A 3-part plan to take on extreme heat waves | Eleni Myrivili
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
The deadliest severe weather phenomenon is something you might not realize: extreme heat. Eleni Myrivili, chief heat officer of the city of Athens, Greece, explains that extreme heat and heat waves are often overlooked because they're not as dramatic as flooding or hurricanes – and breaks down three approaches to keep cities cool in a time of rapid global temperature rise. "Cranking up the air conditioner is just not going to cut it," she says.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Heel. |
| 0:06.5 | Today's speaker holds a position that's increasingly relevant as extreme heat grips much of the planet. |
| 0:12.9 | Eleni Miravili is a heat advisor, and in her archive talk from TED 2022, she calls on us to act fast |
| 0:20.5 | to build heat resilience into our cities and our |
| 0:24.0 | infrastructure. |
| 0:25.2 | How? |
| 0:26.0 | After the break. |
| 0:29.2 | So in my city of Athens, Greece, like in many cities around the world, a lot of people |
| 0:36.8 | thought that climate change is something |
| 0:40.1 | happening far away until ash started falling from the sky and temperatures neared 45 degrees |
| 0:52.1 | Celsius in the summer of 2021. and they stayed above 40 degrees for several days. |
| 1:01.7 | The asphalt sizzled and huge wildfires burned the forests around the city, and people died. |
| 1:10.3 | The last decade has been the hottest ever recorded in our history. |
| 1:18.4 | Paradoxically, even though we've been talking about global warming for decades, |
| 1:23.6 | we haven't been talking about extreme heat, especially in urban environments. |
| 1:29.3 | Extreme heat is the deadliest of all extreme weather phenomena. |
| 1:35.3 | Very few of us know this. |
| 1:37.3 | We overlook extreme heat because heat doesn't come with the drama of roofs sent flying and streets turned into rivers. |
| 1:48.6 | Heat, heat destroys quietly. |
| 1:53.7 | Yet there is little escape from heat. |
| 1:57.5 | These are temperatures our bodies are not made for and cannot adapt to. |
| 2:01.6 | These are temperatures, our cities and our infrastructure is not made for. |
... |
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