Hot days in August are nothing new to St. Louis, of course. But with the current heat wave baking the city (temperatures are expected to peak at or near 100 F through Friday), it's a good time to remind residents of safety tips for dealing with what can be deadly temperatures.

It's also a fitting time to think about long-term city policies to address future heat waves — which will become more common as global warming continues its inexorable rise.

This page has examined the well-established fact of human-caused climate change many times. As we noted during last month's heat wave, the evidence of that phenomenon isn't in a short or even long stretch of unusually hot days in one location. The evidence is in centuries of global data that have convinced virtually all of mainstream science that Earth is becoming warmer than at any point in human history and that modern human activity is the primary cause.

While global warming is exactly that — global — some areas will feel the brunt of it more than others in years to come. St. Louis sits in the path of some of the worst anticipated heat waves, for two reasons.

First, there is the so-called "heat island effect" that is common to cities generally. Concrete, asphalt, brick, metal and other infrastructure materials that are abundant in cities absorb and re-emit the sun's heat. That heating effect is worsened by the relative lack of cooling features such as grass and trees. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that average urban temperatures on hot days can be as much as 7 degrees hotter than less-urban areas experiencing the same weather.

Secondly, St. Louis is one of five U.S. metro areas that anchor what a study last year predicted will be an "extreme heat belt" blanketing much of the industrial Midwest in the coming decades.

The peer-reviewed study by the First Street Foundation — based on assessments of greenhouse gas emissions, terrain and other factors — predicts that these regions could experience heat-index days of 125 degrees by 2030. (The heat index is what heat and humidity combined feel like to the human body.)

All of it reinforces the need for St. Louis to get aggressive about heat-mitigating policies such as encouraging green space in building projects (on roofs, for example), expanding parks, planting trees and replacing concrete with grass wherever feasible. Providing services such as cooling centers will be more important than ever in summers to come.

A list of those cooling centers — government buildings, rec centers, churches, libraries and more — can be found on the city's website at: https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/live-work/summer/cooling-centers.cfm

Other advice for dealing with the current heat wave might by now sound familiar, but bears repeating:

— Never (ever!) leave a child or a pet in a car on a hot day — not even for a short time, not even with the windows cracked.

— Put off outdoor projects and stay in air-conditioned indoor areas when possible. If you must be outdoors, wear light, loose-fitting, light-colored clothing.

— Drink plenty of water (don't wait until you're thirsty) and avoid alcohol.

— Check on elderly neighbors and keep pets out of the sun.

The current heat wave will end, of course, but more of them are inevitably in St. Louis' future. It's a future humanity has brought upon itself and still has the ability to mitigate, but not until enough of the nation and the world finally accepts it as a scientific issue instead of a political one. Until, in other words, cooler heads prevail.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Lucian at Unsplash