Rising summer heat increases risk of child deaths in hot cars
So far this year, nine children have died after being left unattended in vehicles in California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, New Jersey and North Carolina, according to Kids and Car Safety, which collects data on hot car deaths.
Five died in June.
And last year, 39 children in the US died after being left in hot cars.
Why hot cars are so dangerous for children
Human-caused climate change keeps dialing up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists say. But the temperature outside doesn't have to be super hot for a child left in a vehicle to be affected by the heat, said Kathy Wall, director of Safe Kids Palm Beach County.
'Inside, the vehicle can heat up 20 degrees in just 20 minutes,' Wall said. 'So if you imagine it's an 80 degree day, which in South Florida is a cool day, it could be over 100 degrees within 10 minutes inside the car.'
Hot car deaths can happen any time of year, and since 1998, every state but Alaska has reported a hot car death, according to the National Safety Council. In both 2018 and 2019, a record 53 children died after being left in hot cars.
About 80% of the heat rise in vehicles happens in the first 30 minutes of a child being left inside, when maximum temperatures can exceed 150 degrees Fahrenheit, according to data compiled by Jan Null, a certified consulting meteorologist at San Jose State University.
Nine US children have died after being left unattended in vehicles in 2025.
AP
'Children sweat a lot less than adults do and their internal temperature can increase three to five times faster than an adult. So that's why it's just as important to make sure that your child isn't left in the vehicle, especially during these rising temperatures,' said Capt. Karen Derogatis of Palm Beach County Fire Rescue.
It can happen to anyone
While it's easy to place blame for leaving a child in a vehicle, even people trained to know the dangers have made that tragic mistake, Wall said.
'It's not a socioeconomic group, it's not a cultural group,' she said. 'This sadly has happened to doctors, it's happened to dentists, it happened to school teachers, it's happened to child care workers. Nobody is exempt from this.'
Nearly 80% of the heat rise in cars happens during the first 30 minutes of a child being left inside.
AP
Distraction often leads to forgetting about a child in the backseat, which is why it is important to create routines and reminders, she said.
'It sounds crazy, but sometimes people get out of routines or are distracted, especially in today's world. There's lots going on in the news, lots going with families,' she said.
A parent who normally doesn't drop a child off at a day care facility might become distracted and forget that the child is in the vehicle, she said.
Create a reminder that a child is in the backseat
She encourages parents and caregivers to establish routines.
'We have an acronym, ACT,' Wall said.
A stands for avoiding leaving a child unattended in a vehicle.
C stands for creating a reminder that works best for you. Authorities suggest leaving a personal item such as a purse or briefcase in the backseat so you'll have to open the back door before locking the vehicle.
T is to take action right away. 'If you see a child in a car, don't try to figure out how long they've been in the car. Call 911 immediately,' Wall said.
Some newer cars offer warnings for drivers to check the backseat for passengers.
Double checking the vehicle is key, said Derogatis, the fire captain.
'If you make it a common habit, just like you would look in their rear view mirror to see if somebody's behind you, or if you look at your side view mirror to see if you want to switch lanes, make it habit to look in your rearview mirror, whether you have a child or an animal or anything, just to ensure that they are as safe as possible,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
4 days ago
- Miami Herald
It's so hot in Arizona, park rangers baked cookies on dashboard. See the results
As temperatures reached well above 100 degrees, rangers at an Arizona national park dusted off their baking sheets. Each summer, rangers at Saguaro National Park 'have a tradition of baking in the car,' according to an Aug. 7 Facebook post from the park. 'While we have fun, and pastries are also tasty, this is meant as an illustration of how hot the car really gets,' rangers said. A photo shared by rangers shows two baking sheets with cookie dough rolled into balls sitting in a closed car atop a dashboard with a stuffed octopus and Bob Ross air freshener hanging just above. In a photo taken about 1.5 hours later, the dough is spread out as it bakes in the hot sun. 'During the summer, with outside temperatures 100°F and up, the ambient air inside your car can reach over 143°F within an hour,' rangers said. 'And the dashboard can climb over 200°F!' Displaying the final product, a ranger holds a fresh plate of cookies in a photo shared by the national park. Rangers commented that they baked the cookies for 3.5 hours, noting 'they were a tad overcooked.' 'Three hours is probably better for that crisp edge/soft center type of cookie,' rangers said. Facebook users were quick to comment on the baking session. 'I bet that car smelled amazing,' one user commented. 'Best air freshener ever, and you can eat it.' 'I'm only here for the cookies....' another user quipped. Rangers said the summer heat 'can lead to life-threatening heat illness to anything living left in the car be it people, pets, etc.' Even with a partially opened window, 'temperatures inside the car can rise almost 20 degrees Fahrenheit within the first 10 minutes,' the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. 'Remember that all park staff are allowed to remove any child or pet from a locked car using whatever means necessary,' rangers said. Aside from living things, park rangers noted that property 'left in a hot car' can also be at risk. 'Electronics (particularly those with lithium-ion batteries) can heat up and explode,' rangers said. 'Sealed cans such as soda, paint, etc. can pressurize and burst.'
CNN
07-08-2025
- CNN
Trump EPA proposes revoking pollution limits based in part on document authored by 5 climate contrarians
In one of its most significant reversals on climate policy to-date, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to repeal a 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced. If successful, the repeal could strip away the federal government's most powerful way to control the country's planet-warming pollution and fight climate change. The repeal was based in part on a hastily produced report — authored by five researchers who have spent years sowing doubt in the scientific consensus around climate change — that questions the severity of the impacts of climate change. The 2009 scientific finding at the heart of this repeal has served as the basis of many of the Environmental Protection Agency's most significant regulations to protect human health and environment, and decrease climate pollution from cars, power plants and the oil and gas industry. Zeldin on Tuesday spoke proudly of his agency's move to repeal the endangerment finding as the 'largest deregulatory action in the history of America,' speaking on 'Ruthless,' a conservative podcast, and referred to climate change as dogma rather than science. 'This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,' Zeldin said. In addition to reversing the endangerment finding, the EPA's proposal also seeks to repeal rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, since they stem from the finding. The Biden EPA sought to tighten those standards to prod the auto industry to make more fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles. The text of the proposal said that while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in the atmosphere, it has been 'driven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources,' and has happened 'without producing the degree of adverse impacts to public health and welfare in the United States that the EPA anticipated in the 2009 Endangerment Finding.' The US is the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and historically has emitted more planet-warming pollution than any other country. Many rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have showed both climate pollution and its warming effects are not just harming public health but killing people outright. In the nearly 16 years since the EPA first issued the Supreme Court-ordered endangerment finding, the world has warmed an additional 0.45 degrees Celsius (or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) to 1.4 degrees Celsius, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Numerous international and US scientific findings have found 'increasingly incontrovertible evidence' that humans are causing this warming by burning oil, gas and coal. Even that fraction of a degree, when spread across the planet, has had an enormous impact on our weather, water and food systems. The world is at a dangerous threshold with individual years, including 2024, already exceeding the 1.5-degree guardrail laid out in the Paris Agreement — the point at which scientists believe the effects of climate change will likely be near impossible to reverse. Many climate scientists no longer believe the long-term target of 1.5-degrees is achievable, as fossil fuel pollution continues and the world heads closer to 3 degrees Celsius of warming during this century. Zeldin said during the podcast he believes the scientific finding that climate change threatens human health was a guise used to attack polluting industries, and that the human health finding was 'an oversimplified, I would say inaccurate, way to describe it.' The Trump administration commissioned the new report on climate change and climate science in conjunction with its proposed regulatory repeals, Energy Sec. Chris Wright announced during a Tuesday afternoon press conference. The document calls into question the seriousness of climate impacts and informed EPA's repeal of the endangerment finding, according to the proposal. Wright's Energy Department recently hired three prominent researchers who have questioned and even rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, CNN previously reported — John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Christy, Spencer and Koonin are on the byline of the DOE report, along with Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry — also considered to have opinions on climate change that contradict the scientific consensus. The group took around two months to complete the report. Wright said climate change 'is a real, physical phenomenon' that is 'worthy of study' and 'even some action.' 'But what we have done instead is nothing related to the actual science of climate change or pragmatic ways to make progress,' Wright said. 'The politics of climate change have shrunk your life possibilities, have put your business here at threat.' Hausfather told CNN he was 'surprised' this would be released as an official publication, and said it was notable the Trump administration had selected 'five authors who are well known to have fringe views of climate science' to author it. 'It reads like a blog post — a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings,' he said. 'The fact that this has been released at the same time that the government has hidden the actual congressionally mandated national climate assessments that accurately reflect the science only further shows how much of a farce this is.' And Hausfather strongly pushed back the idea that the scientific record shows anything other than climate change presenting danger to humans. The findings of international climate scientists have been reaffirmed in the fourth and fifth US climate assessments, the former of which was released during the first Trump administration. 'Both the scientific certainty around climate change and evidence of the dangers it is causing have grown stronger since 2009,' he said in an email. 'There is no evidence that has emerged or been published in the scientific literature in the past 16 years that would in any way challenge the scientific basis of the 2009 endangerment finding.' Global warming is supercharging extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation, heat waves and wildfires. It is making these extremes more likely, intense and in some cases, longer-lasting. 'These changes in climate have moved out of the domain of pure science into the domain of everyday life,' said Phil Duffy, a climate scientist and former Biden official in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Duffy, who lives in California, said he can now only buy wildfire insurance through the state insurer of last resort — a reality for many Californians as wildfires are increasing in size amid hotter temperatures. 'The evidence (in 2009) was overwhelming, but it's even stronger now,' he said. This story has been updated with additional information. Rene Marsh contributed reporting.
Newsweek
07-08-2025
- Newsweek
Car Companies Will Go Out of Business, Auto Industry COO Predicts
The global auto industry is in danger, warns an expert who deals with the behind-the-scenes technology and innovation automakers are looking to bring to market up to a decade down the road. John Wall, chief operating officer and head of product, engineering and services at QNX, told Newsweek, "The Chinese are moving very quickly." China's auto industry is booming. Since 2009, China has been the world's largest automotive manufacturing country and automotive market. Chinese car makers account for one-third of the world's vehicle production. "It's super competitive in China. There are a lot of original equipment manufacturers that are competing with each other," Wall said. And, they're starting to compete with European and American automakers as well as other companies from Asia, including those from Japan and Korea. "They're competing with each other by putting out features very quickly. They're competing by cutting costs, cutting prices of vehicles. There are going to be losers in China. There are going to be car companies that go out of business," he continued. QNX, a BlackBerry company, sees the future of automotive well before the public. They supply a variety of technology solutions to automakers and offer support for their systems, which are in 255 million vehicles that are on the road today. Wall's verdict about American carmakers is damning: "They're not keeping pace." He said: "There's many reasons why they're not keeping pace. The Chinese don't have a legacy of supporting back models and all that baggage that Ford and BMW and Mercedes and Volkswagen have. That's the number one advantage. The second advantage is the Chinese are less focused on safety, so they're going fast and they're maybe cutting corners." "What I'm saying is the state-of-the-art processes for software development in a functional, safe context, is not being followed by the Chinese. The reality of it is, if you're Mercedes or you're Ford or you're GM, you can't have an accident... There's so much legacy, there's so much reputational baggage. Mercedes can't have cars that drive into walls. It just can't happen," Wall said. Car companies are bringing features to cars that a half-decade ago seemed nearly impossible, and they're doing it at great expense. "I think what the speed of the Chinese has done is it has pointed out to the more traditional car makers, this focus on doing everything yourself is a mistake. There are things that bring value. There are areas you don't bring value, and I think it's becoming very recognized in the industry," Wall said. He continued: "A lot of people are spending a lot of time on platforms that provide no value to the customer, provide no differentiation for a car brand. It would behoove the auto industry to be able to start at a higher-level application development and not to be wasting time on things that are non-differentiating, but are very important. They have to work properly. If your base is weak, just like the foundation of a house, you're going to have a problem. Each misstep costs money, sometimes billions of dollars. "If you look at what's happened with Volkswagen and Cariad, if you look at the money spent at Ford, at GM, the layoffs, the starts and stops to their strategy. That's time and money, and it's debatable whether those groups were really focused on the right things." QNX aims to provide a technology architecture to car companies that allows them to compete with the fast-moving Chinese brands. The technology combines software and hardware that would traditionally be sold in separate lots as a package. "Our belief is, if you provide something that is non-differentiating, that allows the car makers to save money and to go faster, they're going to be interested. It's a value proposition. The reality of it is the Chinese would be interested. The Chinese are interested because anything that helps them go faster is better, and especially with their looking to export markets, they will have to have a much closer eye on functional safety and security," Wall said.
