Efforts to green cities for cooling are succeeding unevenly because the same vegetation that cools surfaces can also intensify how hot the air feels. Previous studies have identified humid heat as a growing urban hazard, yet how physiologically active vegetation governs this trade-off between cooling and moisture accumulation remains poorly understood, leaving mitigation policy and design largely unguided. Here we quantify how vegetation structure and function influence the Heat Index (HI), a combined measure of temperature and humidity in 138 Indian cities spanning tropical savanna, semi-arid steppe, and humid subtropical climates, and across dense urban cores and semi-urban rings. Using an extreme-aware, one kilometre reconstruction of HI and an interpretable machine-learning framework that integrates SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), we isolate vegetation-climate interactions. Cooling generally strengthens for EVI >= 0.4 and LAI >= 0.05, but joint-high regimes begin to reverse toward warming when EVI >= 0.5, LAI >= 0.2, and fPAR >= 0.5,with an earlier onset for fPAR >= 0.25 in humid, dense cores. In such environments, highly physiologically active vegetation elevates near-surface humidity faster than it removes heat, reversing its cooling effect and amplifying perceived heat stress. These findings establish the climatic limits of vegetation-driven cooling and provide quantitative thresholds for climate-specific greening strategies that promote equitable and heat-resilient cities.

John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer--some of which he's won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years' worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he'd never said.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Summer just started, and the first significant heat wave of the season is almost over. Some 265 million people across the Midwest and the eastern United States have experienced a week of temperatures in the 90s and triple digits, with a slew of all-time records set on Tuesday. While extreme heat waves can be caused by any number of factors, this particular one is thanks to a phenomenon called a heat dome: a ridge of atmospheric pressure that settles over a region like, well, a dome. Or, as the National Weather Service's Alex Lamers so wonderfully described it to NPR, think of it as a lid placed over a grilled cheese, which, as we all know, makes the cheese melt much faster.

For more than 20 years, print media has been a bit of a punching bag for digital-technology companies. Craigslist killed the paid classifieds, free websites led people to think newspapers and magazines were committing robbery when they charged for subscriptions, and the smartphone and social media turned reading full-length articles into a chore. Now generative AI is in the mix--and many publishers, desperate to avoid being left behind once more, are rushing to harness the technology themselves. Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued--publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles.

At first glance, "Heat Index" appears as inoffensive as newspaper features get. A "summer guide" sprawling across more than 50 pages, the feature, which was syndicated over the past week in both the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, contains "303 Must-Dos, Must-Tastes, and Must-Tries" for the sweaty months ahead. Readers are advised in one section to "Take a moonlight hike on a well-marked trail" and "Fly a kite on a breezy afternoon." In others, they receive tips about running a lemonade stand and enjoying "unexpected frozen treats." Yet close readers of the guide noticed that something was very off.

Statistical downscaling is a technique used in climate modeling to increase the resolution of climate simulations. High-resolution climate information is essential for various high-impact applications, including natural hazard risk assessment. However, simulating climate at high resolution is intractable. Thus, climate simulations are often conducted at a coarse scale and then downscaled to the desired resolution. Existing downscaling techniques are either simulation-based methods with high computational costs, or statistical approaches with limitations in accuracy or application specificity. We introduce Generative Bias Correction and Super-Resolution (GenBCSR), a two-stage probabilistic framework for statistical downscaling that overcomes the limitations of previous methods. GenBCSR employs two transformations to match high-dimensional distributions at different resolutions: (i) the first stage, bias correction, aligns the distributions at coarse scale, (ii) the second stage, statistical super-resolution, lifts the corrected coarse distribution by introducing fine-grained details. Each stage is instantiated by a state-of-the-art generative model, resulting in an efficient and effective computational pipeline for the well-studied distribution matching problem. By framing the downscaling problem as distribution matching, GenBCSR relaxes the constraints of supervised learning, which requires samples to be aligned. Despite not requiring such correspondence, we show that GenBCSR surpasses standard approaches in predictive accuracy of critical impact variables, particularly in predicting the tails (99% percentile) of composite indexes composed of interacting variables, achieving up to 4-5 folds of error reduction.

Alerting the public when heat may harm their health is a crucial service, especially considering that extreme heat events will be more frequent under climate change. Current practice for issuing heat alerts in the US does not take advantage of modern data science methods for optimizing local alert criteria. Specifically, application of reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to inform more health-protective policies, accounting for regional and sociodemographic heterogeneity as well as sequential dependence of alerts. In this work, we formulate the issuance of heat alerts as a sequential decision making problem and develop modifications to the RL workflow to address challenges commonly encountered in environmental health settings. Key modifications include creating a simulator that pairs hierarchical Bayesian modeling of low-signal health effects with sampling of real weather trajectories (exogenous features), constraining the total number of alerts issued as well as preventing alerts on less-hot days, and optimizing location-specific policies. Post-hoc contrastive analysis offers insights into scenarios when using RL for heat alert issuance may protect public health better than the current or alternative policies. This work contributes to a broader movement of advancing data-driven policy optimization for public health and climate change adaptation.

A fuzzy inference system was developed for predicting the heat index from temperature and relative humidity data. The effectiveness of fuzzy logic in using imprecise mapping of input to output to encode interconnectedness of system variables was exploited to uncover a linguistic model of how the temperature and humidity conditions impact the heat index in a growth room. The developed model achieved an R2 of 0.974 and a RMSE of 0.084 when evaluated on a test set, and the results were statistically significant (F1,5915 = 222900.858, p < 0.001). By providing the advantage of linguistic summarization of data trends as well as high prediction accuracy, the fuzzy logic model proved to be an effective machine learning method for heat control problems.