Pepo48This is not a forecast for 50 years time, it’s happening today.
DrNeurohaxI'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.
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.