Print version by Adam Wagner and Aaron Sánchez-Guerra
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan
Reporting for The Raleigh News & Observer - North Carolina News Service collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

RALEIGH, N.C. -- José and the other farmworkers who live in a grower-provided barracks at a Johnston County farm are used to going to bed late and waking up early.

It's just too hot inside to do anything else.

"There's no air conditioning in our housing, just intake fans," José told The News & Observer in Spanish during an interview in August. "All the workers have to get their own fans and ventilators to cool ourselves off.

"We struggle to fall asleep at night because of, well, that damn heat," he said. José and other farmworkers quoted in this series are only being identified by their first names to protect their employment.

Inside the long white building where José and about 20 other farmworkers stayed, there was one room for sleeping with beds lined up along the walls. Many workers had draped sheets around their beds for some privacy. At the foot of several beds, box fans had been propped up to provide some cool air.

It is common for North Carolina farmworkers to live in grower-provided housing, and it is common for that housing to lack air conditioning. Beyond making it hard to fall asleep, that can be a health risk, especially for agricultural workers.

When farmworkers come home at the end of the day, they immediately set about cooling off, changing clothes and finding water. When they cannot cool off, experts told The News & Observer, their bodies could be more susceptible to heat illness.

Climate is likely making workers' recovery more difficult, too. Warmer nights are among the telltale signs of a warming planet, and the decade from 2008 to 2017 in North Carolina included more nights when the low temperature stayed above 75 degrees Fahrenheit than any other on record, according to the N.C. Climate Science Report.

Box fans and cracked windows often aren't enough for workers to recover.

Less than half of the state's farmworker housing has air conditioning, said Gayle Thomas, the medical director of the N.C. Department for Health and Human Service's Farmworker Health Program. Most of the housing that does have air conditioning only has window units in the bedroom.

"I have not seen many farmworker camps that even have [window units]. Most of them I've seen just have big fans next to their beds, and they sleep with the fans on," Thomas said. "So not only are they exposed to heat at work, but when they come home, they don't have a place to recover."


MORE WARM NIGHTS COMING

It is alarming when scientists use words like "astounding."

That's what Kathie Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist, calls a graph showing the progression of North Carolina's average minimum temperature. After averaging 47.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the 20th Century, the annual minimum temperature has been above average since 2002.

And during the last five years, the average minimum temperature has hovered around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching record highs each year.

That is, Dello said, almost entirely a consequence of nighttime temperatures failing to get as cool as they did for much of the 20th century. Nighttime temperatures are more sensitive to global warming because there is less air mass overnight, meaning the heat trapped by greenhouse gases has a more pronounced impact.

"We're doing a crazy experiment to our planet and it's just that much more sensitive [at night] because there's less to get warmed so it can heat up more," Dello said.

Making matters worse, the number of very warm nights is almost certain to dramatically increase over the rest of the century, according to experts.

Scientists working on the Climate Science Report looked at two warming scenarios: Under one, temperatures would increase by about 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, while the other studied an increase of about 6.7 degrees.

Either way, the number of very warm nights in North Carolina's Coastal Plain would spike. Under the 3.2 degree scenario, the increase would be between 14 to 45, while the 6.7 degree scenario would see 48 to 87 more very warm nights.

Dello said, "If you're somebody who doesn't have sufficient access to cooling or can't afford to run an air conditioner the entire night, you might be physiologically stressed."


NO REGULATIONS

There are no states that mandate cooling in farmworker housing. North Carolina's Migrant Housing Act requires growers to provide heating if the outside temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit but does not address cooling.

In emailed responses to The News & Observer, Cherie Berry, the longtime N.C. labor secretary, argued that federal and state laws don't require that homes have air conditioning.

"Until air conditioning is required of all private residences, I cannot see why we would burden farmers with a higher level of regulation than required of any other residence," wrote Berry, who is retiring this year.

Thomas Arcury and Sara Quandt have studied the impacts of heat on farm workers for more than a decade. The husband-wife team works out of Wake Forest University's Center for Worker Health.

Migrant farmworkers who are in North Carolina for the growing season on an H-2A visa have their housing provided by growers, Arcury said. That means that even if workers want air conditioning, it is virtually impossible to justify the investment.

"If you own your own house, you can air condition it. If you can rent a house, you can air condition it," Arcury said in an interview. "If you are in employer-provided housing then it's difficult to do such a thing, particularly if you are only there for a few months a year and you don't know if you are going back to that place."


CONDITIONS IN FARMWORKER HOUSING

During an interview with The News & Observer, Arcury recalled one research trip to farmworker housing next to a cantaloupe field. He initially tried to take measurements outside, but small bugs soon drove him indoors to a space without air conditioning.

After three or four hours doing interviews and collecting data inside the house, Arcury said, "I was soaking wet from perspiration from head to toe. My jeans were soaking wet. My shirt was soaking wet. ... If you have to sleep in those conditions, you're not going to recover from a day's work."

For one study, Quandt and Arcury visited 170 farmworker camps in North Carolina during the summer of 2010, with all visits coming after 4 p.m. They found that 55% of the workers they spoke with had no air conditioning at all, and 38.3% had window-mounted air conditioning units that are typically used to cool one room at a time. Only 6.6% had central air in their dwelling. Nearly 80% of workers had fans in their sleeping quarters.

The research team also measured the heat index inside the housing, or what the temperature actually feels like when the humidity is combined with the temperature. Heat indexes above 90 degrees Fahrenheit were common in sleeping quarters during summer months, they found.

"They're working all day in the heat, in the high humidity, doing strenuous labor which only compounds the heat. Then, if they get home and they're in a situation in which the inside of their dwelling is in the 80- or 90-degree Fahrenheit range, then they can't recover," Arcury said.

From mid-June to mid-July, 47.7% of the sleeping rooms measured reached 90 degrees, the heat index at which the National Weather Service urges extreme caution. That dipped slightly to 40.4% of rooms measured from the middle of July through the end of August before dropping to 11% in rooms measured from September through early October.

"This study suggests that farmworkers' recovery from the heat stress experienced during daily work will be affected by the [heat index] experienced at night. The [heat index] in sleeping rooms decreases later in the season, but dangerous levels still occur into the late summer," Quandt wrote.

In another study, Arcury interviewed 101 farmworkers about heat illness. He found that 35.6% of the workers reported experiencing at least one heat illness symptom while working outside, while 13.9% reported experiencing a symptom while working inside. The most common symptoms were hot, dry skin and dizziness.

Arcury also tried to figure out what might be causing heat illness. Personal characteristics like age or being a smoker were not associated with heat illness while working outdoors, he wrote. But working in wet clothes, harvesting and cutting the top of tobacco plants off were.

He also found that 66.7% of the workers who had gotten heat illness while working outside had spent time in an extremely hot house after work. Arcury called this "an important association" and wrote, "This result argues for changes in the [federal] Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act requiring that farmworkers be provided cooled living spaces."

"I'd honestly really like to have air conditioning here in our housing," said José, the Johnston County farmworker.

Instead, most workers have bought fans, like José has, and set them around their sleeping areas. When they need to cool off, the workers find reasons to go outside, like talking on the phone or doing a load of laundry.

It's the night time that's the worst, though. Once the workers eventually fall asleep, they wake up tired, José said.

"At times you don't want to go to work because you don't sleep because of the heat. But we have to keep at it."

This story is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

This story was produced with original reporting from Adam Wagner and Aaron Sanchez-Guerra for the Raleigh News & Observer, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Read the full story here.


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Wet weather this spring has improved drought conditions in Minnesota and southern Canada. However, experts remain on alert for increased wildfire activity and other climate changes affecting people's health.

Poor air quality was a frequent topic last year in the upper Midwest, as smoke pushed down from Canadian wildfires. Researchers said climate change is fueling hotter and drier summers, making forests more susceptible to large fires.

Dr. Bruce Snyder, co-founder of Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, worries about a repeat summer of thick, hazy smoke in the air creating unhealthy conditions.

"When that happens, people have more respiratory disease; people who have chronic lung disease tend to get sicker," Snyder explained. "There's a lot of downstream consequences for people all over the world, but certainly here in Minnesota."

Snyder noted the transition to cleaner energy sources is complex, but acknowledged pollution events place more emphasis on the need for less reliance on fossil fuels, due to their contributions to a warming planet. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said the state has had 46 air quality alerts since 2015, and 34 of those were because of wildfire smoke.

Snyder emphasized it is not just air pollution from wildfire smoke to worry about. He pointed out there are other ways a person's health can suffer from climate change.

"We've got many more dangerous insects -- ticks, mosquitoes, and so forth," Snyder stressed. "This is having a profound effect on our wildlife. But also, we're seeing a lot more progressively rising rates of Lyme disease, of West Nile virus."

Year-over-year statistics may vary, but state health officials say the median number of Lyme disease cases has risen in the past decade. Snyder added adverse health effects of climate change can be much harder for populations lacking stable housing.


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Conservationists in Maine said reinstated protections of the Endangered Species Act could help wildlife already struggling to adapt to climate change.

Economic impacts will no longer be considered when listing certain species as threatened or endangered but the threat of climate change will be a factor.

Anya Fetcher, federal policy advocate for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said so-called "blanket rule" protections will also be revived.

"This is basically, while they are considering whether they should become endangered, they're going to continue to protect those species as if they were," Fetcher explained.

The Trump administration removed protections for threatened species along with other key aspects of the law. Fetcher acknowledged the new rules are likely to be challenged by Congress similar to other climate and environmental regulations.

Conservation powers will also be extended to federally recognized tribes, allowing them the same opportunities to protect wildlife, including some of Maine's most iconic species such as the piping plover and Canada lynx, which are losing critical habitat to development and a changing climate.

Fetcher pointed out one-third of Maine's species are vulnerable to climate change, including more than half the state's birds.

"Our wildlife is part of what makes Maine so special," Fetcher asserted. "Protecting critical habitat and the incredible wildlife that we have here is vital to our economy as well."

Fetcher added the Endangered Species Act has been helpful in protecting species such as the bald eagle, once on the brink of extinction but now a common sight in Maine. Nearly 500,000 public comments were considered in the new rule-making process.


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PacifiCorp's updated energy roadmap throws a lifeline to Wyoming's coal industry but critics said the new Integrated Resource Plan is a major setback for community health and the climate.

Rob Joyce, director of the Wyoming Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the plan would add 100 million metric tons of climate pollution by 2042. It also slashes near-term investments in cheaper wind and solar, and makes a huge bet on behalf of ratepayers to install unproven and expensive carbon capture devices on existing coal-fired power plants.

"To be increasing emissions, increasing investment in fossil fuels, and putting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars towards carbon capture when we're not 100 % sure if that is actually even going to work is really dubious," Joyce argued.

PacifiCorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, plans to extend the life of the Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant in southwestern Wyoming until 2039. The plan also pushes back the retirements of Utah's Hunter plant by at least 10 years, and the Huntington plant by at least four years. PacifiCorp said it should deliver significant near-term cost savings to ratepayers.

The plan also added more natural gas to PacifiCorp's energy portfolio. Joyce worries Wyoming ratepayers, already tapped by state lawmakers to pay millions for a carbon capture compliance surcharge, will end up on the hook.

"We're going to have to cover the costs of the volatility of new gas resources," Joyce pointed out. "The company is saying between $500 million and $1 billion per unit that they put carbon capture on. Those are all things that they pass on to the ratepayers."

Joyce noted with a looming 2030 deadline to significantly reduce fossil fuel pollution in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, now is the time to invest big in wind and solar. He added by delaying the expansion of clean energy resources, PacifiCorp is leaving billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act incentives on the table.

"Right now we know that solar and wind and even battery storage are cheap and getting cheaper," Joyce emphasized. "Those are investments that the rest of the country is making to save ratepayers money."

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