AUSTIN, Texas — For nearly a decade, climate scientist Tyanyi Sun has been working to find solutions to one of the world’s biggest problems: climate change.

“Texas is known for our hot summers, but now our summers are getting a boost from climate change,” Sun said.

A member of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in Austin, her team is finding ways to combat this reality.

“For decades and decades, we’ve been extracting fossil fuels and energy that releases too much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and they act like this blanket over our planet,” Sun said. “So, our planet is warming faster than ever recorded.”

The recent data from research facilities such as the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine share a similar theme. From July 3-6, the globe recorded the hottest average temperatures (62.9 degrees) since it began compiling the data in the late 1970s.

From July 3-6, the globe saw the four hottest days ever recorded with an average temperature of 62.9 degrees. (Spectrum News 1/Dylan Scott)

Combined with an El Niño event, the results have been deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports in Texas more than a dozen people have already died from heat-related illnesses and emergency room visits are up to almost 200 per 100,000 patients. A dangerous trend to monitor, said University of Texas-Austin geosciences professor Dev Niyogi.

Texas has seen the deadly impacts of the rising temperatures with the CDC reporting more than a dozen deaths and a major spike in heat-related emergency room visits, which data shows there being 837 per 100,000 patients. (Spectrum News 1/Dylan Scott)

“Heat is like a hurricane, it has impacts,” Niyogi said. “Just because we see a hurricane approaching, we know it has a lot of ferocious winds, we take a lot of precautions. Heat is here and we need to take care of ourselves.”

Niyogi and Sun said it’s not just the heat but extreme weather, too, that is a direct result of the changing climate.

“We’re also dealing with more intense hurricanes and flooding, prolonged droughts, worsening wildfires… These are all fueled by a warming planet,” Sun said.

Luckily, there is some good news. Scientists are working in Texas and across the globe to create alternative energy solutions such as wind, solar, electric and hydrogen to mitigate future damage.

Climate scientists in cities like Austin are working to find alternative energy solutions to the continuous release of carbon dioxide and methane emissions such as wind, solar, electric and hydrogen energy to help combat the warming trend. (Spectrum News 1/Dylan Scott)

“I’m very optimistic,” Sun said. “Reversing the warming trend might be hard, but what we can do is slow it down significantly in the next decade.”