I don’t understand the point of these. It’s not like you can’t swim under them, or throw someone over them. Seems like another grift where Abbott’s friends or someone similar is making money to produce the stupid things.
It seems to me it would block boats, but I assume it has more effects than I understand. The article quotes a letter from a top Mexican diplomat saying
“We write to express our profound alarm over border policies instituted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that are putting asylum-seekers at serious risk of injury and death, interfering with federal immigration enforcement, infringing on private property rights, and violating U.S. treaty commitments with Mexico.”
Reminds me of here in Oz, people were getting punched with what was called a “king hit”, basically some drunk idiot grabbing someone and hitting them hard enough to kill them.
Then the media started to relabel it a “coward punch” (which it really was) which caught on. This had a measurable impact on these idiots punching like that and the number of deaths went down.
We always had another word for it though: sucker punch. Also, where are the stats on it having a measurable impact? It was widely seen as a pretty lacklustre thing at the time. I’d argue the real impact was the massive increase is sentencing guidelines for king hits/coward punches that turned them into murder charges if they died from the hit.
In the same vein, we should be charging companies that are causing this impact to the climate. I’d say there’d be real change then.
Those are oil companies. They operate within the bounds set out for them. If there is an externality present, some kind of positive or negative effect not captured in the market price of what they're selling -- say, that burning oil produces carbon dioxide -- it's not the job of the company to address that, but of market regulators. If a company did refrain from extraction, another company would just step in -- a competitive market specifically should not allow any one company to withhold a resource from the market; a company that did that would have monopoly power. As it stands, market regulators have a market says that companies should extract oil, so that's what they're doing.
If sale of oil doesn't incorporate the cost of carbon emissions, or if oil shouldn't be sold at all, that's an issue for the regulators.
A company getting yelled at is going to make some polite noises and brush complaining people off, not because they're not doing their job, but because restricting global oil consumption is not their job.
You want to complain at someone, complain at market regulators, because they're the ones that are responsible for taking into account said externalities, not the companies that operate in those markets.
You'd yell at a company if the company were breaking the laws that have been put in place for it, or something like that -- if BP were smuggling black-market oil or something, then that's an issue with BP. But as things stand, they're acting as the system intends.
Regulators are never going to regulate unless the public gets mad enough at those companies to do something like vote against every politician that props the anti regulatory environment that benefits those companies at the cost of the world.
Correct! Regulators are going to vote to do whatever benefits the oil companies, because the heads of the companies have the money and don’t care about their fellow humans or the planet.
These companies have lied, withheld info and done everything they can to shape public image and the legal ground they are standing on.
they are not as helpless and subject of others as you paint them to be. They act internationally. Appeal to a single nations law will not curb their actions effectively enough.
There have been so many targeted projects to weaken the publics understanding of climate change as a whole and activists personally. It's high time that these companies reinvest their record breaking profits into fixing the problem they have a large hand in creating.
I agree with you except for the fact that oil companies have known about climate change for many decades and have actively paid for pseudo-science studies and other disinformation, plus lobbying, to minimize regulation and maximize profit. So they can go fuck themselves for that.
This is an Olympic gold medal level of willful ignorance that honestly isn’t believable. This post is just too naive to be from a real person. Oh, companies just operate within a market that they have no influence on, do they? They’re just subject to regulation crafted by others, the poor dears. Please.
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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.
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.
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.
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'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!
IMHO the graph is not misleading. It is telling the story that more people are dying due to heat related issues. But yes, you may be right, that the older population contributes to this more but this does not mislead in any way that more people of dying to due heat related issues…
I’m stealing this. I’m seriously worried for the world. We are entering a new age of the diggers and levellers and that ended with the beheading of the king and no real change.
We have a segment of the population that’s exceedingly frothing at the mouth and in some cases for very valid reasons but at the same time they have no plan and that’s scary. They want to scorch the earth instead of fix it.
We are entering a new age of the diggers and levellers and that ended with the beheading of the king and no real change.
First of all, great reference, the English civil war is a fascinating period of history.
But second of all, it wasn’t the diggers who chopped off Charles’ head, they basically never had any real influence on anyone. It was the nobility in parliament that did that (and honestly, Charles did it to himself by being such a stubborn pain in the ass for the nobility), and they were the same ones who didn’t have a plan/couldn’t really imagine a world without a king, which is why they basically forced Cromwell to be king in all but name and then crowned Charles’ son when Cromwell died.
They want to scorch the earth instead of fix it.
I can imagine a lot of scenarios where a bit of scorching is a necessary first step in fixing (but I can also imagine a lot of scenarios where scorching goes off the rails and/or starts cycles of vengeance, so, yeah, we’re seriously worried for the world and for good reason).
I wasn’t implying the diggers chopped off Charles’ head. I was more hinting at he political turmoil at the time was very similar to what we see now and it scares me. Those who don’t pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it and we are collectively horrible at teaching people history!
Fair enough, the emergence of groups like them is definitely a symptom of a stressed social system, it’s just I don’t think they’re often the actual cause of the stress, and sometimes listening to those radical groups is the only way to resolve the actual stress (e.g. abolitionists in the United States were right and we just needed to completely abolish slavery for moral and practical reasons but most everyone thought they were crazy until like 1863). I don’t think that really applies to the diggers (the English civil war was a bunch of rich people fighting for power by throwing mountains of poor people at each other who were never organized enough to have their own faction in that fight), but it might apply to our present-day situation (e.g. people like Pia Klemp make a lot of sense to me).
On a related note, if you’re into the history of political upheavals, I highly recommend this podcast called Revolutions^1^ that actually did a season on the English Civil war and is just absolutely fantastic throughout it’s whole ridiculously long run.
^1^ best links for finding it depends on if you’re on a desktop, iOS, or Android device,
I would say the richest and most evil of us dooming our planet to a heated, hell hole of an apocalypse kind of deserves some emotional reaction. The lack of one by most of the population is probably why we won’t see change until it’s too late.
The only thing we have left is to make sure the ones whi caused this suffer as immeasurably possible as the damage they’ve done. To make sure they do not enjoy one second of the remainder of their days.
This includes any and all o&g execs. Every last shareholder. Every politician who has done nothing or invited this. Every one of them.
100% tax on anything past 100 million or 100% of their head gets lopped off. That’s still an absurd amount of money for you and your family. Put the rest into growing your businesses and thus the economy, or give it to Uncle Sam for some socialized healthcare and UBI instead.
That’s what they currently do. All of them. That’s the whole point in them owning/investing in a business. That’s how they sidestep so many taxes. Aside from a few (relatively) toys and houses, do you really think Musk or Bezos keep billions on hand in liquid form or physically owned objects?
I have a friend with parents that owned their own business that wasn’t really all that large. It had a net profit of maybe $450,000 per year. They paid themselves enough to do whatever they wanted to that year, and the company “reinvests” the rest. It’s all a shell game to avoid taxes. They did it by buying real estate for the company to ‘eventually’ grow on, but just put five cows on and got themselves agricultural exemptions on taxes, then sold the land later. Repeat x100. That money from the sale could be shuffled into other ‘company’ assets. That’s super small time. They didn’t have fancy lawyers or investing agents to help.
Big, rich, asshole business does it by buying back stock, diversifying (do you really think the big contractor company wants to own a grocery store chain, or a bank wants to own restaurants?) into assets that can just be sold later to recoup the money, etc.
Owning a business is all about tax avoidance. An individual doesn’t have many ways to pump up deductions on taxes, but businesses have so many different avenues that even the IRS throws up their hands at some point. Requiring an individual to “put the rest into” their business won’t change anything, and god knows the economy improving is only going to help a small portion of society. That portion isn’t the portion that needs help.
Also, truthfully, I’d lower your number to $10,000,000. It’s enough to live on even in the ritziest of areas, in the fanciest of houses that aren’t mansions, and is still more per year than the highest of the middle-class will earn in their lives.
Between literal apocalyptic scenarios and open fascism, it’s hard not to picture the trolley problem. But we’re forced to pretend everyone’s acting in good faith. Like if we just try harder, words will work, all of a sudden.
At some point we’re telling people not to “escalate” to violence against people shoving them onto the train. The shovers aren’t the ones killing them… directly. They’re just public servants, doing their job! So relax, get along, kumbayah, and get in the fuckin’ train.
For some queer Americans that’s not an exaggerated comparison. The actual Nazis also targeted trans people, almost immediately. Decades of records on transition and therapeutic treatments were burned, by doctors, to protect those individuals from murderous bigots. Nowadays it wouldn’t even work because that’s all digital. And the elected bastards talking about accessing teen girls’ period apps to detect pregnancy are the exact same bastards talking about globe-spanning temperature data like detecting a trend is impossible.
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