Adaptation to climate change

So many threads arguing about the stuff that's solid, far less content on the stuff that matters, adaptation and mitigation.

Here's a good paper appearing in Environmental Health Perspectives:
Urban Form and Extreme Heat Events: Are Sprawling Cities more Vulnerable to Climate Change than Compact Cities?

The open source article will be available as soon as the copyedited and formatted version becomes available.

Anyways, the gist of the study is:

Background: Extreme heat events are known to be increasing in frequency in large U.S. cities and are responsible for a greater annual number of climate related fatalities, on average, than any other form of extreme weather. In addition, low density, sprawling patterns of urban development have been associated with enhanced surface temperatures in urbanized areas.

Objectives: This study examines the association between urban form at the level of the metropolitan region and the frequency of extreme heat events over a five decade period.

Methods: We employ a widely published metric of urban form (a “sprawl” index) to measure the association between urban form in 2000 and the mean annual rate of change in extreme heat events between 1956 and 2005.

Results: Our results find the rate of increase in the annual number of extreme heat events between 1956 and 2005 in the most sprawling metropolitan regions to be more than double the rate of increase observed in the most compact metropolitan regions.

Conclusions: The design and management of land use in metropolitan regions may offer an important tool for adapting to the heat-related health effects associated with ongoing climate change.

Build up, not out! Makes sense on many levels, not just from the health impacts of extreme heat events.

But of course building up would make the urban concentration camps much more efficient in containing larger numbers of humanity. Suburbia was a failed experiment in containment. I foresee a problem in Vancouver where they can't seem to build water proof structures. Black mold is a serious health problem that makes building up taxing on the system. Not very efficient for running that concentration camp, but then it is overdue for a tsunami or major earth quake which should cancel out that problem.