To Beat the Heat, We’ll Need to Turn Our Homes Into Batteries
It’s impossible to outrun the pace of climate change. The solution is to work with the infrastructure we’ve got.
Scorching.
Photographer: Samsul Said/BloombergThe world’s climate is changing faster than we can keep up with it. With the first El Nino in four years now under way, hot and dry conditions are spreading across areas where a huge share of the world’s population lives: South and Southeast Asia, northern China, southern Africa, and the tropical Americas.
The effects are already starting to strain infrastructure that wasn’t built for such conditions. At the Koyana Dam southeast of Mumbai, one of India’s largest hydroelectric projects has gone into partial shutdown to preserve its dwindling reservoir for drinking water. Similar conditions are prevailing across southern Kerala state. In Malaysia, the government has been flying cloud-seeding planes to refill two dams that keep Penang supplied.