They’re not more or less in the way just because they’re electric.
I’ve never understood the hate for them. Sure people leave them in annoying places and inconsiderate with them but that’s not the scooters fault. Also it’s a very easy problem to solve if authorities could be bothered, if a scooter is found in the way then fine the last person to use it.
I'm 110% on board with global warming, but this graph is misleading.
The author needs to at least correct for population changes (heat deaths per X residents). Even better would be to account for changing demographics, like age and county. From this random stats website, it looks like there has been a dramatic increase in proportion of older residents since 1970. Old people are more likely to die, so more elders = more deaths.
If I wasn't about to head to bed, I might try to fix it, but.... sleep.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure there has been an increase in small plane crashes in AZ. The hot air is much thinner than most pilots are used to, so they tend to forget accounting for changes in thrust and climb rates. I'm pretty sure a couple happened in just the last few weeks.
yeah, people lose so much credibility when they don't even control for simple easy things.
there will always be some confounding factors, but doing rate per population, is rarely hard - andneeded over decade comparisons.
demographic risk adjustment is more complex, so i'd not expect that. but if it is at least acknowledged, then the article is more credible and will get more (of my) attention.
media (and i guess their audience) seem to enjoy hype though . . .
oh shit this is the f.t. i used to think they were among the more credible journo's. pity.
Shouldn’t we be doing more about increasing heat related deaths, even if it would be primarily caused by more people becoming vulnerable to it, or more people living in the zone that is dangerous?
I agree. And shit like this makes me trust financial reporting in general. It's akin to not accounting for inflation in financial graphs.
And yes, the risk adjustment can be as complex as they want to make it, but when I clicked, I was expecting a study of some type. Probably my bias kicking in. My first thought was, "Are they kidding?" Then I saw it was from a news source and thought, "Oh, okay... no wait. Still, they know this is bad, right?"
And whenever you have a chart of historical data like this, you have to at least consider that an increase could be reflective of either improved diagnostic or record-keeping abilities.
More like you just died from old in 1970, versus acute heat stroke in 2023.
I say this being fully on board with the climate change. Charts like this serve little purpose when you don’t properly adjust for the myriad changes that have occured over the last half century. And before anyone says “you mean like global warming,” no, don’t account for that one, because that’s what we’re trying to see.
Yeah, it can be as simple as the death certificates requiring only a primary cause of death.
Old man collapses from a heart attack while trying to change a tire on a hot desert road? Cause of death: heart attack. If more details are requested, they could probably get away with just claiming age-related health issues. The guy is dead, no foul play, the case is closed.
Very much this, and especially over this period. More universal diagnostics, more emphasis on secondary causes and contributors, etc.
And it works the other way, too. Fewer people should die per capita based on faster EMS response times, better medicine, more urban living, etc.
The big one for me is age. I never really heard of people retiring to Arizona until the late 90s. It was always Florida before then. The over 50 crowd is 36% now vs 23% in 1970.
Hmm, but a big part of the problem here is that vulnerable places like Arizona are also those seeing such high population growth. I’m not sure correcting for that would make the graph “better”, it would just show something different.
I'm not advocating for better or worse. In the end, the data shows what it shows. I'm just saying that there was essentially no "analysis", making any interpretation inappropriate.
Hey, more people should survive, thanks to newer medical treatments and more concentration of populations around cities.
On the flip side, there's a larger portion of the population that's older and from out of state.
In between there's the chance that the threat of heat-related health problems should be much diminished due to widespread access to air conditioning. But, that also means more people haven't had first hand experience with heat exhaustion/stroke, and don't realize how quickly things can go from kinda bad to dead.
rates. I’m pretty sure a couple happened in just the last few weeks.
I’ve heard of articles saying that global warming is already leading to more air turbulence and that it is only going to get much stronger by the mid century
Yes. Hot air is thinner, so there's less lift on aircraft wings. There's actually a conversion they're supposed to use that basically says, 'At this temp, treat the plane as if it's actually at this other, much higher, altitude."
Here's one of the recent videos I've seen mentioning it (around 5 min in they mention the "density altitude"). I'm not a pilot and just find the stuff interesting.
As an analyst, this pissed me off. There’s like an oath to never fudge, misrepresent, or be selective with data to manipulate the viewer. We collect raw data for the purest source of fact. It is a single source of truth.
Just a quick Google on one of the glaringly obvious misrepresentations in this graph, and AZ’s population in 1970 was 1.77M; it is now 7.36M. Displaying this graph more truthfully would still highlight increased temperatures impacting increased rate of death to heat, but not at all dramatically, so the creator has misrepresented. Then there’s a lot more to factor in for proper analysis. Healthcare rate with growth? Infrastructure for the same? Why just Arizona?
Climate change science has fact and figure on its side. There is not need to misrepresent it like deniers do. Doing so dilutes and damages the cause by denying the one thing it has, truth.
Exactly. I stumbled across this report from the AZ Dept of Health which breaks it down into per 100k people and the data still supports the author's point. The report then goes on to divide up the population by age, residents vs visitors, county, etc.
Hell, the FT author could have just included a plot of the population growth, which was pretty linear. Not great, but better than nothing.
Here’s a version scaled by population (deaths per 100,000 residents). I’m no expert in this kind of thing, so I didn’t account for other factors, such as age groups. Also, the data I found using the source in the original graph only went up to 2021, and didn’t include 2017 for some reason.
Yeah, that looks more reasonable. The original graph makes it look like there have been ~5x the number of deaths in the last few years compared to ~10 years ago. Adjusted for population growth, it's ~2-3x.
That's still really concerning and makes the point the article was making, while being much more accurate and defensible when scrutinized. Thanks for that!
We desperately need regulation for people and workers in extreme temperatures. We'll be dealing with more and more of it as times goes on so the protections need to be in place.
There was an interesting study done on a city hear me which said that the lack of trees and general built design of the area had made the city's temp go up by between 2-5C. Which is a big difference!
Trees and green in the US southwest a pipedream tbh. The only way that could possibly be achieved is by siphoning off a ridiculous amount of water from another location. Call it as it is. The US Southwest isn’t built to sustain human life.
There has been talk of diverting water from the Mississippi river (or was it the Missouri?) and somehow transporting it across the continental divide to the southwest. Terrible idea, I might be worried if it wasn’t so far outside the realm of possibility.
In my opinion, the only solution, although radical, would be to make motorists’ lives a living hell (charging for road or parking lot use, lowering speed limits to increasingly slow levels, removing on-street parking lots, prioritizing bicyles and buses, reducing bus fare prices, and converting excess parking lots to new neighborhoods) that public transport (i.e. metro and local commuter trains) and bicycle paths can be considered to reduce road traffic with the budget allocated to making new roads or maintaining currently existing ones allocated to improving the public transport system and even providing a bicycle route network that can allow us to follow in the Netherlands’ footsteps.
I looked up news articles after seeing the graph. Seems to be more about elderly and homeless. People touching knobs or falling on the concrete and receiving burns is a thing, but it’s trending way up. Like 83C concrete… crazy hot.
Every time I see crazy heat data for Arizona and other places like it in the US, it makes me wonder. When the fuck will we see a reversion of population trends of people moving south? Arizona, Texas, etc. are only going to get worse. Everywhere is going to get worse, but there’s a lot of rapidly growing areas that are on track to be non-viable for 1/3+ of the year within 10-20 years.
People should not be moving to Arizona, not with climate change as it is.
We’ll reach 100m by 2100 and it won’t be an evil plan or anything, just people forcing their way through the border because they can’t live down south anymore.
I don’t know that the northern U.S. will be that great either in the summer. I’m in Indiana and it’s been in the 90s for weeks. When I was a kid, it was a day here or there in the 90s.
I live in the southwest and it’s definitely something I worry about. Every year it gets worse in our apartment during the summer. Our cooling bill is ridiculous for ~1/3rd of the year. The amount of heat transfer coming in through our single pane windows is insane. The walls barely seem insulated at all. On most hot days (95F/36C+) with the A/C blasting we can’t get it below 80F/26C inside.
Laws where I live require only minimum temperatures that must be met by residences, not maximums; almost nobody is freezing to death here (very rarely someone unhoused will), but people ARE dying of heat related illnesses. It makes me so angry, not only because it’s miserable to be hot all day and expensive to run the A/C as hard as we do, but because it’s so wasteful. The amount of electricity we have to use because our landlord is some bean counting, soulless corporation is sickening.
Yup, it lets some light in but it’s supposed to reflect 99% of UV and 70% of the total light. I also keep the blinds down all day, I don’t think it makes a big difference but I figure it can’t hurt.
This is horrible and obnoxious tree trimming. Bad for the trees, bad for urban tree canopy, bad for urban heat management, bad for carbon sequestration, and done as an insult to labor.
I asked our AI overlords for an appropriate punishment:
The company executives have to spend the weekend acting as city gardeners, complete with typical gardening attire, tending to the local parks and trees - ensuring the community that they’re committed to their “root-level” duties.
Where as I don’t disagree with the timing being retaliatory, my parents have similar trees and my father had me do that just before he passed away. I was convinced I was killing the trees and turns out their canopy is larger than ever now, so it might not be terrible for trees, but still timing is bullshit.
I’m not an arborist and we don’t have those type of tree where I live, but I have worked in landscaping before. My understanding any substantial trimming like that I’ve done in the past should never be done in the hottest part of the year because the tree will have trouble retaining water.
This looks more like tipping than pollarding to me. If it’s supposed to be pollarding whoever’s doing it is shit at it. Tipping is harmful to trees, and based on the photos of the tree prior to it being cut it looks like it may have been tipped once in the year already (likely why they weren’t issued a permit by the city and cut it illegally).
The trim is negligible when you are talking about carbon sequestration in the scheme of things too. I’m not sure how the other points stand up either - but the timing would suggest it is an insult to the labour.
The last IPCC climate change report predicted that shits gonna get real fucking bad for a while, but at the rate we’re going it should at least turn around sometime between 80 to 100 years.
We could shut of all fossil fuel usage tomorrow except for where it’s needed (eg a single generator to kick start a countries power grid if things actually go down) and make a painful hard switch to renewables. We could begin using renewable energy sources to start extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
I don’t know and can’t speak to how effective that would be, from memory the earth would continue to warm for some time to come even on their optimistic predictions.
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