I thought this was an interesting comparison: in particular, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 is the type of natural disaster that gets a "X years ago, on this day" type of anniversary...
I thought this was an interesting comparison:
Washington's deadliest weather-related disaster was the 1910 avalanche at Stevens Pass, killing 96 people in train cars.
It's also more lives lost than the eruption of Mount Saint Helens – 57 people – and more than the 2014 Oso landslide – 43 people.
in particular, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 is the type of natural disaster that gets a "X years ago, on this day" type of anniversary article in the local news, pretty much every year since it happened.
what are the chances that this heat wave, with a death toll at least ten times higher, will be remembered even a year from now as a newsworthy event?
will there be an "on this day, a heat wave killed a few hundred people, we're not even really sure of the death count because no one really keeps track of deaths caused by excess heat"?
It really is unfortunate that the deaths from the heat wave(s) isn't being reported on as a national tragedy. An article I read on CNN earlier posited that because deaths caused by excess heat...
It really is unfortunate that the deaths from the heat wave(s) isn't being reported on as a national tragedy. An article I read on CNN earlier posited that because deaths caused by excess heat aren't something that we can point to like say, a mass shooting or a building collapse, that the deaths aren't as visceral to us, or as "real".
Sort of how at least 600,000 people (and likely many that were under-counted) in the US alone have died from COVID-19, and we really have no way to contextualize that.
We will see many more climate change related deaths in the very near future, and we need to prepare for the new normals that await us. This bear bought and installed a portable air conditioner, even though I live in a place that typically has 60F temperatures. Even we set an all time high temperature record of 107F in 2017, and I feel that we're likely to break that record repeatedly, sooner rather than later.
I thought this was an interesting comparison:
in particular, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 is the type of natural disaster that gets a "X years ago, on this day" type of anniversary article in the local news, pretty much every year since it happened.
the Oso landslide in 2014 won the Seattle Times a Pulitzer, despite a relatively small death toll - 43 people - and a relatively small set of other people affected (population 180 as of the 2010 census)
what are the chances that this heat wave, with a death toll at least ten times higher, will be remembered even a year from now as a newsworthy event?
will there be an "on this day, a heat wave killed a few hundred people, we're not even really sure of the death count because no one really keeps track of deaths caused by excess heat"?
seems pretty unlikely to me.
It really is unfortunate that the deaths from the heat wave(s) isn't being reported on as a national tragedy. An article I read on CNN earlier posited that because deaths caused by excess heat aren't something that we can point to like say, a mass shooting or a building collapse, that the deaths aren't as visceral to us, or as "real".
Sort of how at least 600,000 people (and likely many that were under-counted) in the US alone have died from COVID-19, and we really have no way to contextualize that.
We will see many more climate change related deaths in the very near future, and we need to prepare for the new normals that await us. This bear bought and installed a portable air conditioner, even though I live in a place that typically has 60F temperatures. Even we set an all time high temperature record of 107F in 2017, and I feel that we're likely to break that record repeatedly, sooner rather than later.