air conditioning is a reality for people like bankers. 

DELANEY HALL: But while bankers were bathing in this mechanically cooled air, working-class people in Phoenix were living much hotter lives. Back in the 1960s, the city was starkly divided by race and class…and by temperature. When a reporter from the New Republic went to Phoenix to write about the city…

ANDREW NEEDHAM: He says something to the effect of “two cities stare at each other from opposite sides of a golf course,” essentially saying that, like, here is this landscape of quality-of-life in which African-American and Latino people have all been concentrated in kind of deteriorating and dilapidated housing.

DELANEY HALL: That inferior housing had flimsier insulation and older electrical systems, which made it harder to cool. And poorer neighborhoods typically had more concrete, fewer trees, and denser development, all of which made the outdoor temperatures as much as ten degrees hotter than in the wealthier parts of the city. 

Even as access to AC has expanded, poor people just have a harder time escaping the heat. That was true decades ago, and it’s still true today. Air conditioning is now nearly ubiquitous in Phoenix. Today, the vast majority of the city’s buildings have AC. But paradoxically, the fact that it’s everywhere also makes the city vulnerable. That’s because most builders today don’t build with heat in mind.

JEFF GOODELL: You know we’ve forgotten…

DELANEY HALL: Again, Jeff Goodell. 

JEFF GOODELL: …how to build buildings with natural ventilation. We’ve become dependent upon this machine, this cooling machine.

DELANEY HALL: Cooling modern buildings requires an enormous amount of electricity. And in a lot of places, including Phoenix, that energy still comes from fossil fuels. I didn’t realize it, but air conditioning is responsible for about 4% of emissions globally, which is nearly double the amount from the entire airline industry. And that means that while we’re cooling ourselves off, we’re also making ourselves hotter.

JEFF GOODELL: So, you get into this sort of perpetuating cycle of more air conditioning, more burning of fossil fuels, and a hotter planet.

DELANEY HALL: And that vicious cycle can become deadly, because during an unprecedented heatwave, people crank the AC as high as it can go, which puts a lot of stress on the electrical grid and creates the potential for a catastrophic failure.

JEFF GOODELL: It’s like a sword of Damocles on a hotter planet. Air conditioning is great as long as it works. But if it fails, then we’re all in big trouble. 

DELANEY HALL: When we come back, the worst-case scenario… 

[AD BREAK]

DELANEY HALL: In Phoenix, air conditioning has become a fact of life. But what if the AC fails? 

This is the kind of scenario that keeps emergency planners up at night. And recently, a study came out that provided them with ample nightmare fuel. The study modeled what would happen if a heatwave in Phoenix coincided with a grid failure and then a multi-day blackout. The results were like the source material for a new Mad Max movie. The study predicted that half the city’s population—nearly 800,000 people—would need emergency room care. The city only has 3,000 emergency department beds. The study also showed that almost 13,000 people in Phoenix would die.

1. GEOFFREY COMP: All of us were kind of like, “My goodness. Well, this would be… This would be not ideal.”

DELANEY HALL: This is Dr. Geoffrey Comp. He’s an ER doctor at Valleywise Health, which serves Maricopa County. And I bet when he went to medical school he didn’t think he’d be doing work on the frontlines of climate change. But much like Sergio, that’s exactly what he’s doing. Every summer, Dr. Comp treats people coming into the ER with heatstroke. People even get contact burns from touching the metal side of a car or falling down on a hot sidewalk. But the summer of 2023 was different and maybe a sign of summers to come.

1. GEOFFREY COMP: It’s been really hot. It’s been really, really hot. And when we look at markers like mortality—so, how many people die—it’s much worse than last year. 

DELANEY HALL: I spoke with Dr. Comp towards the end of last summer, and deaths were up 52% from the previous year. An estimated 645 people died from the heat in 2023, and almost 300 of them were unhoused. Dr. Comp says people were arriving at the ER in truly mind-boggling conditions.

109. GEOFFREY COMP: Our thermometers top out at 109. And personally, I’ve had multiple patients that have come in that have maxed out our thermometers. So, I honestly don’t know what my “T-max” or “maximum temperature” has been for patients. But we’ve had people that come in incredibly, incredibly, incredibly hot.

DELANEY HALL: There are a couple different types of heat illness. The first is what’s known as “classic heatstroke,” which happens when you’re exposed to heat for a prolonged time. This kind of heatstroke tends to affect the more vulnerable of us, like babies and older folks, pregnant people and people with chronic heart conditions and hypertension. The second kind is called “exertional heatstroke,” and it can happen to really anybody, even very healthy people when they’re doing intense physical activity. It could be a roofer or an athlete working out in the hot sun.

As your body heats up, it reacts automatically, pumping more blood toward the surface of your skin where it can get cooler as you sweat. That’s a normal physical process, but if it’s too hot outside, it starts to break down. 

JEFF GOODELL: If it’s too hot, your blood can’t cool off fast enough. So, what starts to happen is your heart starts pounding faster and faster.

DELANEY HALL: Again, here’s Jeff Goodell.

JEFF GOODELL: It starts to kind of panic and think, “Okay, I need to cool off. We’re not cooling off fast enough. I need to push more blood and more blood.”

DELANEY HALL: In the case of heatstroke, this can become a runaway process where your body pulls blood away from your brain and internal organs, desperately pumping it towards your skin to try and cool it down. 

JEFF GOODELL: And if you don’t start cooling off, then your body temperature starts rising and rising. And once it gets above 103 or 104 degrees, which is only five, six degrees above, you know, the normal body temperature, then you start to get into real serious problems where the actual cell membranes in your body, especially in your internal organs, begin to actually melt. And your body kind of—I know this sounds like a terrible thing to say, but it’s true—It kind of liquefies from the inside. 

DELANEY HALL: In most ERs, the standard care for heatstroke is something called “active cooling.” That means misting the patient or covering them with a cool, wet sheet and blowing fans on them. But when you’re seeing a lot of patients come in with really severe heatstroke, then you start getting creative. 

1. GEOFFREY COMP: We’re one of the only hospitals that does a whole-body, cold-water immersion therapy for all of our heatstrokes. 
2. GEOFFREY COMP (DEMONSTRATION): So, this is our EMS entrance. As a patient is coming in, especially if they’re coming in from, like, prehospital or EMS, they’re going to be coming and wheeling right through here as if they’re going to our resuscitation rooms.

DELANEY HALL: Dr. Comp demonstrated what happens when a patient gets rushed in with suspected heatstroke. What they do is they wheel the patient into a room where they do the first round of resuscitations. And then they place the patient in a giant, plastic body bag and pack ice in around them. 

1. GEOFFREY COMP: And unfortunately—I need a better term—but we’re just zipping people into body bags, filling it up with ice and water, and then zipping them back up but making sure that we’re keeping arms and, frankly, the face and airway exposed so we can continue with vital signs and getting IV access but also continuing to monitor our patient status. 

DELANEY HALL: Sometimes, if patients are treated fast enough, they recover. But even people who survive can have organ damage and neurological problems that stay with them. 

1. GEOFFREY COMP: It’s sad because this is an absolutely preventable disease. I mean, different people are affected based on different risk factors, different underlying medical problems, or other intoxications and drug use. But for the most part, if we can get someone out of the heat, we can prevent a lot of death.

DELANEY HALL: There’s a brutal simplicity to who is most at-risk for heatstroke. It’s the people who have trouble escaping the heat because they don’t have air conditioning or it’s broken or too expensive to run. Or they’re older and have health issues and live alone. Or they’re struggling with addiction and are vulnerable to passing out in the sun. Or they live outside. All of which means that vulnerability to heat is tied up with big structural problems that can be hard to solve, like homelessness, addiction, poverty, and housing. Keeping people safe from heat is both easy—just give them a place to cool down—and hard.

[car honks]

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: Do you currently or have you ever had a case manager helping you towards housing?

JASON JOSEPH: No.

DELANEY HALL: I’m back in the Circle K parking lot with Sergio Armendariz. He’s the outreach worker with the Phoenix Rescue Mission. And now, he’s chatting up a guy named Jason Joseph, who ticks the boxes for many of the risk factors I just listed.

DELANEY HALL: How has this summer been for you, kinda heatwise? 

JASON JOSEPH: A couple of days were ridiculous. I thought I was gonna die. 

DELANEY HALL: On one of the hottest days, when temperatures were up near 120, Jason undertook his own improvised cold-water immersion. He headed over to a nearby ditch. And despite the terrible smell of the water, he jumped in.

JASON JOSEPH: I was so glad for that. All I could do is lay in the shade, soaking wet. And then it gets so hot that I had to go back in the ravine and then go back to the shade.

DELANEY HALL: So, it’s like you just spent the whole day like that?

JASON JOSEPH: Just cooling. I couldn’t do anything else that day. I had to just cool. The mission was maintaining, because a lot of the places, you’d think, “Oh, why don’t you just go inside somewhere?” But they would kick me out anywhere because I was dirty and, you know, my hair all messed up. And they’re just like, “No, get out of here!”

DELANEY HALL: Jason survived that day but, from talking to him, it sounds like every day in July and August required a kind of desperate improvisation to cool himself down one way or another, like stumbling on an air-conditioned church that wouldn’t turn him away or finding a little piece of shade where a breeze would pass over him.

[car engine and AC running]

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: Maybe a little over a month ago, this was on a Sunday…

DELANEY HALL: Back in the car with Sergio, you can hear the AC running again. Normally, as a radio producer, I would ask the person I’m talking with to turn it off so that I could record their voice more clearly. But there is no way I’m doing that in Phoenix. And as we drive on to a new location, Sergio tells me about an experience he had recently. He was sitting in a park… 

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: And I’m sitting there, and I see that there’s police. And it looks like a body on the ground. And so, I’m just kind of wondering, like, “Is that a body? I can’t tell.”

DELANEY HALL: Eventually, the police strung yellow tape around the figure…

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: And then I realize it is a body. And I just couldn’t help but wonder about that person, you know? Like, how did they die? Was it the heat? Was it drugs? Was it a mixture? 

DELANEY HALL: The questions that Sergio is asking—”How did they die?” “Was it the heat?” “Was it drugs?”—It turns out there’s a person whose job it is to find the answers. 

1. JEFF JOHNSTON: So, I’m Dr. Jeff Johnston. I’m the chief medical examiner for Maricopa County.

DELANEY HALL: As the chief medical examiner, Dr. Johnston oversees a staff of 120 people. They’re responsible for investigating the non-natural deaths that happen in the county, including the ones where heat might be a factor. Dr. Johnston speaks with a disarming directness about his work. And the way he referred to the summer months will probably stay with me forever… 

1. JEFF JOHNSTON: Really, we do look at this like a mass fatality event…

DELANEY HALL: “A mass fatality event.” It’s a phrase I associate with shootings or acts of terrorism. But he’s just talking about June, July, and August.

1. JEFF JOHNSTON: …Where you have a sudden surge in the number of deaths that you’ve got to investigate that outstrip your typical resources.

DELANEY HALL: Figuring out whether a person died from heat-related causes is actually harder than you might think. Despite its devastating effects on the body, heatstroke doesn’t really have a specific physical signature that shows up in an autopsy. Heat-induced death looks a lot like organ failure or just general decay. And so, understanding the context in which the body was found is key. To do that, the department employs 40 medicolegal death investigators. They go out to scenes to collect information.

1. JEFF JOHNSTON: Whether their air conditioner’s working, whether they’ve got access to food, water, collecting information at the scene, those temperatures, other signs of risk factors that help our forensic pathologist to make the correct conclusion about what caused or contributed to the death.

DELANEY HALL: Last summer, the scenes that Johnston’s team of investigators encountered were difficult. They found bodies curled up in tents, stretched out on the asphalt, slumped in backyards, or entombed in houses where the air conditioning had broken and the temperatures inside had soared to 130 degrees.

Everyone was stretched to capacity. The office was dealing with so many bodies that they had to call in for extra refrigerated trailers for backup storage. And they would’ve brought in more pathologists, but there weren’t any.

DELANEY HALL: It doesn’t seem like an easy job to just staff up, you know what I mean? Like, your skills are so specialized, there’s probably not just a bunch of, like, temp medical examiners hanging around Phoenix.

1. JEFF JOHNSTON: Definitely, yeah. If we have a vacancy, it’s on average 20 months for us to be able to fill it. All offices across the country are really struggling with that and have been for the better part of two decades.

DELANEY HALL: So you can add pathologists to the list of our already overburdened infrastructure buckling under the weight of climate change. Our housing is inadequate, our insurance systems aren’t ready, our roads and bridges and levees are aging and flimsy, and our medical examiners are very, very tired.

Heat in Phoenix increasingly appears to be a predictable annual disaster. But, amazingly, that’s not the way the federal government sees it. Extreme heat is not on the list of disasters that FEMA is authorized to respond to. 

JEFF GOODELL: There’s been a vast underestimation of the risks of heat and the dangers of heat that even the people at FEMA are still behind the curve in recalculating the risks of this new climate world that we’re living in.

DELANEY HALL: And that’s partly because so many of heat’s victims are still unseen. The data on heat-related deaths across the country and around the world remains inadequate. And heat kills a lot of people who are living on the margins.

JEFF GOODELL: They’re not the people that are out there lobbying for more protection. 

DELANEY HALL: But it’s also because of the fundamental way that our government thinks about disasters. It’s geared towards damage to stuff rather than damage to people.

The government overwhelmingly uses property value as a metric when weighing how to dish out funds after disasters happen. And in some ways, that calculation makes sense. It’s hard and time-consuming to investigate heat-related deaths. And it’s hard to quantify damage when you’re talking about overstretched social workers or a hospital system struggling to keep up with its patient load or what’s lost when a person needlessly dies on a hot sidewalk. But that means that places like Phoenix, and hot places across the country, are largely left to fend for themselves every summer, when heat is extracting a terrible human toll. 

Jeff Goodell sometimes calls air conditioning a “technology of forgetting.” The ability to cool ourselves down obscures the fact that the world around us is getting much hotter and more dangerous. Even Sergio Armendariz, who lived on the streets of Phoenix for five years, sometimes forgets what that experience was like. He and his wife, who was also homeless, will joke about how soft they’ve gotten, how they complain when the AC can’t get their house any cooler on the hottest summer days. 

SERGIO ARMENDARIZ: So, I’m like, “What happened to us? We used to be gangster out there, just dealing with it like nothing. And now we’re just complaining about 75 degree AC.” It’s like, geez.

DELANEY HALL: There’s a question hovering in the background of this whole story. Will Phoenix be a liveable place in another 20 or 50 or 100 years? This was a question I posed a few times in interviews, and most people did not appreciate being asked about it. People will continue living in Phoenix for a lot of good reasons, like jobs and housing and family. But it’s also true that in a typical year back in the early ’90s, Phoenix experienced about seven days above 110 degrees annually. Last year, in 2023, by the time all the days were tallied, the city saw 55 days at those temperatures.

And yes, Phoenix is doing a lot of important adaptation work right now. The city created the first publicly funded heat response office in the whole country. They’re building new air-conditioned homeless shelters out of shipping containers. And preparation for summer happens year-round. But there are limits to our ability to adapt. We don’t know exactly where those limits are. We don’t know exactly when we’ll hit them. It depends a lot on what you’re willing to endure.

JEFF GOODELL: With enough money and enough technology, you could live on Mars, right? I mean, you can live that way. But do you want to live in a place where, when you go outside, you can’t touch the steering wheel on your car, if you fall on the sidewalk, you get third degree burns, where animals are dying because it’s so hot, where people on the street are literally dying on the streets because it is so hot? I mean, is that the kind of world you want to live in? Not me. I’d move.

DELANEY HALL: But in the meantime, people are arriving in Phoenix, not leaving. It’s still one of the fastest growing cities in the whole country. For at least six months a year, the weather is still glorious. People still want to live in the land without winter. And at least for now, many are finding ways to make it work.

The people I spoke with in Phoenix were like messengers from the future, spelling out a vision of what our hotter world might look like. And that hotter world looks nocturnal. Everywhere in the summer, people shift their lives towards the early morning and late evening, when temperatures are cooler. People hike at night with headlamps. The zoo opens at 6:00 am so that kids can enjoy it before the real heat kicks in and all the animals hide. And from April to September, there are a series of trail races called the Insomniac Night Runs, which start in the evening and continue through the night, on desert trails surrounding the city.

[sounds of Insomniac Night Run]

ANNOUNCER: Look at all these fast finishers coming through!

[cheers]

DELANEY HALL: It’s a real scene, with music and beer served at the finish line and runners high-fiving their friends. 

ANNOUNCER: Let’s give these guys a big round of applause!

DELANEY HALL: This particular race is happening at the McDowell Mountain Regional Park, about 45 minutes from downtown Phoenix. The trail winds through a Sonoran Desert landscape and it’s gorgeous here. I can imagine the runners racing under the stars, past prickly pears and saguaros, some of them wilting from the heat. I imagine that, even in the dark, the runners are guzzling water and stuffing ice in their shirts and shorts to keep cool. They’re finding ways to keep doing this thing they love, in a place they love, despite the immense challenge of it–trying to get their miles in, before the sun rises and a new, even hotter day begins. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The thing about the big story of climate change is that we’re only in the first chapter. 

DELANEY HALL: Here’s Emmett again. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: We’re only just starting to feel the magnitude of the changes we’ve unleashed and how they will cascade into nearly every aspect of our lives. For some people, climate change has already been disastrous. It has destroyed homes and uprooted lives. For others, the changes have been subtler. But the signs are all there, lurking in our rearranged running schedules and our insurance statements and our air conditioning bills.

This isn’t the apocalypse, just a series of unravelings. And while we’re all busy worrying about the end of the world, the world is just changing beneath our feet and leaving us behind. 

There’s a lot that we can do to try and catch up. We can run at night and replace our wooden floorboards. We can keep people cool and give the river more room to meander. And unlike a cactus, we can move out of harm’s way. None of that will be easy. And when you do a lot of stories about adapting to climate change, you can’t help but come away feeling like we need to do everything in our power not to make this hard job harder on ourselves. We need to stop the forces that are irrevocably changing our planet. And, at the same, be honest about the degree to which our planet has already been changed.

When I’m feeling anxious about the uncertainty of the world right now, which is often, I find myself yearning for a feeling of stability that I really only felt during my own childhood, living my quaint, little life in my quaint, little Vermont town. I find myself wanting to go back there, to a mild July day, skipping rocks in the gentle flow of the Winooski, or curled up with a novel in the back of the creaky, old bookstore. That river still exists. And that bookstore still exists. But they’re in a different world now. We all are. And the task ahead is to embrace the hard work of living in the world as it is.

This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by Delaney Hall and me, Emmett FitzGerald. The rest of the Not Built For This team is producers Jayson De Leon and Sofie Kodner. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic with additional music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Special thanks to everyone Delaney spoke with for this episode who didn’t make it into the story. That includes Juanita Constible of the NRDC; Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, the Medical Director at the Maricopa County Department of Public Health; Masavi Perea, the Deputy Director of Chispa Arizona; Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego–go Chargers–and finally to Alvaro Morello. Also, a special thank you to all of the other people who helped us with this whole series at various points in this process: Anna Weber, Ian Gray, ZJ Taylor, Hamilton Nolan, Dustin Mulvaney, Alice Hill, Margaret Elysia Garcia, John Liotti, Jake Metcalf, Meg Baranski Alisago and Mike Herzog, Alex Kolker, Ritchie Blink, The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, the Anthropocene Alliance, Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm, Virginia Hanusik, and Susan Sakash. Thank you to all of our partners and families for putting up with the long hours working on this. And finally, our immense thanks to 99PI boss Roman Mars for giving us the time and the space to create this series.

Not Built For This was a six-part series from 99% Invisible. This is our final episode. Thank you so much for listening. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Berube, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and Neena Pathak. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family. You can find 99% Invisible on all of the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that and every episode of 99PI and Not Built For This at 99pi.org.