Hot girl summer wasn't supposed to be *this* hot, says this girl who is currently wearing a long-sleeved top and pants because it's basically the North Pole bureau here at CNN's office.
For real though... It's pretty darn hot out there.
I'm talking 110+ degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix for 20 consecutive days. In the US alone, more than 121 million people were under an active extreme heat alert watch or warning on Thursday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Some more heat stats:
- There have been more than 1,800 record high temperatures in the US so far this month.
- The US has seen more than 26,000 record high temperatures this year
- There are more than 170 potential temperature records (both high and low temperature records) that could be broken through Saturday.
Who's bringing the heat? El Niño, a climate pattern that originates in the Pacific Ocean, could be behind the latest heatwave, which appears to be hitting the West Coast particularly hard. There's also good old-fashioned climate change.
And no matter where you stand on that, there's no denying the dangers heat carries.
It kills more Americans every year than any other weather-related disaster. Each year, an average of more than 700 people die from heat, and more than 9,000 people are hospitalized nationally due to heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn reported.
So what's being done to cool people down?
Some cities like Chicago have passed laws requiring certain new and existing residential buildings to install air conditioners in indoor common areas. But having access to AC doesn't solve everything.
Most low-income families have access to cooling in their homes, but they lack the money to turn it on, costing them an average of 8.6% of their income to pay for home energy — three times that of higher-income families, according to the US Department of Energy.
Additionally, fewer states have protections against power shutoffs during the summer than they do for heating in the winter.
To combat the cost individuals shoulder to cool their homes, many cities offer publicly-operated cooling centers. But they tend to only do so when temperatures rise above a certain level. And even still, there are barriers that prevent people from making use of them.
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