The “compelling” story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds—and what it revealed about our broken society (Boston Globe). On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index—how the temperature actually feels on the body—would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. By July 20, over seven hundred people had perished—twenty times the number of those struck down by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city’s vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a “social autopsy,” examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. He investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how city government responded, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported and explained these events. Through years of fieldwork, interviews, and research, he uncovers the surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown that contributed to this human catastrophe as hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies. As this incisive and gripping account demonstrates, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities made visible by the 1995 heat wave remain in play in America’s cities today—and we ignore them at our peril. Includes photos and a new preface on meeting the challenges of climate change in urban centers “Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters.” —Chicago Sun-Times “It’s hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you’ve just read a tale of slow murder by public policy.” —Salon “A classic. I can’t recommend it enough.” —Chris Hayes

In a cemetery on the outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of a hundred of what many have called the first casualties of global climate change. They are the so-called abandoned or forgotten victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck France in August 2003, leaving 15,000 people dead. They are those who died alone in Paris and its suburbs, buried at public expense when no family claimed their bodies. They died (and to a great extent lived) unnoticed by their neighbors, discovered in some cases only weeks after their deaths. And as with the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they rapidly became the symbols of the disaster for a nation wringing its hands over the mismanagement of the heat wave and the social and political dysfunctions it revealed. "Chasing Ghosts" tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the anecdotal lives and deaths of its victims, and the ways in which they illuminate and challenge typical representations of the disaster; and the scientific understandings of catastrophe and its management. It is at once a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape, and an ethnographic account of how a city copes with dramatic change and emerging threats.

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is an area of growing interest for many people studying the urban environment and local/global climate change. The UHI has been scientifically studied for 200 years and, although it is an apparently simple phenomenon, there is considerable confusion around the different types of UHI and their assessment. The Urban Heat Island—A Guidebook provides simple instructions for measuring and analysing the phenomenon, as well as greater context for defining the UHI and the impacts it can have. Readers will be empowered to work within a set of guidelines that enable direct comparison of UHI effects across diverse settings, while informing a wide range of climate mitigation and adaptation programs to modify human behaviour and the built form. This opens the door to true global assessments of local climate change in cities. Urban planning and design strategies can then be evaluated for their effectiveness at mitigating these changes. - Covers both on-surface and near-surface, or canopy, measurements and impacts of Urban Heat Islands (UHI) - Provides a set of best practices and guidelines for UHI observation and analysis - Includes both conceptual overviews and practical instructions for a wide range of uses

The first volume to examine theories of soul in Greek philosophy using an approach drawn from the history of science.

The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.