Hacker News Reader

Comment by huppeldepup | Hacker News Reader

The 2003 heatwave killed 70.000+ in Europe. But nobody seems to remember/know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heatwave

The issue there is a lot of homes throughout europe at the time had no air conditioning, just heaters. This included things like nursing homes.

They were basically relying on the fact that historically above 90F (32C) temperatures were unheard of.

Now it's so common that there's been a rush to install AC and heatpumps throughout.

https://www.eurodev.com/blog/europe-hvac-market

They're pushing heatpumps out of some misplaced effort to reduce emissions, not to improve climate control in homes. Nobody I know in Germany has AC except commercial buildings and rich people. They couldn't afford to run it anyway with the highest electricity prices in the world.

Most of the deaths happened in southern Europe, where temperatures above 32 °C are common in July and temperatures reaching 40 °C are not unheard of.

And also made European forests a net CO2 producer for the year, IIRC.

Photosynthesis doesn't work well at high temperatures, so instead plants switch to respiration, burning their stored sugars for energy while taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. Which, you know, is why plants produce those sugars in the first place, not to magnanimously produce oxygen/scrub CO2 for us.

Heat-waves, with lots of days over 40C/100F, will also wreak havoc on our agriculture.

Extreme cold kills far more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/07/19/excessiv...

You know what's wild? Global Warming will create more extreme cold events in places that don't have them! Why? Because global warming is causing the jet streams to weaken and cold air in the arctic escapes more to the south.

Isn't that interesting?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com