In the Summer of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis “failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened.”
A fascinating article in which Eric Klinenberg describes what he found when he returned to his home town to explore why some neighbourhoods seemed to recover quicker than others, even though on paper they looked very similar.
Read the full article, ‘Want to survive climate change? You’ll need a good community’, on the WIRED web site.