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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Letting the days go by!
Let the water all dry up Letting the days go by!
Water flowing underground?! Into the alfalfa, until the money's gone
Once in a lifetime! Lake Mead's looking more like ground.
Just thought I'd add this report from the AZ health department. This breaks down the factors MUCH better and comes to a similar, but not quite as extreme, conclusion. Only part is normalized for population, but it gives an idea of how to scale the numbers.
I mean... They did do stuff like fix the ozone layer. Unlike us, they have the excuse of information being considerably harder to come by because they didn't really have the internet. So far, for the most part, all we're doing collectively is being mad about it online. Oh, yeah I guess we banned straws.
Millennials have been adults for a while now and... Welp. I don't think it'll be long before the newer gens start heavy criticizing us and frankly we'll deserve it. If we were any less apathetic than previous gens things would have already changed or be changing faster imo.
On one hand yeah, I'd look at us pretty dimly from the outside
On the other, we've been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we're unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we're missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it's our fault.
Even as far as voting, we've been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum
They just keep gaslighting us.
We don't have the money, we don't have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we're not ok... Frankly, there's no way this ends well. It's hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven't realized that and thrown us a bone now and again
Climate change is just getting started and people should start suing cities and design firms for failing to include shade requirements in their standards and for making roads too wide to properly shade
Where natural shade can't be sustained artificial shade needs to be provided.
The single family house on a grass lawn is such a stupid idea in many places
I wish, but I just know the segregationist city planners in my town will just lay down more asphalt and gated suburbs. We don't even have sidewalks or crosswalks even though there's people walking/biking everywhere. They intentionally make our towns unlivable.
Ironically the oil companies back in the 60’s, did an extensive research into what exactly would happen to the climate and ecology etc, if they kept drilling for and using fossil fuel etc.
It’s so accurate that even todays models aren’t that good (I find that fact odd), but bottomline, they knew.. they knew, but kept on doing it anyway.
They are likely referring to Exxon's research. I think they started research in the 70s which spread the earth would warm with an increase in CO2. They did quite a few studies (that they kept internal) and a good chunk of them were as good of not better than NASA's climate models. They are not as good as our current models though. But considering they have denied CO2 linked climate change despite their own research showing it for the past 60+ years, they can go fuck themselves.
A Dutch site, but with a bit of translation applied it should be perfectly readable from Dutch to English.
Also you are not bombarded with ads unlike the original the guardian link, they link to that article and so it’s available if preferred.
NGL... First glance at the chart I thought the left hand scale was temperature with a sudden spike to 250°.... no wonder people are dying when your iced tea boils in your glass as you try to drink it!
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.
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 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!
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 just want to say that graphs like this should be contrasted with the number of deaths from extreme cold. I know Arizona probably doesn't have the numbers of say, Alaska, but it's worthy of note to contrast the two.
I'd also point out that it is far easier for an individual to protect themselves against the rigors of cold than it is for heat; in the cold, with warm clothing, you can keep yourself warm, while the environment is very cold; fire is relatively easy to make, even if you have little more than sticks, and thus getting warm or keeping yourself warm is by and large easier to accomplish than staying cold.
When you're in an extremely hot environment, it's not like you can make yourself more naked than naked. You need some outside influence to keep you cool, like a swamp cooler, a misting sprayer, a cool body of water (like a river or lake), or some kind of man-made cooling device like an Air Conditioner, in a relatively sealed enclosure (which relies on consistent access to power to run it). most of these are either inaccessible to people in a city or built-up area; sure, there are fixtures, like fountains that contain water, usually not enough to keep them from heating up, and usually the water is recycled, so the heat stays with the water. all other water access is typically restricted to water lines, which usually someone is paying for, and nobody wants to pay to keep random people cool when they don't have to. All man-made (air conditioner) type cooling is generally access restricted to either workplaces, homes, or businesses/storefronts, where the expectation is that you'll be spending money there (which not everyone has).
I'm just saying, that the limiting factor to reducing death by extreme heat, is a far larger one, than death by extreme cold, where you should only need to hand out sweaters, gloves/mittens, jackets, blankets, etc, to keep people from dying from it. There's far-end extreme cold that almost nothing will save you from short of a heated structure, but generally, places that are inhabited by people who don't have access to safe heat and cooling (like a home), are more temperate than that extreme of cold.... not exactly too many homeless people walking around the arctic or Antarctic circles....
Neither is good, but both seem inevitable; regardless we should be doing all we can to help to ensure the survival of everyone, as a species. Whether that's saving them from the heat, the cold, from starvation or dehydration, we should be helping in any way we are able to.
Yeah I know. Can’t regulate sweating at that point and the body will start to frog boil. Hydrate was just a term drill sergeants would tell us when it was hot as hell. Someone military probably understood the reference.
Kids nowadays are so fragile with your participation trophies and dying from touching the ground. In my day, we pull up our bootstraps and head for the coal mines, then lie down on asphalt to nap like Real Men™ do.
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 doubt medics really want to bankrupt anyone. They're usually the lowest paid out of any emergency service. Police and fire departments are paid way higher.
My area:
~$56k - Average police starting salary
~$59k - Average fire starting salary
~$32k - Average basic EMT
~$34k - Average advanced EMT
~$39k - Average paramedic
Blame the big pharmaceutical companies and corporate takeover of hospitals and small clinics for the insanity of medical costs. The absolute shitshow that insurance has become is also a large contributor. It's bad enough that doctors are finding it much simpler to work for corporations instead of owning their own practice because it's easier for the big company to fight the other big company.
Except the slope of your graph looks like a kicker ramp while OP looks more like a quarter pipe, so it really doesn't look like population growth can account for the uptick in heat deaths
Devil's advocate: type of population also makes a difference. If that uptick in population is predominantly elderly, for instance, you're gonna see the rate of susceptibility skyrocket relative to the whole.
But that is not to dismiss the reality of climate change. It just illustrates the potential for dangerously synergistic factors to be considered when evaluating risk that we'll need to keep in mind as we try to keep existing in this ever-hotter world.
Still a 4x population increase since 1970. The point is op's graph is misleading not climate change doesn't exist. Even then you still have to account for demographics and such. Here's a more dramatic graph for you:
Someone else brought it up, but the idea that this is a "common" incident during summer and if the population has increased 30% then you'd expect some correlation with the number of incidents.
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.
This is a bad take... Regions affected with mass migration, people without solid infrastructure, AC or clean water, people not able to move are in danger. They are not the ones polluting.
Hypothetically you have 50% less people. Great. Think about who is still there and if pollution really is in decline then.
Problem is we're on our way to reach a point where even if we stopped all our GHG emissions, just the melting of the ice caps and thawing of the permafrost will be enough to create a self sustaining global warming event.