Greater Shepparton needs public cooling centres.
Fortunately, it is something Greater Shepparton City Council has already thought about, and such centres already exist.
Minds are being applied to what existing public facilities we could use as places to which people could retreat on days of extreme heat.
Beyond that, owners of large facilities, such as shopping centres, will likely be encouraged to offer their premises as places of retreat when temperatures soar.
But of course, it’s a more significant issue than simply finding air-conditioned places with enough room for hundreds of people, as such a project is littered with logistics and liabilities.
You can’t simply throw open a building, declare it a cool space, say “job done”, and walk away.
Such a project needs to be managed; there are health and safety considerations, a slew of personal issues and, of course, the air-conditioned venue becomes a death trap if the power system collapses. The idea of living through major heat events has been thought through by council staff, and sound advice about the dilemma can be found on the council website at http://tinyurl.com/7yt64ptt
Unlike all other life-threatening moments driven by our worsening climate, heat is not something you can see — torrential rain is apparent, wind can be both seen and felt, and we know about floods.
Heat can obviously be felt, but it comes upon us with stealth and can quickly and quietly overcome an individual’s resistance in such a way that many are unaware that their defences are crumbling and the journey toward death has begun.
Extreme heat is harming people around the world. Last year, heat waves across three continents in the Northern Hemisphere broke records, made many people sick and caused death from heat stroke, heat exhaustion, dehydration or related illnesses – and this extreme heat, authorities predict, is likely to continue.
Excessive night-time temperatures — a hallmark of human-caused climate change — make the heat even more dangerous because it deprives our bodies of the chance to cool down, especially if air conditioning is not available.
Heat, the leading cause of weather-related deaths, is considered the ‘silent killer’ and is both an unrecognised and unacknowledged killer (heat is rarely listed on death certificates as the cause), and so the actions of our city council deserve applause.
Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 killed about 170 people, attracting huge attention from the media, but what passed almost unnoticed and unreported were the deaths in the preceding week of about 300 people from the heat.
Some say predictions need to be treated with caution, something I agree with, but the increasing heat we are being forced to live with is not a prediction but rather a scientific fact.
We learned in the 19th century that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would push up the Earth’s temperature, and although that has been discussed many times since, the idea took on a whole new public profile when the then NASA climate scientist James Hansen warned the US Senate in 1988 about the implications of our prolific use of fossil fuels.
Stand clear, I’m coming through the front door. The rising heat that concerns me and for which council is attempting to prepare those who live here is clearly the product of a human-caused climate crisis.
Not only do we have to act for ourselves, but it is also about taking steps to ensure those around us, particularly our children and grandchildren, get to live in a world in which they enjoy circumstances at least similar to what allowed us, their parents and grandparents to thrive.
Rallying behind our council as it works to prepare people here for climate-driven increases in heat, we need to remember that later is too late.
Last year, 2023, was officially the hottest year on record, according to new data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.