David Abel | The Boston Globe | August 13, 2021
It was so hot in Nubian Square Thursday afternoon that the humid air in Roxbury wasn’t just palpable, it was visible — hovering in blurry waves radiating over the asphalt. It was similarly steamy near Maverick Square in East Boston, where a warren of old brick buildings and few trees combined to make the heat wave feel unbearable.
It was also hot in the Longwood neighborhood of Brookline, but in a park filled with century-old beech trees and surrounded by the manicured lawns of multimillion-dollar homes, the temperature was discernibly cooler, if only slightly, according to thermometer readings by Globe reporters who fanned across the city on the second day of the heat wave.
As climate change brings more hot days to the area, those small differences can be significant, and they’re likely to become increasingly pronounced, especially in lower-income neighborhoods where there are fewer trees, more concrete, and less air conditioning, a growing body of research shows. The worst temperature differences are in humid cities including Boston along the East Coast, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
By the end of the decade, temperatures in Boston could exceed 90 degrees for more than 40 days a year — and for as many as 90 days annually in 2070 — compared with an average of four days between 1971 and 2000, according to city projections. Those increases in temperatures could have serious health consequences, with one major study estimating that heat-related deaths in the coming decades could be more than 50 percent higher than they were a few decades ago.
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