You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. The deadliest of extreme weather phenomena

is something we might not realize is quite as deadly as it is. And a lot of nations have yet to take it seriously. I certainly was surprised by much of what heat advisor Yelani Miravili shared at TED

2022. Her eye-opening talk offers us a path forward in a time of rising global temperatures.

So in my city of Athens, Greece, like in many cities around the world, a lot of people thought that climate change

is something happening far away, until ash started falling from the sky and temperatures neared 45

degrees Celsius in the summer of 2021,

and they stayed above 40 degrees for several days.

The asphalt sizzled and huge wildfires burned the forests around the city,

and people died.

The last decade has been the hottest ever recorded in our history.

Paradoxically, even though we've been talking about global warming for decades,

we haven't been talking about extreme heat,

especially in urban environments.

Extreme heat is the deadliest of all extreme weather phenomena.

Very few of us know this.

We overlook extreme heat because heat doesn't come with the drama of roofs sent flying and streets turned

into rivers heat heat destroys quietly yet there is little escape from heat these are temperatures our bodies are not made for and cannot adapt to.

These are temperatures, our cities, and our infrastructure is not made for. The structures of

our cities and the surfaces absorb heat and store it and radiated at night. Cars and air conditionings add more to the urban

environment. And this is a deadly mix. This is what we call the urban heat island. The list of

health effects that from heat and from heat waves is long,

and it includes significant mental problems, mental health problems.

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