Abstract
When most people read an article or see a news story discussing the topic of climate change, the story often informs the reader about changes to ice sheets, the arctic regions, certain wildlife populations, and many parts of the natural world. In his book The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live, Brian Stone takes us on a different journey about climate change and the effect it has on cities, where the majority of the world’s citizens live and spend most of their lives. I work in the field of energy systems and am mostly focused on fossil fuel energy consumption and the transformation to renewable energy. The closest I get to land use change and climate are the issues related to agriculture. This concise and well-written book has opened up a whole new avenue of analysis for me, going into the future.
This is the most engaging academic book that I have ever read. It starts with the Prologue that introduces the reader to the well-known, but nevertheless not well-understood, piece of recent history, the European heat wave of 2003. The Prologue is almost written in the flavor of a historical mystery, yet several key concepts are carefully embedded in this story. Affecting mostly Northern Europe, this heat wave caused more deaths in a four-month-long time frame than all of the U.S. combat deaths in Viet Nam. These deaths also occurred in fully developed advanced countries with the world’s best health care systems. The heat wave was made more intense within cities because of the heat island effect. The author also introduces a key climate change issue and explains that higher temperatures allow more moisture to be evaporated into the atmosphere. These higher humidity levels trap more heat at night and do not allow nighttime temperatures to fall to historical norms. Thus, elevated temperatures at night with houses that are not air conditioned increase the accumulated heat stress on individuals. Just several days and nights of this unrelenting heat wave can and did kill thousands of people in some of the most advanced countries on earth. Lasting an entire summer, this heat wave changed the French language. The term for “heat wave” in French is canicule, yet due to the heat wave in 2003 the new term is La Canicule.
The Prologue emphatically illustrates the scope of the book by focusing on a specific climate event and its effect on people. The rest of the book proceeds from the planetary scale to the local and individual human scale. For those not familiar with the science of climate change, the first chapter, “Keeling’s Curve,” is a well-written summary of the state of climate science as of the published date. The author gives the reader a historic look at the early greenhouse gas theory development, going back to Fourier in the 1820s and Tyndall during the 1850s. Indeed, the most detailed work of that time was accomplished late in the nineteenth century by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist who went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work in electrochemistry. Arrhenius took a year off to explore his idea of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise. His calculations, done before the advent of any modern technologies, were very accurate and are well within the predictions of today that rest on the effort of many talented scientists using the world’s most powerful computational techniques. Also included in this chapter are detailed explanations of climate myths and the analysis of the science behind the ever accumulating body of evidence that supports the threat of climate change.
The next chapter, titled “The Climate Barrier,” brings the focus a little closer to the city. This chapter starts with an explanation of the landscape with several regional examples. The author shows how land use changes can have regional and local climate effects that may be more pronounced than what is predicted for climate change alone. In the case of Florida, the steady draining of the lower half of the state to support development and agriculture has obviously caused the land surface to become drier. The constant wet surface of the land acts as a giant evaporative heat exchanger that dampens out temperature extremes. With less water on the land, surface temperatures can become hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. Couple this effect with global warming and more hot extreme records are being set than cold extreme records.
In the third chapter, “Islands of Heat,” the author brings the reader right into the city. The theme of the entire book comes together in this chapter. Tying everything together with the topic of heat brings a truly holistic analysis to the issue of cities, climate, and heat. In this chapter, the author combines the obvious and not so obvious. For example, green roofs can be used to reflect heat and to use the water in plants to cool by evaporation. But at the same time, absorbing less heat on roofs does nothing to minimize the heat rejected directly into the city environment from thousands of automobiles, air conditioners, trucks, lights, and freezers. Another example is the nice discussion of the art of early planners who integrated tree-lined avenues and extensive parks into densely packed urban centers. As these trees grew during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they provided natural cooling to the local environment. However, as time marched on, urban expansion for increased automobile traffic added many lanes to these early avenues and many trees were sacrificed. Less tree cover, more heat sources, and a larger number of people have caused many cities to become significant heat islands. As a person who has studied energy efficiency in the built environment for many years, this chapter is a treasure trove of multidisciplinary thought. The urban planner of the future needs to mix the needs of housing with a sense of place and landscape, and do it in such a way that increases holistic efficiency and decreases the overall heat effect of the city and its environs. At this point I realized that I would be recommending this book to all of my colleagues, however remotely related to this field. Well within two hundred pages, the author brings together a detailed understanding of a complex topic that allows a professional to develop an actionable understanding that will help him or her develop solutions to many cityscape problems. This is definitely a must read for professionals in any discipline or field related to urban planning.
The next chapter, “The Green Factor,” focuses on how a modification of people’s immediate surroundings make a more livable city for all, and develops detailed solutions that can significantly reduce the heat island effect produced by the densely packed urban environment. The author is clear that these solutions cannot solve global warming alone, but can modify people’s immediate surroundings to make a more livable city for all. The easiest solution, planting trees, is also the most inexpensive and least energy intensive. Stone discusses a study that finds that half of Los Angeles’ heat island effect could be cooled by planting eleven million trees within the Los Angeles basin. Another solution involves green or reflective roofs. The combination of these simple ideas dramatically cools the local environment and the author makes it clear that these actions do not solve the temperature increase due to global warming but do make the existing city landscapes much more livable now. Collective action spurred by policy incentives can provide a buffer for changes to come and even to the environment people have already created.
The last chapter of the book, “Leveraging Canopy for Carbon,” takes a look at global-level policies that can change our landscapes to accomplish several things at once, such as carbon sequestration, water retention, cooling local environments, etc. A key suggestion in this chapter is to strengthen the language in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to encompass land surface drivers of climate change. The author goes on to list three other policy suggestions that all bring greater focus to the regional and city level landscapes of the future that will be impacted by climate change.
In summary, each chapter in this book began with a vivid story that tied people’s reality to the subject matter of climate change and the city. Every one of these stories immediately pulled me into the chapter. These stories were detailed and historically accurate, and greatly enhanced my desire to continue reading. Each chapter took a broad topic and brought it down to the cityscape level and provided enough basic understanding that when solutions were introduced their viability was evident. The topics were also woven together so that solutions were multifaceted in that they solved more than one problem. This book should be required reading for anybody in the fields of planning, landscaping, construction, and regional government.