2020 is on course to be the hottest year since temperature records were first kept. It's been widely predicted by the science types that we're in for a steady succession of record heat years.
Heat kills. In already hot regions bordering already hot oceans and seas the heat and humidity combination is expected to become a lethal, one-two combination.
Even parts of the United States are now succumbing to the "new heat" of the Anthropocene.
Yearly heat-related deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last decade to 283. Across the country, heat caused at least 10,000 deaths between 1999 and 2016 – more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods in most years.
Scientists link the warming planet to a rise in dangerous heat in the US, as well as the spread of infectious diseases and other health conditions. Federal research predicts heatstroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thousands of American lives each year by the end of the century. Already, higher temperatures pose lethal risks: the five warmest years nationwide have all occurred since 2006. In the last six decades, the number of annual heatwaves in 50 US cities has, on average, tripled. In contrast to a viral pandemic, this is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.There are measures governments can take to save the vulnerable - wellness checks, cooling centres, free cold water and ice - but they all take money that's increasingly hard to find in this era of "everyday low taxes." That's particularly true in a land where Social Darwinism has been elevated to the stature of a religion.
It isn't the money, the government just doesn't care and neither do most of the tax payers. I do agree low taxes is a big item with the billionaire class and corporations, because it all does add up. However, given the number of people in the U.S.A. even a very small increase in taxes, wouldn't impact most peoples' lives.
ReplyDeleteWe are seeing how government in the U.S.A. doesn't care about who lives or dies because of COVID. Its not them. I've read items where parents have kicked their children out of their homes because they participated in Black Lives Matter Demos. Now how could a parent do that, in the middle of a COVID crisis.
I remember reading on an American blog, all of it was so cruel and some one else wrote, that is the point, the cruelty. So the lack of cooling centers, etc. Most governments don't care. they just don't care.
We've seen Trump roll back environmental regulations which would help the planet., just so his friends could make a few more bucks. How many billions do they really need? Its about the power and to attain it they just don't care. The people who die, they don't know and don't care to know. They don't vote for them and they don't contribute to their political campaigns.
On the 'upside' covid has reduced the number of jets in the air and the number of cars going places. O.K. but it is a side benefit.
Going back 50 yrs I figured out the most expensive commodity at some point would be clean water. You can live without oil but not water, but the billionaire class is buying up land in the middle of the U.S.A. they'll have what they want to keep going the rest of the world can die.
Good article, thank you.
ReplyDeleteI think the Americans will pay dearly for what they have allowed their country to become, e.a.f. When social cohesion breaks down, differences are accentuated. What we're seeing today is not a nation deeply divided but a people fracturing across many fault lines - ethnic, religious, political, social, educational - just about anything that can be manipulated to divide people, which also renders them all more powerless, easier to exploit.
It's hard to see how and when this ends but it simply cannot go on much longer.
Heat is good according to Trump - "as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone." And now, with the warm weather it's safe to hold another Reichsparteitag in Tulsa. See? The virus is gone, and if it isn't, that's your problem.
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influential Americans are well aware of climate change and indeed, catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteInfluential Americans and their wannabees also see profit in global warming and in particular the upcoming water shortage.
one example.
https://5minforecast.com/2015/04/24/why-did-george-bush-buy-nearly-300000-acres-in-paraguay/
TB
Tulsa, what a fitting place for a gathering of the Klan, a.k.a. Trump supporters.
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