Keep Your Kids Safe in the Heat. Tips from a Pediatrician & Author

Heat and the consequences of climate change on our environment are more dangerous to children than we realize.

Please join Climate Tucson to welcome Dr. Debra Hendrickson, author of “The Air They Breathe,” a personal account of caring for children and teenagers as the climate warms, wildfires burn hotter, and floods destroy lives and livelihoods.

Climate change is a “disease of our own making that is unraveling the fabric in which our children live,” she writes in her book, subtitled “A Pediatrician on the Front Lines of Climate Change.”

A resident of Reno, Nev.—the “fastest warming city in the US”—Hendrickson has seen the impacts of smoke on her young patients from wildfires burning in the nearby Sierra Nevada. She writes about the PTSD that children such as Sophia of Houston experience after extreme and deadly weather events, like Hurricane Harvey which destroyed Sophia’s home.

And then there’s the cause of it all, the heat of a rapidly warming planet. Heat so deadly it can harm the unborn, writes Hendrickson. Extreme heat in the first trimester can lead to birth defects, she writes, including spina bifida; in the second and third trimesters, heat exposure can increase the rate of premature births.

Her work with children and anxious parents does not signal a bad ending to a horrible opening act, she assures.

“I believe that in 2025, the harms to children will become so clear and immediate that parents—the sleeping giant in the climate fight—will wake up to what the fossil fuel industry has done,” she wrote in a Wired magazine commentary.

Learn more and be informed about what to expect from summer in Tucson and how to make it safe for you and your family.

We will have time for a Q&A.