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.
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.
And regulations for less pavement, concrete etc and more green and trees to provide shade and cooler temperatures.
You can live in extreme temperatures, provided the infrastructures are built for that (ie. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
But with the US urban planning and all for cars policy it won’t happen before it’s too late.
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.