Where dangerous heat is surging | Hacker News Reader

Where dangerous heat is surging

washingtonpost.com

47 pointsndsipa_pomu61 comments

Don't worry. The nice thing about all this climate change is that total economic collapse will stop it in its tracks.

Infertility will fix the population boom too.

Unfortunately, probably not. It seems that it's like a tanker rather than a speedboat.

This new epidemic of extreme heat represents one of the gravest threats to humanity, scientists say, but it won’t affect the world in a uniform way. While certain parts of rich countries will see a surge in days, most of the danger will come in poor countries in already hot regions such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that lack widespread air conditioning and other advantages like advanced health-care systems.

On the upside, what you really need is cultural adaptation, like siestas in Mexico. And some of this places may be better positioned to pursue that than a lot of wealthier countries where some people can't solve anything if throwing money at it doesn't resolve it in short order.

This seems to be off... According to the search, London is going to have no days above 31c by 2050, and we're currently going through a whole week of it.

You're confusing dry bulb temperature with wet bulb temperature. It's certainly hot (I'm in Bristol), but humidity isn't 100% which means that the wet bulb temperature is lower (i.e. you can cool down by sweating and sitting in front of a fan).

https://archive.ph/LjlCp

Sounds like it belongs on the list: https://extinctionclock.org/#show

The latest "confirmed" Doomsday date on that page references a quote that doesn't contain a Doomsday date, so the site owner has wilfully misread the quote to create one.

That list appears to be cherry picked to support a narrative.

It doesn't include e.g. Exxon's predictions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...

As a climate change skeptic

I want a curated list of failed or vague climate predictions

So I can maintain cognitive resonance.

Do tell. What part of it are you skeptical about? That the greenhouse effect is real? That temperatures are rising? That extreme weather events will continue to increase in frequency and severity? That raising temperatures are melting the tundra and releasing more methane causes a feedback loop? That ice sheets are receding all over the world?

These all seem to be well supported by facts. I’m curious about what the seed of your skepticism is, what planted it what previously cherished beliefs it supports.

I thought this was quite a good interview, summing the rational, skeptic position.

https://youtu.be/l90FpjPGLBE?si=v8fwGFWT-yLPpKgC

What would convince you?

This site is pretty bad. Every prediction is a "doomsday" prediction, and it simply marks them as wrong if the world hasn't ended by the specified date. Example, predicting the Hoover damn (Lake Mead) won't provide electricity if no action is taken. There have been significant efforts at water conservation. So now it's a "missed" prediction. Or predictions that X could happen in as little as Y years, establishing a lower bound. Y years passed, we'll call it missed.

It would be interesting to see a meta-analysis of predictions and how accurate they turned out to be, but that isn't what this site is.

Looks like they will need cheap, reliable electricity and air conditioning.

We should focus on making sure they get it.

Air conditioning can increase external temperatures in cities by approx 2 degrees C.

But decrease internal temperatures by 20+ degrees. Seems like a good trade off.

Depends very much on which side you are on. Unfortunately I expect that those people outside won't have much say in the matter.

In other (hacker) news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37455382

And let’s talk about deaths due to cold weather?

I’m all for conserving the climate. The doom and gloom has been media’s staple for over 50 years. Now, it’s taking on the vibes of “We’ll all die if you don’t adopt authoritarianism. We want to monitor your carbon footprint.”

Are cold weather deaths increasing or predicted to increase significantly? If so, then that does sound interesting and should be discussed.

No, cold weather deaths will decrease significantly--by more than heat-related deaths will increase. About five times as many people die from cold each year as from heat. So the overall effect of warming will be to decrease the number of deaths due to extreme weather.

Are there any studies that support that view?

Yes. Have you heard of google? It's a search engine. Type your question and a list of related pages appear

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohe...

Five seconds of googling will reveal:

> https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t... > > The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat.

The study is here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

This shows that cold deaths outnumber heat deaths about 10:1, so global warming is a net positive when it comes to avoiding death.

Additionally, heat deaths currently happen in countries that lack air conditioning because it was not historically needed. This is rapidly changing. Fortunately, cooling takes less energy than heating, which seems paradoxical at first, but it makes sense if you consider that cooling doesn't need to generate heat, but simply move it away (which also requires energy, but less than raising the temperature of a closed system by the equivalent temperature). Additionally, heat pumps can run on electricity from renewable energy sources, rather than heating which mostly uses fossil fuels (yes, heating can use electricity too, but that's currently an order of magnitude more expensive).

All of these factors show that moderate global warming is good for mankind: it reduces overall energy use, it reduces fossil fuel use in particular (which is great because it's fossil fuels that are contributing to the greenhouse effect), and it reduces human death rates. You rarely hear about this, however, because the media is committed to pushing the false narrative that the world is on a path to global destruction.

That's a big jump from one questionably positive benefit to a blanket "good for the planet".

I find it extremely callous to label a net reduction of people dying of extreme weather as only “questionably positive”.

Questionable statistic. Indirect deaths due to temperature are a lot higher than direct deaths, but much harder to measure.

The referenced paper is taking indirect effects into account. It is not just counting deaths that have "cold-related" or "heat-related" listed in the cause of death. It is looking at overall excess mortality due to extreme temperatures, i.e., the increase in deaths over what would be expected at non-extreme temperatures.

How about deaths due to crop failure? How about deaths caused by mass migrations? How about deaths due to the increased spread of disease? et cetera.

To the extent those vary by temperature, which is what is relevant for this discussion, the paper's methodology takes them into account. That's the whole point of doing an overall excess mortality analysis: it means you don't have to know the specific cause of each individual death or how temperature affected it. You can just compare expected deaths at "normal" temperature to actual deaths at the actual temperature (I am oversimplifying here, the actual methodology is more complex than that, but that's the basic idea).

This methodology was not made up for this specific case. Overall excess mortality analysis is used in all kinds of contexts. For example, it is used to estimate the overall impact of COVID, for much the same reasons--because it takes into account indirect effects of COVID that would otherwise be very hard to measure. The methodology is not perfect (no methodology is), but it is the best we have for this kind of analysis.

The IPCC estimates 250,000 excess deaths due to climate change by 2050.

See my response in the other subthread where you made a similar claim.

... he said with 0 evidence to back it up.

The IPCC (aka broad scientific consensus) claims there will be net excess deaths due to climate change.

The OP has shown (in a deleted comment) that the IPCC has includes his argument in their calculation. IOW, there are enough deaths elsewhere to offset any benefit from reduced cold deaths.

> The IPCC (aka broad scientific consensus)

No, that's not what the IPCC reports represent. They represent a politically directed conclusion. We know this because the summary for policymakers is written first, which dictates what the politically directed conclusions are. Then the overall working group reports are written; then the detailed reports that are supposed to feed into the overall working group reports are written. Which is exactly backwards from how it would be done if it were representing the actual science.

Also, science does not work by "consensus". It works by building models that make accurate predictions. The models we have for climate science don't make accurate predictions. And the models that are used to predict the impacts of climate change, which are not even climate science models but economic and sociological models, are even worse. In short, the actual science does not justify the alarmist claims that are being made.

But even if we leave all that aside, alarmist claims don't even correctly represent what the IPCC says. For example:

> The OP has shown (in a deleted comment) that the IPCC has includes his argument in their calculation.

No, that's not what the comment I deleted before shows. Since you are presuming to reference it because you apparently think it somehow supports your argument, I'll repost the direct quote from the IPCC AR6 here (Working Group 2, Chapter 16.2.3.5):

"Heat-attributable mortality fractions have declined over time in most countries owing to general improvements in health care systems, increasing prevalence of residential air conditioning, and behavioral changes. These factors, which determine the susceptibility of the population to heat, have predominated over the influence of temperature change."

In other words, humans adapt to changes in climate, in a way that reduces the impact of those changes on (among many other things) mortality. Which is nothing like the claim you are making.

Please keep conspiracy theories out of your argument, it doesn't help them.

Humans adapt, but those adaptions are often deadly. Mass migration is an adaption that kills people. Wars are adaptions that kill people.

Humans can adapt in decades, ecosystems need millenia to adapt, and humans are dependent on their environment.

> Please keep conspiracy theories out of your argument

It's not a conspiracy theory. You will find plenty of scientists who participated in the IPCC process and were disillusioned by it saying the same thing. I'm simply explaining why I don't accept the IPCC reports as scientific gospel the way you do. We obviously aren't going to reach agreement on that here.

That said, as I have already pointed out, you're not even correctly describing what the IPCC reports say:

> Humans adapt, but those adaptions are often deadly

What I quoted from the IPCC says nothing about these "deadly" adaptations. It describes humans adapting through the ordinary peaceful processes of life and economics.

> Humans can adapt in decades, ecosystems need millenia to adapt, and humans are dependent on their environment.

Humans adapted to the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas, which was a much larger change than what is expected to occur to us by 2100 and was on the same time scale (about a century), with Stone Age technology. The idea that we cannot adapt to this much smaller change with 21st century technology without suffering a catastrophe is laughable. And if the world would expect a fraction as much effort on actually helping to adapt as it spends on wringing its hands about impending catastrophe, the adaptation would be even easier. The 20th century saw massive restructuring of the economies of the world due to two World Wars, continuing industrialization, computers, and the Internet. Adapting to climate change in the 21st century should be a no brainer.

The IPCC is a panel of climate doomers. It exists mainly to promote globalism and secure funding for “scientists” who are willing to sell their soul to the political powerful.

“Scientific consensus” has little bearing on truth. In Galileo Galilei's time, the scientific consensus was that the Sun revolves around the Earth (and this was not just the view of the Catholic Church, it was endorsed by renowned and accomplished astronomers like Tycho Brahe!) And yet it moved!

If you have blind faith in globalist institutions like the IPCC then there is nothing I can say to change your mind, anymore than I can debate the existence of God with a Catholic who believes the Pope is the highest authority on the subject. I wish you good luck with your trust in globalist authority, and if it is any solace to you: the massive deaths predicted by the IPCC will probably not occur. Though by the time that will be clear, the narrative will probably be changed to some variant of “we never said climate change was going to be that bad” or “it only didn't turn out that bad because of our decisive action”.

" the massive deaths predicted by the IPCC will probably not occur."

250,000 deaths by 2050 is massive deaths? That's about 5% of what COVID caused, and that's not generally acknowledged as mass death.

> 250,000 deaths by 2050 is massive deaths? That's about 5% of what COVID caused, and that's not generally acknowledged as mass death.

If this is your position, it's all the less reason to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation.

You have data to back that up? How do you know that the death rate from heat won't eventually eclipse the cold weather death rate?

Note that your statistic comes from a study of European cities, and is only true for Europe. By not noting that caveat you're implying world-wide, which is very much not true.

Nobody has studied Africa and India the same way, but it seems quite likely that the increase in heat deaths there will significantly the decrease in cold deaths.

> your statistic comes from a study of European cities

Yes, the ratio of 5 does (actually from Northern Europe). But if you look at worldwide data, the ratio is actually higher: 9.8. In other words, Europe as a region has a substantially lower ratio of cold-related to heat-related deaths than the world average. And Africa has a substantially higher ratio: 16.5 in Northern Africa and a whopping 58.3 in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Of course this is because the people there are so much better adapted to heat than to cold.)

See Fig. 1 here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

deleted because it's hard to reply to a comment that keeps getting edited.

Yes, sorry for the edits, I hit post by mistake the first time.

There are way more cold weather deaths than hot, and they would be expected to decrease significantly.

I'll add that I belive we should prioritize reducing atmospheric CO2, but straight up lying about it's impact, and using it for politics, which go togetjer and represent most of the discourse, are both despicable and counterproductive.

I agree as oil companies have influenced politics and climate science for decades. There is plenty of evidence that they deliberately lied as they valued their profits over humanity's welfare.

Some of the worst environmental damage has been done by socialist governments when they control everything. Private ownership is better than alternative of socialism.

Even though residents of East Germany had considerably less standard of living than the west, the east created enormous amounts of pollution. Worse with less human welfare.

https://fee.org/articles/why-pollution-was-so-much-worse-in-...

I think you're conflating authoritarian communist governments with socialism. Moreover, isn't that just trying to deflect from addressing climate issues?

The "blame the for-profit oil companies" ignores the history of government dictated economies. We don't have to like private ownership [of energy production], but removing companies just changes ownership to less accountable government.

We shouldn't ignore past mistakes, whether by companies or governments, but our current problem is being perpetuated by the oil companies, so something has to change to stop them from destroying our future.

> our current problem is being perpetuated by the oil companies

People consume goods and services which rely on oil. Act locally and stop consuming things which depend on oil and natural gas. Oil is used for more than electricity generation, so it will be a cave-person lifestyle.

That is an excellent reason why we need to stop burning it. Lots of things can be used for energy, but oil is also useful in manufacturing.

Acting locally is exactly the narrative that the oil companies want you to push as it distracts people from the oil companies greed and destruction of our climate.

Please explain how market economies deal in scenarios where externalities are involved. How do they price in those externalities? Also, how well do market economies perform for the common good when limited natural resources are exploited?

> when limited natural resources are exploited

Malthus was not correct. I'm trying to think of one commodity which has been used up, and I can't think of one though you can name a few.

Private property, free markets, and rule of law are not perfect. What system is better for a good standard of living for the masses?

There was a recent study on this issue here. [1] Globally from 2000-2019 there were about 5 million deaths per year associated with "non-optimal" temperatures. This accounted for more about 9.5% of all global deaths. 8.5% of these were because of cold, and less than 1% were due to heat. So if the heat increases, it could be expected to lead to a global reduction in temperature related deaths, which is pretty neat!

The most interesting thing about this study is an initially paradoxical (but not really when you think about it) finding. The most mortality from high temperatures came from Eastern Europe, whereas the most mortality from low temperatures came from Sub-Saharan Africa!

[1] - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

Deaths due to cold can only decrease so much (i.e. they can't go negative), so it would seem reasonable to assume that increasing deaths due to heat will surpass the deaths due to cold.

We in a media inspired climate doom and gloom period where the media tries to inflate impacts but still promotes a return to the office because the impact of going into the office on climate change doesn't matter. The fact that more lives will be saved when death by freezing is lessoned doesn't matter. What matters is you read and do what they want. Stop your critical thinking and panic on the way to the office.

Funny, adopting authoritianism sounds like "vote for me to be your dictator"...

Do you consider yourself sane and intelligent? Ever wondered if you could also suffer from evidence bias, thinking everything from the point of view that the elite trying to force something down your throat?

Or maybe you have the certainty of Principal Skinner? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAuR5bkIlQ

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