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podcast. Welcome back to the climate conversations with me julie you. We have all experienced days when we are home and sweating buckets. The full blast of a fan doesn't work. So it's energy guzzling air conditioning to the rescue temperatures have been soaring in Singapore with the mercury hitting a merciless 35° on some days. But according to data, Singapore is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world maximum daily temperatures
can reach 35-37° by the year. 2100 other countries already experience hotter temperatures than this. But the reason this spells trouble for Singapore as a humidity is high all year round, which can intensify the impact of heat. Urban planners. Architects and climate experts are all racing to redesign our buildings to keep us cool. So as the city changes to cope with extreme heat, how will our daily lives change along with it.
This history holds some answers for us and how different groups from migrant workers to managers and offices adapt to climate change and will a productivity plummet when things get too hot to handle with me to discuss this hot topic is Associate Professor Gregory Clancy, historian and leader of the Science Technology and society cluster at the ASIA Research Institute. Welcome Professor Clancy, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see
you. Thank you.
So, Professor Heat sometimes gets overlooked because we can't really see it and very little has been written on the history or social cultural engagement surrounding it in ASIA. So what drew you to this particular area of study why urban heat
for a long time at the ASia Research Institute where I work, we've been looking at natural disasters and we've done a lot of histories of earthquakes and floods and hurricanes, but we realize that the biggest looming natural disaster in our future is heat. But as you say, we know very little about it from a humanities and social science perspective about how people have dealt with heat in the past.
We don't know much about the history of basic technologies like air conditioning and so we thought as mainly historians, we would do a project which focused on heat but also provide some lessons for the present and future based upon the past as well. So we've constructed a website which anybody can access. It's called Heat in urban Asia. If you just type in heat in Urban Asia, you'll find the link to it. The subtitle is past, present and future.
And to begin, we chose a number of Asian cities, Singapore being one another, Delhi 3rd Wuhan and 1/4 Hong Kong. But you can see by our website, we've expanded well beyond those. It has a couple of features which People might be interested in. One is there are maps of Singapore from the 1820s onward showing where all the weather stations were and what types of weather information. Climate information was being collected how and by whom.
We also have a map of Asia, where you can click on links in particular cities to see how temperatures have risen all the way from Singapore to Delhi to Seoul and Korea. And there's also a series of articles, short articles very readable by our team members about the cultural and social aspects of heat historically. For example, the history of cold storage, how he may have affected fires in the past in Singapore etcetera. So I really recommend everybody take a look at our website.
It's a very comprehensive study and the project is titled Heat in Urban Asia, Professor, you are a historian. So take us 2030 years back into history of sunny Singapore and how hot was it then? How do residents cope with the heat in the past?
Singapore has always been hot of course, but it's interesting to look at british colonial records of english colonizers who came here from India always described Singapore as an easy posting compared to India because it was cooler. So within the tropics colonies, Singapore wasn't considered to be among the hottest places. And ironically, Singapore is much hotter now than it was in the colonial period. We always used to say to ourselves,
how did people endure heat in the past? Of course it was hot in the past and they didn't have air conditioning, But it's harder now. We've gathered temperatures here ever since 1820, the average temperature in 1820 remained relatively steady all the way up to the 1940s. If you had lived in that period, you wouldn't have noticed changes from year to year, but the average temperature wouldn't have changed much now since 1948.
We know that temperatures have risen here every decade by about 0.25 degrees so cumulatively, in the lifetime of the pioneer generation. I mean, from 1948 onwards, the temperature has risen 1.6 degrees centigrade, which is substantial. Now, a lot of people may not have noticed it because it's been gradual, but it's had a big effect on what we call the urban heat island effect, which I can talk about a little bit more later and it of course had a big effect on nature as well
as on human comfort ability. We are in the midst of something unique, something that we've never experienced before.
Indeed. And professor, you've alluded to some of the cases back in history. Do you have more examples of what history can teach us to better prepare for the world that's heating up?
I go back and forth. It's been fascinating to go back and look at how people dealt with heat in the past and we've come up with all sorts of interesting anecdote or interesting pictures of how people have dealt with heat. A good example is rotten furniture, which was actually meant to cool bodies off because it had little air holes all over it. Rotten furniture was abandoned for plush furniture at a particular point.
But maybe we have to think about going back to those sorts of things so we can find little clues in the past about things that we've abandoned which were very common before. Air conditioning. But the past isn't a perfect guide to the future because what we're experiencing now is unprecedented.
Yeah, just how worried should we be about this? As you mentioned, the Singapore has been heating up twice as fast as the world average over the past six decades. What's your assessment to help people in the country are dealing with surging heat?
Well, the way that most of us are dealing with surging heat is air conditioning which is itself a problem. And it's a chicken and egg thing is it gets hotter. We add more air conditioning and the air conditioning helps to increase the heat because every time you cool inside, you're throwing heat outside and of course you're using energy more fossil fuels. So I think architects are more and more thinking about alternatives ways to at least reduce air conditioning by
designing buildings so that they're more naturally cool. And that involves drawing upon perhaps some past architectural elements which we've forgotten about. For example, more than 1000 years ago in Cairo, they invented things called wind catchers which are still now
coming back in the Middle East. They're basically like chimneys that go up and catch wind and push it down into buildings as a way of natural air conditioning and architects are more and more looking at those historic non mechanical ways and also involving different materials and thicknesses of walls etcetera, which we relied upon exclusively for centuries.
We may need to rely more and more upon again because air conditioning is not the answer in the future, unless we can make it much much more efficient than it is now and reduce the heat, it's been generated by it.
Professor, it's not just Singapore, but you've also looked into three other cities, you mentioned Hong kong Delhi and Wuhan that are well known for their steering summers, what does the hotter global future mean for places that are already so hot to begin with. How are they dealing with it?
Well, India is a particularly striking case because parts of India have always been among the hottest places in Asia and they're getting hotter and hotter. The governments all around the world are responding with mitigation plans. Singapore I think has done really well. You can see the results of all the tree planting trees are maybe the front line of defense at least in cities. I think everybody agrees with that, that we
just need to plant many more trees. Singapore is remarkably green city, but most asian cities are not and you know that from travel, this gets into the problem of the urban heat island effect. A lot of people feel helpless with climate change because I think what can we do about rising oceans, What can we do about typhoons and storms? One thing we can do is try to mitigate the rising heat that's caused by the city itself. In other words, the global climate change
is only one component of the reason we're hotter. Another component is what's called the urban heat island effect, which is that cities as they get dense and built up and they cover natural ground with pavement and with buildings, the buildings absorb heat during the day and then they release it at night. So the city never cools and part of the increase in temperature as little to do with global climate change. But it has a lot to do with local
infrastructure and how it's made. Now planting lots of trees which the government is doing is a way to help mitigate that. Along with other things like putting greenery on top of buildings designing buildings so that they channel wind which is being done in Singapore more and more. We can now use computer generated models to figure out how wind off the ocean works its way through the city and take advantage of that to cool areas of the city and of course reducing air
conditioning as part of that as well. Those are things we can do locally to make ourselves more comfortable that doesn't affect sea level rises, but it does affect health, particularly elderly people, they're very vulnerable to eat. Hi, my name is steve Lie and I'm Teresa Tang and we are the hosts of the new podcast CNN correspondent
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Let's talk about those people who are more vulnerable individuals or in the sector society who will be most affected because when we look at the social impact side of things, the reality is that heat waves or periods of extreme worms do not affect everyone in the same way. So what are some of the main factors that lead to this vulnerability and what can we do to address these?
We're doing a lot of things already. And one is that to cover as many outdoor walk spaces as possible so that people aren't out in the sun much and don't experience heatstroke. I think there's a lot of local habits which have perfected over time, which are excellent strategies. One is to be careful about what part of the
day you go out, how far you go. I notice that there's more and more talk about air conditioning, bus stops where people have to wait for long periods of time and I can't help it, but are very dangerous, particularly for elderly people. There's a very good argument that the older you get, the more you do need to depend on air conditioning. But the alternative side of that is I think younger people need to rely less on air conditioning. For example, I'm sitting here under a fan
And I'm from a very cold place. I'm from one of the coldest parts of North America. I've been in Singapore for 22 years and when I first came here I was utterly dependent on air conditioning and I used far too much of it and now I use almost none of it, except when I don't have a ceiling fan in her room. So I think younger people
did you have to force yourself to do that or
it just happened naturally over time, partly, but then partly, I also did force myself to do that because I realized it wasn't just the price of air conditioning. It was also the fact that I just didn't think it was good for me. And now that I've been doing this project, I realized it's not good for anybody for younger people, even though I'm not a younger person, I think younger people need to wean themselves off very
cold indoor temperatures. That's the other thing that struck me when I first came here is how cold some indoor temperatures could be and people have been adjusting that over time but basically reserve strongest air conditioning for elderly people who really need it for health reasons and younger people should really try to acclimatize themselves back to ceiling fans and away from artificial thermal.
We often tend to forget those who work in outdoor settings such as those engaged in agriculture or in construction sites. How significant is the impact of heat, stress and labor productivity or decent working conditions and what should employers do to ensure the well being of their staff in such instances?
Well, this is a huge problem. As you say, construction workers in agriculture where they can't help but work outside and I guess shading and lots of water and clothing which is not going to harm them being to have the same sorts of things that armies around the world are worrying about with their troops and are perfecting ways to monitor and to protect people. But it's not just a matter of doing things in Singapore, 90%
of our food is imported from abroad. Climate change is also going to affect agriculture and agricultural workers and particularly through droughts, it's going to affect prices and produce availability of products in the future here. So even though there's not a lot of agriculture in Singapore, I think we have to be as concerned about the protection of agriculture and agricultural workers in the region as any city does because we're totally dependent on imported food.
We're also seeing unbearably hot temperatures already testing the limits of human survival with rising heat related deaths and illnesses around the world. I also read reports that heat waves affecting early pregnancy causing still births as well. Professor, just how much heat and humidity can a human body withstand how hot it's too hard.
It's hard to say because again it depends on your age. It also depends on this is another thing that we found, which is a very controversial and very difficult to figure out. But people acclimatize different ways in different cultures and it partly depends on whether you've grown up in a particular hot place. As I said, I didn't, so
it took me a long time to acclimatize. Scientists have been trying to answer the question, you just asked a particular global standard and it's been not possible to do that because people in particularly hot places do adapt over time. Not everybody there's illness but they adapt in different ways. It's interesting in the Northern Hemisphere now they're experiencing
far greater shifts than we are here in Singapore. Places like Tokyo paris, New york, heat waves are becoming more frequent and they're becoming more noticeable to those populations than the gradual rise in. Heat is noticeable to our population. And so there's actually more deaths from heat related causes in the northern cities than there are here on the equator because they're not used to it
And they haven't, their infrastructure is not prepared for. In fact, the word heatwave we know was invented in the 1890s because of the heat wave in New York before that people didn't talk about heat waves, heat was invisible and making it a wave made it more visible, like a tsunami. And now people in the Northern Hemisphere and cities like Tokyo and new york and paris are talking about heat waves all the time. We're still not talking about them
here because they don't strike us as tsunami. Like things that occur just in certain periods. It's more stealth here, but it's still happening
for us here in Singapore. As you mentioned a number of times, air conditioning is extremely pervasive. So rather than hiding in air conditioned buildings which instantly hot air outside, what do we need to do to live better adapt to hotter temperatures in a more sustainable way.
There's one interesting development is people are experimenting with misting, you talk about outdoors, you see that a little bit around Singapore now, but it's a global new technology of basically missed very select outdoor areas to make them more comfortable rather than using outdoor air conditioning, which is a terrible idea given how much energy air conditioning uses. This basically goes back to a very old and habitual practice in India putting water on walls which will then
slowly evaporate and make things more comfortable. Of course it intensively uses water which is also a concern because we have a finite amount of it here in Singapore. If droughts become more common then that's not a long term solution but it's an interesting new technology which I think we'll see more and more of
because people are not going to abandon outdoor living. They're not going to not want to sit outside at a restaurant for example, so you will get used to more and more probably missing technologies in the future, but on the other hand, we might also indeed retreat more and more inside over time, over the long term. That just may be inevitable
before we let you go, Professor, what do you make of the current attention placed on climate change and the movements this has spawned? How would you place this in a historical perspective? And what can history tell us about where we're headed as a planet in this respect?
Well, I guess the most optimistic thing you can say is that in the past we have avoided other global crises. Common sense has prevailed. We've not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons, which we thought we might do in the 1950s and 60's overpopulation has been controlled when I was a child, there was talk about mass starvation because we run out of food. That hasn't happened. In other words, we've used technology and common sense and
diplomacy in the past. We thought that the hole in the ozone layer was going to continue to expand indefinitely. The Montreal protocols put an end to the use of freon and we don't talk about the ozone layer anymore. I guess I'm being optimistic in the sense that we should use these past victories over global problems to inspire us to redouble our efforts to deal with the current global problem, which affects everybody everywhere
and everybody and everywhere. Should constantly thinking about what not only what governments can do, but what they can do.
All right. So on that optimistic note that will have to end our conversation there. But thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time.
Thank you for asking.
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