Hazel Chandler.Photo:Hazel Chandler
Hazel Chandler
Last July, after days of bad air quality alerts, Hazel Chandler started coughing. The great-grandmother ended up coughing so hard she had to have emergency spinal surgery.
“The coughing wouldn’t stop,” Chandler, 77, of Phoenix, Ariz., tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “It just kept getting worse instead of getting better.“
Chandler has asthma, allergies and Stage 4 breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones. She has been living with cancer for more than 11 years now.
In October, she had an emergency spinal fusion surgery to stabilize her spine.
Chandler is now a field organizer forMoms Clean Air Force, helping to raise awareness about the health dangers of climate change, extreme heat and bad air quality.
“It just keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter,” says Chandler. “It’s like somebody turned the heat up and it’s been above 110 for days.”
For more on extreme weather, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribehere.
The heat in Phoenix is extremely dangerous this summer, says climate expert,Michael Mann.
“The heat that we’re experiencing is literally deadly. It’s too hot for human beings,” says Mann, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of the upcoming book,Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis. “In Phoenix, a child who walks barefoot on the street can get second or third degree burns.”
Pedestrians wearing face masks in New York in June as smoke from Canada triggered air quality alerts.Michael Nagle/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux
Michael Nagle/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux
The record-breaking extreme weather this year is a direct result of climate change, saysMichael Wehner, senior scientist in the applied mathematics and computational research department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“If it hadn’t been for climate change it would probably be another hot year, but not as hot as it actually is,” Wehner says. “Climate change makes most of these extreme events worse. It’s quite blatantly obvious with the unusual weather from the strange winter we had, to this very hot and stormy summer.”
James Carbone/Newsday RM via Getty
Wehner has been vocal about climate change for the past 10 years.
“We won’t have a normal until we stop climate change getting worse. There’s no going back,” he says. “And 30 years from now, it’s going to be even worse. I’m not surprised, but I’m shocked and disappointed and sometimes even angry that we haven’t done enough, because this is something we’ve known about for 20 years.”
source: people.com
