Honestly this list sounds like total BS. Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such? How are they possibly the best prepared city on the planet for climate change? The whole methodology here seems suspect at best.
Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.
david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.
> Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?
There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
My concern with this analysis is that the headline "conclusions" depend on a proprietary composite index and assumptions. Where are the underlying data and methodologies for independent evaluation?
I was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
Good thing we've been working on beating photosynthesis efficiency of turning sunlight into carbohydrates (e.g., sugar) by using special electrolysis cells to synthesize plant-accessible carbon-nutrients (one kinda-successful (in beating natural leaves with PV based sunlight electricity and their electrochemistry)) attempt focused on generating a nutrient solution rich in acetate from CO2 feed (and electricity); that's one of the energy carrier molecules that existing plant biology can efficiently utilize.
And note that by exploiting winter time solar yield and the grow houses with such technology not using sunlight directly and thus allowing easy and efficient thermal insulation, production could run year-round just with the amount of grow houses "online" varying with the average solar yield. Also gives convenient off-times (if they rotate which building runs through the winter) for maintenance.
And eating less meat or at least feeding the meat animals efficiently produced (but not as "tasty/varied/textured") plant/algae(/possibly-microbiological with bacteria or yeast) feed instead of things like Alfalfa that are very resource intensive to farm, would also help a lot with these issues.
Probably we should get back to doing grain bunkers as strategic reserves, though, lasting long enough to realize the problem, slaughter 80% of livestock, and plant low-failure-risk human suitable food crops on farmland that previously had feed crops for those no longer living 80% and land that had things like corn dedicated for ethanol that's then added to gasoline.
Ideally ofc. we'd not need to cull as much life stock and could instead just slightly reduce new breeding and switch those corn fields to human food.
We have beaten it but only for an output that's approximately "green smoothie".
We're already better than just LED grow lights for e.g. lettuce, though, from how I recall the linked paper.
Unsure how you conclude that cold outdoors necessitate more meat though; aside from some micronutrients vegan diet works just fine so reverting back to "meat only on Sundays" 1910 style household dinner menu structures would work fine...
Most people could, for example, do with replacing the caloric intake from half the portion of any non-vegan food they consume, with potato.
If outdoor farming breaks from climate meat will get more expensive...
Vertical solar panels mounted like fence panels between fence posts high enough to not get covered by snowdrifts will produce electricity year-round; and we only need around 3x as much solar farm currently to power sealed grow "basements" than the same plant output would need if just farmed on an open field (assuming climate is matched and weather is average). The benefit of it is just that the panels can be other places (like noise barrier walls next to an urban highway) than the plants and the climate can be freely picked. Also no unlucky correlated dry spell weather events that can cut 100 million people's worth of harvest yield down to half or worse.
Grow houses won't fail collectively as much as farming weather is correlated across a region.
Pretty much just need to keep measures around to prevent the plants from freezing just because the electric grid falls over for 3 days in winter.
Some foods yes, there are huge fisheries, but not agriculture. (I admit that should had been more precise in my post)
After the British Columbia University web, Canada still seems to import like a 75% of the fruits and a 50% of the vegetables eaten by Canadians (excluding potatoes). Apparently, this is one of the problems with the tariffs.
2026 Summer in Europe signals something like the past centuries are not really representatives of the challenges we face to be able to sustain agriculture as we did before.
Between fruits and vegetables that literally dried up to the Sun (with a unusually hot and dry Spring season), critical drinking water availability and drying up rivers, the coming year is going to be interesting to track.
Not disputing the methodology, but our state is the nation's leader in tornadoes (by more than a factor of 2) due to Niña/Niño this year, and Chicago spent a few days this summer with the world's worst air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke.
Not the leader yet and not anywhere close to "factor of 2" also the effects of el nino this year haven't even started really. It's more of a winter weather phenomenon.
Current tornado count for Illinois: 210 ( as of 8/29 )
Current record holder is Texas: 244 in 2015
However, Texas is big i don't have the math handy but I bet Illinois is well ahead in terms of tornados/square mile. ..maybe that's where your "factor of 2" comes from?
I have a hard time believing this site also. When I looked at their methodology at how this list was created, it said "Please fill out our Methodology Request Form, and a member of our team will get back to you, typically within one business day.". As far am I am concerned, I can safely ignore this site.
There's a very cool project wrapping up here in Zurich where they built a relief tunnel from the sihl river underground downhill to lake Zurich to handle 500-years floods.
One weekend they let people walk the length of the tunnel from the river to the lake. It was a pretty steep slope and about 3/4 down the walls of the tunnel changed from smooth to rough. They had calculated how fast the water would be moving when it hits the rough part and then how much that would slow it down.
Then at the bottom instead of emptying directly into the lake it comes flying out of the tunnel and smashes into a giant cement wall then flows under a roadway into the lake.
Cost was $200 million. A 500-year flood would flood downtown Zurich.
The cross-border system fed from the Elan Valley in the UK is like this, Wales is famously very rainy due to its hills and the Victorians exploited this by damming the Elan Valley and gravity-feeding the water from the Cambrian Mountains all the way to Birmingham which was a rapidly growing industrial centre. There's no pumps, it was all calculated to drop 170 feet over 73 miles!
It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.
Nice to see at least one country that has a government that thinks ahead and is proactive. Here our local government is busy issuing building permits for inundation zones (seriously!) because the land is cheap to build on for some reason and if they're packed full of apartments they can collect a ton of property taxes from them.
São Paulo is in the "green" but they were supposedly around two weeks from running out of water for municipal distribution in 2014/2015. A city of that size without water would not do well.
How is Miami not near the bottom of the list? Every time there is a moderate rainfall, streets flood like crazy. Plus we are in hurricane alley, and some models project that most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years.
I had asked a question "how is Miami not on the list at all" and then realized that the table is actually an image not a table so I couldn't search it.
It's on the list. #34 out of 72, middle of the pack. Within the U.S. Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, LA, and DC are above it. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix are below it. They seem to weight heat-stress pretty highly in their rankings, hence why all the TX/AZ cities are at the bottom and are joined by South and Southeast Asia.
The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.
My guess is that Miami and Washington are there for essentially rhetorical reasons. Miami is often talked about as a city that's vulnerable to climate change, and Washington is the capital.
Friendly reminder that the NOAA's USHCN reference network of well sited thermometers with continuous temperature records and no urban heat island bias shows no warming trend over the past ~20 years.
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
Replying to you again because I would like to know what you think of the evidence presented above? Maybe download the data and try and run it yourself? What info do you need to see that the temperature is changing?
I like that map and it goes all the way down to the tract level of detail. I was confused about the range of risk then saw the sub-heading "Score combining environmental, social, economic, and infrastructure effects on neighborhood-level stability.". Thinking in terms of neighborhood stability make more sense when viewing the percentiles.
My neighborhood is in the 55th percentile but then right across the main street, where the houses are bigger, it drops to 25th percentile. Both neighborhoods seems pretty stable but I guess when the chips are down crime is going to increase faster in a poorer neighborhood.
It doesn't seem to account for earthquakes, which is appropriate, since it's a climate vulnerability index. But definitely something one would take into account when deciding where to settle.
This is far outside of my wheelhouse, but I have some serious questions about the methodology here.
I dug into what they call a "resiliency checklist", which is what looks to be a set of questions that have qualitative answers which are subjective at best. This information looks like it is fed into the CRRI, the data set that substantiates the city-wide scores used to power this report.
I am very skeptical that these 2 things happened:
- They captured a representative set of key assets that go into making a "city"
- The answers they received are calibrated or are meaningful enough to make these large conclusions
43 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 42.8 ms ] threadThere was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
I was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.09.011
And note that by exploiting winter time solar yield and the grow houses with such technology not using sunlight directly and thus allowing easy and efficient thermal insulation, production could run year-round just with the amount of grow houses "online" varying with the average solar yield. Also gives convenient off-times (if they rotate which building runs through the winter) for maintenance.
And eating less meat or at least feeding the meat animals efficiently produced (but not as "tasty/varied/textured") plant/algae(/possibly-microbiological with bacteria or yeast) feed instead of things like Alfalfa that are very resource intensive to farm, would also help a lot with these issues.
Probably we should get back to doing grain bunkers as strategic reserves, though, lasting long enough to realize the problem, slaughter 80% of livestock, and plant low-failure-risk human suitable food crops on farmland that previously had feed crops for those no longer living 80% and land that had things like corn dedicated for ethanol that's then added to gasoline. Ideally ofc. we'd not need to cull as much life stock and could instead just slightly reduce new breeding and switch those corn fields to human food.
We have beaten it but only for an output that's approximately "green smoothie".
We're already better than just LED grow lights for e.g. lettuce, though, from how I recall the linked paper.
Unsure how you conclude that cold outdoors necessitate more meat though; aside from some micronutrients vegan diet works just fine so reverting back to "meat only on Sundays" 1910 style household dinner menu structures would work fine...
Most people could, for example, do with replacing the caloric intake from half the portion of any non-vegan food they consume, with potato.
If outdoor farming breaks from climate meat will get more expensive...
Vertical solar panels mounted like fence panels between fence posts high enough to not get covered by snowdrifts will produce electricity year-round; and we only need around 3x as much solar farm currently to power sealed grow "basements" than the same plant output would need if just farmed on an open field (assuming climate is matched and weather is average). The benefit of it is just that the panels can be other places (like noise barrier walls next to an urban highway) than the plants and the climate can be freely picked. Also no unlucky correlated dry spell weather events that can cut 100 million people's worth of harvest yield down to half or worse.
Grow houses won't fail collectively as much as farming weather is correlated across a region. Pretty much just need to keep measures around to prevent the plants from freezing just because the electric grid falls over for 3 days in winter.
After the British Columbia University web, Canada still seems to import like a 75% of the fruits and a 50% of the vegetables eaten by Canadians (excluding potatoes). Apparently, this is one of the problems with the tariffs.
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/food-projections-2025
Between fruits and vegetables that literally dried up to the Sun (with a unusually hot and dry Spring season), critical drinking water availability and drying up rivers, the coming year is going to be interesting to track.
Not disputing the methodology, but our state is the nation's leader in tornadoes (by more than a factor of 2) due to Niña/Niño this year, and Chicago spent a few days this summer with the world's worst air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke.
Obviously, "resilient" ⍯ "unaffected".
Current tornado count for Illinois: 210 ( as of 8/29 ) Current record holder is Texas: 244 in 2015
However, Texas is big i don't have the math handy but I bet Illinois is well ahead in terms of tornados/square mile. ..maybe that's where your "factor of 2" comes from?
- number of “tornadoes due to Niña/Niño“ (my reading)
- “number of tornadoes” (total for the year), with Niña/Niño being why it’s that way (sounds like your reading, since those numbers are the overall)
https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...
One weekend they let people walk the length of the tunnel from the river to the lake. It was a pretty steep slope and about 3/4 down the walls of the tunnel changed from smooth to rough. They had calculated how fast the water would be moving when it hits the rough part and then how much that would slow it down.
Then at the bottom instead of emptying directly into the lake it comes flying out of the tunnel and smashes into a giant cement wall then flows under a roadway into the lake.
Cost was $200 million. A 500-year flood would flood downtown Zurich.
https://www.zh.ch/de/planen-bauen/wasserbau/wasserbauprojekt...
It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932017_Brazilian_dr...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
EDIT: added timeframe
The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.
I'ma guessing that's the reason.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
The article you are indirectly citing (https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/08/u-s-government-has-an-ac...) is easily disproven if you analyze the numbers: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-most-accurate-record-o...
My neighborhood is in the 55th percentile but then right across the main street, where the houses are bigger, it drops to 25th percentile. Both neighborhoods seems pretty stable but I guess when the chips are down crime is going to increase faster in a poorer neighborhood.
I dug into what they call a "resiliency checklist", which is what looks to be a set of questions that have qualitative answers which are subjective at best. This information looks like it is fed into the CRRI, the data set that substantiates the city-wide scores used to power this report.
I am very skeptical that these 2 things happened:
- They captured a representative set of key assets that go into making a "city" - The answers they received are calibrated or are meaningful enough to make these large conclusions