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“President Joe Biden said on Monday he will visit hard-hit Kentucky on Wednesday to survey damage from deadly tornadoes that devastated a broad swath of the state… At least 64 people, including six children, lost their lives in Kentucky, with power still out for thousands and strangers welcoming survivors who lost everything into their homes.” Reuters
“An employee of the Kentucky candle factory where eight workers were killed by a tornado said Tuesday that a supervisor threatened her with written disciplinary action if she went home early because storms were approaching.” AP News
The right argues that faced with a tornado people should shelter in place, not leave, and pushes back against claims blaming the disaster on climate change.
“It would have been a violation of safety protocols for managers to have allowed people to leave. Most people who die during a tornado are killed by flying debris. Keeping people from driving home in a tornado is simply common sense — unless you want to frame the story as evil capitalists deliberately trying to murder helpless workers… When the siren sounds or you see a funnel, [you] seek shelter immediately. The workers asking to leave were wrong, and to paint the response of company managers in any other light than an attempt to save lives is nothing more than cynical politics. The managers had no idea whether a tornado would touch down or when and took the only sensible precaution; stay indoors, hunker down, and pray.”
Rick Moran, PJ Media
“The historical record shows that over past decades, heavy [EF3+ strength] tornadic activity has steadily decreased even as carbon emissions increased. The last peak came in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we were being warned about the dangers of global cooling and the possibility of another ice age being upon us… Also, it’s worth noting that tornadic outbreaks in December are not rare…
“We live on a continent that generates a lot of tornadic storms. They’ve been recorded for as long as we’ve had a country, and some parts of the country are worse than others. We had a serious spike of E3+ tornadoes in 2011 and people tried to blame it on climate change then, also. That was followed by five years where the number was roughly one-third as many and you didn’t hear a peep out of anyone.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
“Global deaths resulting from climate-related disasters — floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures — averaged nearly half a million every year in the 1920s. By the 2000s, we averaged fewer than 14,000 deaths worldwide every year from these same disasters. As nations continue to develop and become wealthier, those numbers will keep falling, as they have nearly every decade for the past century…
“The drop has been more precipitous in the United States than elsewhere. In 1942, the year Biden was born, 384 Americans died in tornadoes, even though far fewer Americans lived in their paths. Last year, 76 Americans died in tornadoes. The year Biden first ran for office, 555 people died in floods. Last year, 57 Americans did…
“Critics will point out that the declining death numbers are due to innovation, early warning systems, better infrastructure, and more mobility. The answer to this contention is, ‘You’re right.’ That’s the point. Adaptation to climate change has been driving innovation since the first person put on a thatched roof. Human history has been a long fight to get out of the bad weather, and adaptation is a lot more affordable than overturning modernity.”
David Harsanyi, National Review
The left condemns the companies for putting their workers at risk and argues that climate change makes extreme weather events more likely.
The left condemns the companies for putting their workers at risk and argues that climate change makes extreme weather events more likely.
“‘People had questioned if they could leave or go home,’ one [Mayfield Consumer Products factory] employee told NBC News in an interview. But, she said, they were warned: If they left, they were ‘more than likely to be fired.’ When a powerful tornado did bear down on the factory, it was so strong that there was nowhere safe to hide… When the storm cleared, eight people on site were dead and eight others were missing. Three hours north, in Edwardsville, Ill., a similarly powerful tornado hit an Amazon warehouse, killing six people…
“These disasters cannot be separated from the overall political economy of the United States, which is arguably more anti-labor now than it’s been at any point since Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act in 1935. A society organized for capital — a society in which most workers are denied a meaningful voice in their place of employment — is a society where some workers will be exposed, against their will, to life-threatening conditions… As the sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox once wrote, ‘The people are not free when a relatively few masters of industry could deny them control of their resources’ — and to that, one might add control of their selves.”
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times
“Many [Amazon] workers, all of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs, said they had never had a tornado or even a fire drill over the course of their careers at Amazon, dating back up to six years. Several expressed that they would be unsure of what to do in an emergency. In one case, an Amazon contractor, fearing Hurricane Ida, asked to go home early but was told that leaving would adversely affect their performance quota…
“[Former employee LeeAnn] Webster said that Amazon’s safety problems extend far beyond extreme weather preparedness. In Minnesota, recent reporting by the National Employment Law Project found that Amazon warehouse workers are injured at more than double the rate of non-Amazon warehouses in the state.”
Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept
“In February, a freakish cold spell in Texas killed more than 200 people and left millions without power. In March, a crippling sandstorm — caused by worsening desertification — turned the Beijing sky an eerie orange. In June, an unprecedented heat wave sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest soaring into the triple digits…
“No smoking gun proves climate change played a role in the tornadoes that destroyed a 275-mile swath of the nation’s heartland… [But] We should remember that climate is nothing but weather over long periods of time. And we should take this year’s brutal events as an urgent warning. By continuing to spew heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we’re daring nature to do its worst. I fear the consequences are just beginning.”
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
