July 11, 2018

It’s Not Your Imagination, the Middle of a City Is Hotter Than Anywhere Else

It’s called the “urban heat island effect.”

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The year is 2018. Cities are hot. Really, really hot. Thanks to something called the “urban heat island effect,” cities like Los Angeles and New York are literally the hottest places to live—and climate change is only warming things up more.

An epic heat wave wreaked havoc across LA this past week, leaving more than 26,000 residents without power after temperatures spiked to 109 degrees downtown. The good news is that cities are taking action to stem the serious public health threats that come along with extreme heat.

More MotherJones reporting on Climate Desk

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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