Only over the past few years have I felt the effects of rising temperatures in New York City. Praying for snow before Christmas so that it actually feels like Christmas has become a norm. If you think back to when we were in middle school, you’d realize that we never had to hope for snow. Once December came around, there were already little flurries falling from the sky and it would start feeling like Christmas. However, in the recent years, snow (or cold temperature in general) in New York City doesn’t come around until the end of December. Let’s take a look at this year, for example. In NYC the December weather has been around mid to high 50s. In December! However, in other suburban states in the middle of the country, it has already snowed. There has to be a valid explanation for this. I think that Urban Heat Island effect would be a good reasoning behind why in the city we’re experiencing higher weathers than expected but suburban cities are not. What’s really interesting is that we have all of this data to prove that the UHI effect is causing these changes in temperature and we have other data that shows how effects of the urban heat island can be reduced but there’s not much that’s being done to help it. Green roofs and cool roofs can be installed on 11% of the buildings in NYC since they’re flat. Even though they are costly to install, I feel that the sooner they are installed, the better of an impact they’ll have on the environment. Over a certain period of time, they will actually be worth the money spent unlike some other useless things the city spends money on.
One thing I found really interesting was reading about how high temperatures have accounted for deaths in the city. Heat stress caused around 300 deaths in an average summer in New York City. That’s a lot of people dying. In the past, I’ve heard people dying in India due to the heat since the weather sometimes reaches around 110 Fahrenheit on an average day in the summer. However, I’ve never heard of someone dying in NYC due to an increase in temperature. The main root of this problem is a lack of education. If more people were educated on urban heat island effect and the impact it has on our health, the city, etc. I’m pretty sure that people would try to get green roofs and cool roofs implemented someway. If those in power really cared about the environment, they could incentivize building owners to create green roofs on the roof of their apartment buildings. We’ve looked at a lot of problems that our city is undergoing and I feel that since all of us are more aware and more educated on these problems, we might be able to make a difference if we tried hard enough.
