Too hot to go outside in your neighborhood? Blame racism. That’s right. According to a professor at the University of North Florida, the city of Jacksonville and the Biden Administration, racism makes low-income and minority neighborhoods hotter than other neighborhoods on the First Coast.
In case you were not aware. It’s freakin’ hot outside. This week our media and government overlords want us to be very afraid of the “extreme heat.” They also seem to think we do not know how to stay alive when the mercury rises. So, we all must tune in and take notes. Action News Jax and First Coast News have loaded up the full-screen graphics with tip after tip on how not to die when going outside. Unless I turned on the news, I would have never known to stay hydrated, dress appropriately, and I totally would have left my kids locked inside a hot car while I walked around Walmart. However, there is a much more sinister side of our newly dubbed “extreme heat.” After a yearlong study, we are learning heat is actually… racist. Well, technically we didn’t learn anything from the research, but a really smart professor and an environmental group say heat is racist. So it’s definitely racist.
Last year the local government was given a $13,000 grant from the Biden Administration’s National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), to create an interactive heat map depicting how hot it is around town. So, the city along with some environmental consulting group overseeing, tasked UNF assistant professor Dr. Adam Rosenblatt to measure temperatures around the city and locate “heat islands.” The goal is to create a plan to “alleviate heat stress,” which of course, is all based in racism.
Rosenblatt took time off from his really important work of studying the effects of climate change, i.e., the weather, on alligator behavior in the Everglades and how the weather, I’m sorry, I mean “climate change,” is interfering with insects and spiders in Connecticut, to drive around town in his Prius with a thermometer checking the temperature three times a day. Rosenblatt and his team of paid “volunteers,” put their findings together to come up with a Heat Map.
The study began last year and even before it began, A local NPR/WJCT reporter, Brendan Rivers, claimed, “temperature can vary dramatically among neighborhoods, too, with low-income and predominantly black and brown communities getting the hottest.” Rivers went on to make this outrageous claim: “Previous research show that land surface temperatures in Jacksonville neighborhoods that were discriminated against under redlining policies are now close to 10 degrees hotter than tree-heavy historic neighborhoods, which tend to be wealthier and mostly white.”
The whole point of the map is to make you afraid. The scary dark red color and menacing bright orange color swaths across the map are used to make you believe our poor and minority citizens in town are suffering and dying from extreme heat and motivate you to do something. And that something is in the form of more government rules and regulations on developers.
Rosenblatt tells First Coast News, “…we need to change things like zoning regulations. We need to make it mandatory that if you’re developing a residential neighborhood or developing a new shopping center, you have to have a certain amount of tree cover and you need to decrease the amount of parking lots and asphalt that are incorporated into that.”
The assistant professor claims his Heat Map results will be given to Jacksonville’s chief resilience officer, Anne Coglianese. Coglianese will then be able to create a plan to save the city’s oppressed from unnecessary heat, somehow.
When looking at the completed Heat Map of Jacksonville, Rosenblatt wants you to notice “some of the lower-income areas are the hottest.” He tells First Coast News, “It’s not a perfect correlation. It’s not like every high-income area is cool and every low-income area is really hot, but there are certain parts of the city, especially on the north side, where there are low-income communities that are exposed to extreme heat, whereas wealthier communities are not as prone to that issue.”
To back up his outrageous and insulting claim, Rosenblatt encourages us to look up our address on the heat map. So, I did.
I didn’t notice any racism while looking at the map, but I did notice some areas are warmer than others. Rosenblatt claims our downtown area is under extreme heat and so is the northside. Well, yes, of course downtown would be hot. It is a concrete jungle. It doesn’t take a professor, a gaggle of environmentalists, thousands of dollars and a media campaign to figure that out. It is obvious, there are low-income areas of the northside that are very hot. What the assistant professor isn’t telling the cameras, is very wealthy sections of town are just as oppressively hot as lower-income areas. All along both sides of the riverbank are in the extreme heat category, same as the northside and downtown. The beaches are the same color red as the northside. Along the riverbank around Fort Caroline is bright red. The homes lining the riverbank are massive with gorgeous sprawling lawns and docks with half million-dollar boats tied up. Either Rosenblatt honestly doesn’t understand the income status and dynamics of our city’s layout, or he cannot comprehend his own map, or (what I believe is true,) he is just flat out lying to us. It is impossible to claim, “low-income and predominantly black and brown communities [are] getting the hottest.” Based on the map, it is also impossible to claim neighborhoods with a lot of tree cover are 10 degrees cooler, “wealthier and mostly white.”
Our government is claiming we are facing a weather crisis that somehow only makes low-income areas of our nation’s cities experience dangerous levels of heat causing heat related illnesses and death. Our U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Don Graves says, “Extreme heat kills more Americans than any other weather event and has the greatest impact on our nation’s most vulnerable communities. Fortunately, our talented and dedicated researchers and scientists at NOAA are working directly with communities across the country to help them take action to manage extreme heat. As climate change worsens heat waves, this critical information will help bring local and equitable solutions for those facing the greatest threats.”
What Secretary Don Graves really is saying without really saying it…. We believe systemic racism allowed cities to be built purposely oppressing minorities. That underlying racism causes the heat to build to dangerous levels endangering the poor and killing them at alarming levels. But luckily for us, we are taking your money and giving it to people whom we think are really smart. Those smart people will discover ways to prevent minorities from getting hotter than rich white people, by creating laws, regulations and building codes. None of which will prevent people of different races and income levels from sweating any less than those from the upper crust, but they will tell you it does.
We are told the weather is hot, dangerous and deadly. We are told extreme heat kills more Americans than any other weather event. But most importantly, we are told minorities are targeted the most by the sun’s rays. NOAA and assistant professor Rosenblatt believe their taxpayer sponsored Heat Map proves Mother Nature is a racist bigot. But is that really true? Are more minorities in Jacksonville suffering and dying from extreme heat?
The truth is, (Rosenblatt might want to cover his eyes so he isn’t exposed to reality,) according to the CDC and the National Weather Service Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics, only one person has died from the heat in Florida since 2009.
This statistic does not include hot car deaths, which are totally preventable and so horrible I will not elaborate much further for my own mental health.
Aside from hot car deaths, Duval County has only had one heat related death. Back in June of 1998 a 54-year-old male collapsed and died after a bike ride in Jacksonville Beach. To put it in perspective, since the year 2000, only five people have died from heat in the state of Florida.
In Duval County, our number one weather-related killer is rip currents. Since 1995, more than 300 people have drowned from rip currents in Florida. In Duval, three people tragically drowned off our coast just this past month — two 19-year-olds and one 16-year-old. I believe every life is precious and the demographics are irrelevant, but you are free to look up the photographs of each victim. If people like Rosenblatt and greedy politicians are really concerned about the deaths of minorities, then they would be honest about real risk mitigation. Maybe next year Rosenblatt could do a study to prove rip currents are the real weather bigots in Jacksonville. Going on every local news program and radio show to suggest our city is just another racist, southern town because minority neighborhoods are hotter than “mostly white” neighborhoods, is intellectual dishonesty at best and glaringly evil at worst.
I wanted to share something I learned researching this story that I find hilarious. Our government is working to build a heat map in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The goal is to plant a million trees in the city to beat the heat. The campaign’s website brags about building awnings over a city market and then setting up booths to tell people it’s hot and teach them about climate change. People working the campaign complain the issue in Freetown is the homes are made from “materials that amplify heat.”
For those who do not know, Freetown is a dangerous and filthy city. It is so dangerous our U.S. Embassy will not let employees off the property after sundown. The Embassy also warns they will not come and rescue you if you get into trouble. There are no police or emergency services. The town and beaches are so filthy it is estimated the ramshackle tin huts are built on top of three to five feet of trash, plastics, food waste and human waste. Yes, that is correct. Arrogant Americans trying to teach poor Africans how to save the planet while they are literally living in a tin shack on top of human waste. Amazing work. Top notch. Oh, they are taking this charade over to Rio de Janeiro also. More than a million people live in the city’s 1,400 slums, all controlled by armed gangs. The U.S Embassy says murder is common in Rio and advises extreme caution. Maybe we should give out U.S. sponsored Kevlar vests instead of tree saplings.
I understand the heat mapping campaign isn’t claiming the weather is actually, racist. I am being hyperbolic. What people like Rosenblatt are really trying to get us to believe is that, because some neighborhoods are a smidge warmer than other neighborhoods and because the hotness just happens to settle where non-white people live, by not spending millions of dollars to somehow fix the made-up issue, that’s racism.
See how that works? It all fits into the core belief of Critical Race Theory – that systemic racism exists in America.
So, you might think this is all trivial stuff made up by silly people in academia. It means nothing in the real world. These people are very serious, and we should believe them. They have major influence over politicians and policy making. This is a religion to them. These complete waste of time studies, like the Heat Map, are paid for by us. We pay Rosenblatt to drive around town hanging a thermometer out of his window so he can pretend he is preventing racism by magically making the sun’s rays cooler with grassy parks and taking away parking spots for his Prius at Starbucks.
Rosenblatt encourages us to plug in our address on the heat map and then call your City Council member to ask what he is doing to relieve heat stress in your neighborhood. I encourage you to do the same, after you finish reading this article, of course.
Heat map
