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.
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.
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.
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?”
Still gets those nummy clicks, I guess.
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.
Grinds my gears.
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.
Love the energy, but before posting anything on the internet you should imagine a prosecutor asking you to read it to a jury
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.
I’m stealing this.
Please do!
I’m seriously worried for the world.
Same :(
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 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.
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.
Put the rest into growing your businesses
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.
I think I agree with you on all those points but that was one rollercoaster of a post.
But… but without those heroic political figures, how will mega-corporations be allowed to continue maximizing profits.
This type of shortsighted ignorance is what causes drops economic growth and allows communism to win.
…. I’m being told that it’s now trans people, not communists that are the real threat.
…. No, no wait it’s still communists. So both I guess?
/s
I am glad we have lemmy. In Reddit you could have been banned even acting on a based self defense
Maybe we should burn more fossil fuels about it
I mean sure, but greenhouse gasses from agriculture are tiny compared to fossil fuels.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
If only we had some kind of warning?!? If only there was something we could do about it?!?
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.
Yup. We moved from Texas now to be not there in 10 years when bad becomes doom.
