I'm having trouble reconciling the rest of the article with this:
> If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6%—almost 1 million—of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold.
So the 36 most extreme days out of 365 only account for 6% of all deaths? Meaning those days are safer than average?
The study did model excess deaths, not total deaths.
But to your point (from the study):
> The excess death fraction of total deaths was 0.67% (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.58–0.74%) for heat-related deaths and 5.09% (95% CI 4.64–5.47%) for cold-related deaths. The relative risk of death was 1.057 (95% CI 1.046–1.067%) per 1 °C higher temperature during extreme heat and 1.034 (95% CI 1.028–1.040%) per 1 °C lower temperature during extreme cold.
So of those 1M, it looks like 90%ish were cold-related (though more extreme temps are equally dangerous in both directions).
> With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts are worsening and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years
If there are 60 million deaths a year, that factoid suggests 1 in 240 deaths, or 0.4%, was caused by a heat wave or a cold front. That just doesn’t pass a smell test
Heat stroke as a cause of death is a bit nebulous, in that it can cause parts of the body to fail that otherwise wouldn't. It's similarly fuzzy to dying of old age: If someone has a heart attack, and they're 95 years old, did they die of heart failure or die of old age? If someone has a heart attack, and it's 120°F outside, did they die of heart failure or die of heatstroke? Heat deaths are typically underreported because of this.
We really need to stop saying people die of old age. Old age is not a disease, even though aging is a degenerative disease that affects a lot of species and leads to a 100% fatality rate from other conditions.
I would disagree --at advanced age, multiple systems and organs are near failure, so while one may identify one as being the proximate cause, if not that today, it would have been another tomorrow and that offers a false sense of certainty or precision.
It’s akin to saying we estimate the newly discovered satellite to be about 1 mile across or 1609.34 meters.
Right, but if you can prevent death from each of those causes, you run out of death.
If grandpa's liver is failing and he gets hit by a car, he didn't die of old age. If the deadly car accident is prevented, and then he dies of liver failure, then he didn't die of old age. If his liver is replaced, and he dies of heart failure...
Most people are dying from cancer and cardiovascular issues. If we cured cancer next year, then we would see a huge drop in people dying from old age, at least until the heart failure caught up to them.
Basically, that would introduce latency without changing bandwidth, and the total mortality rate would only be delayed temporarily.
Mortality rate will be always 100% until we manage to escape this universe and move to a newer one. That or learn how to massively decrease the amount of entropy. Something about light, perhaps.
> I would disagree --at advanced age, multiple systems and organs are near failure, so while one may identify one as being the proximate cause, if not that today, it would have been another tomorrow and that offers a false sense of certainty.
Exactly. Saying someone died of old age also communicates important information about how expected the outcome was.
Like many things in life, that’s a judgement call. Old age, person was living on borrowed time, so to speak. liver disease, person would have lived relatively healthy till something else naturally failed or unexpectedly failed.
The way any weather event is associated by default with climate change has harmed the credibility of those reporting on it, and made it harder to have the urgent conversations we need to have to solve climate change.
I suspect journalists think they’re helping the planet by raising the subject at every opportunity, but when there is no clear link, they’re providing fuel for parties that want to discredit the data and ignore the issue.
Climate change increases the frequency of previously rare events.
By definition, any unprecedented weather event in the last few years is linked to it. Excluding those, what weather event reporting are you referring to?
People saying it’s a nice seasonably warm day, or noting historically average precipitation last week, and blaming climate change?
> Climate change increases the frequency of previously rare events.
People were saying this about hurricanes after Katrina. Then we went about a decade with far fewer hurricanes than normal, and, indeed, named hurricanes in 2010s were 2/3 the count in the 1990s. It's too nuanced of a point to be used with the public.
I suspect this is more due lack critical thinking and lumping everything in with climate change because that is what everyone else is doing. Hivemind may be overwrought, but while I do believe people are affecting climate, attributing thigs that would have happened regardless of climate change is not constructive. It only serves to incite the choir and turn off most everyone else as it appears to resemble chicken little.
Maybe journalists are reporting what’s on the mind of readers, like they always do?
A distressing weather event is news and has always been. The connection of any such event to climate change is something that most people wonder about, and journalists can do little besides ask an expert for their take. And the expert inevitably says “well, we can’t credit any specific event to climate change but extreme and unfamiliar weather patterns are a symptom in any case”
How would you rather it go? Should the journalist find an expert who wouldn’t say that? Where would they find one? Should the journalist stop reporting on the weather? Stop addressing what’s on reader’s minds when they do?
Warning. Opinion piece. Just give me my downvotes.
Climate Change is a religion first. Science second.
We are coming out of an ice age. People don't seem to understand that. The real concern is at what rate things are changing because of human. Not are things changing. Sea level rose 420 feet before people were doing much.
People like Al Gore have gotten rich peddling garbage for decades. By now we should all be dead. The famous hockey stick graph that never happened.
If someone is willing to talk nuclear power then are serious and worth listening to. Everyone else is either trying to get rich, or has no critical thinking skills.
It really doesn’t seem religious to me. I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists.
Most of them do have some disappointment as people resist seeing this problem. I’ve seen more lectures over the last few years where your basic crusty old atmospheric scientist is saying, “people, we have to pay attention to this one.”
Here's a personal opinion, hopefully clearly presented.
Scientists performing science use the scientific method to give humans the best available objective knowledge about the natural world. This aspect of science is not religious in nature and I think ~99% of HN would agree with this up to here.
What science cannot do is use data to make decisions. Science cannot perform risk-management and cost-benefit analysis. You can use scientific data to perform risk-management and make a decision, but there's no objective outcome to any decision. Science qua science cannot decide which course of action is the scientifically accurate one: that concept doesn't exist. This decision-making is the aspect of reality that has become religious in nature, and that has become wrongly conflated with science.
To illustrate that science is not the same thing as decision making, I'd point out that we've had plenty of occasions in real life where the American FDA and the European Medicines Agency have had different opinions on drug approvals with the same exact data. Who is following the science and who isn't following the science when they disagree on a drug approval? You can't answer that, because they both are using science, just making different decisions. Science and decision making are two different things, yet in today's world, they are often treated the same by some of the loudest and dumbest people.
People in today's world scream "Trust the science" as if that's the end to the argument if you disagree with their proposed solution to some problem like climate change or taking a medication. This belief in science is what takes the form of a religious belief. There is no science that can tell humans what the right course of action is to some problem. That's an entirely different thing, yet people shout down rational skeptics about something by saying things like "the science says we must do X" as if that concept is inarguable.
Intelligent, well-meaning, and rational people can agree with objective facts about climate change and still reasonably think that the economic devastation and human misery caused by trying to cut emissions as quickly as possible is not the best course of action to take.
> I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists.
For the most part, most humans working in this field are normal scientists doing normal science things, as best as possible.
However, it should be noted that scientists are also people, and the financial survival instinct for them exists.
Scientists are smart enough to understand the political zeitgeist and what butters their bread. Just like journalists have an incentive towards news that get the most clicks, scientists also have an incentive to veer towards research and conclusions that gets them the funding they need to live and work.
The reason I linked the NCA above is to clarify that we have data on the severity of this problem.
Everything you said above about Science versus Policy is true, as a generic matter.
Problem is (as you can see in the GP comment that sparked my own comment) that a lot of HN commenters seem to view the Science piece fundamentally un-settled.
And another problem with your statements above is, as I was gently pointing out, that very well-informed and deliberative scientists -- I'm talking about people who have done geophysics their whole life, and are not temperamentally given to alarm -- have become very alarmed indeed about the our lack of responsive Policy around this.
So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information.
And this is not "rational skepticism", just a boring kind of generic contrarian stubbornness.
> So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information.
It seems like you misread the main point of making that comment. I wasn't trying to refute the entirety of climate change in that post. The point was to try and provide one personal opinion on why climate change feels like a religion using a fairly clear understanding of the difference between the scientific method and what is not science.
If climate change is too loaded of a topic for you, think in terms of Covid and what we've dealt with the past 2 years. There are smart rational people who are shouted out down for "not trusting the science" when they merely disagree with imposing a particular risk-management decision on young healthy people who face almost zero risk from Covid. Science doesn't tell anybody to take any particular medication: science merely gives us the tool to understand the possible risks and benefits to human actions.
If that's a boring, low-information, generic comment, well ok then.
I’m afraid it is such a comment. HN is over-provisioned with “just asking questions” climate skeptics who use these points.
Your objections and hypotheticals are generic and do not reckon with what we do know about the specific problem of climate change.
And note, despite saying you aren’t trying to question the science, the last paragraphs in your original do just that (“the financial survival instinct for them exists”).
What is it to you if somebody questions the natural world? That's the key step of scientific inquiry.
I don't think we have much else to talk about here as you're trying to focus on the specifics of climate change and I've told you that my comment was for a different purpose: backing up the other person's comment that a lot of appeals to science felt like a religious belief. But for what it's worth, your objections to my comments have only reinforced my opinion because your objection seems to take the form of religious offense, even taking offense at somebody daring to ask questions that express the littlest doubt or questioning the moral purity of your sect's leaders.
Rising average temperature around 1°C is science. Rising because of people... well, that could be religion, hypothesis, alarmism, lobby... You name it.
Too high. For example in the northwest U.S. last year we had an unprecedented heat wave, over 110 degrees for multiple days in places where air conditioning is not common.
In the Portland region 72[1] people were reported to have died from it.
Going by the metro region with a population of 2.2 million, and assuming the heat-related deaths were underreported by half (round up to 100) that’s .0045%
> Going by the metro region with a population of 2.2 million, and assuming the heat-related deaths were underreported by half (round up to 100) that’s .0045%
That is deaths per pop, not rate of deaths. Assuming people live to 80 on average, you'd expect 1/80 to die each year. So multiply that number by 80 to translate it to per death instead of per pop, and you get around 0.36% of deaths that year in Portland was due to that heatwave. 0.36% line up really well to the reported 0.4% figure from the article.
It's very hard to compare ~110 F in a very dry region compared to ~110 F in a wet region. 110 F at 70% humidity is a heat index of 160 F, close to unsurvivable. The highest recorded heat index was 178 F in Saudi Arabia, with an actual temperature of 108 F.
Another thing to consider is heat waves are much worse in regions without reliable or universal air conditioning. This could explain the much higher death tolls in South America compared to North America.
What's a cause of death? Everyone dies of something... usually more than one thing.
AIUI, they've basically put a bunch of factors in to create a regression model which outputs "number of deaths in this area on this day", and the factors for "very hot day or very cold day" are multiplied by the actual number of total deaths to get the "5 million" figure.
That sounds about right, actually. People (especially in the developed world) really, really overestimate how much thermal regulation the very old and very young can do.
Even in our safe, structured, developed cities in the US, we lose several people every time a major snowstorm hits from elderly folks getting locked out of their homes and dying before they can find help.
An interesting side effect of tracking excess deaths for COVID reasons was that we saw the impact of heatwaves in mortality.
For example, Greece had its highest excess death rate of the last couple of years in August 2021 (+61% deviation from expected deaths [1]). Cyprus had similar rates. That was not due to COVID but due to an _once in a lifetime_ heatwave [2].
Here's an uncomfortable question: What happens when citizens of cities impacted by global warming decide they want (rightfully so) to move to somewhere more habitable?
Wouldn't that disrupt the global economy?
Wouldn't a large sudden migrant situation disrupt the host country?
Wouldn't the world become more volatile as the new "oil" emerges: renewable electricity and water?
The upside is that there will be more green nuclear plants but to get there I see troubles ahead. The situation in Ukraine and heat problem in Middle East and Africa facing famine. All of this feels like it's snowballing to a potentially unmangeable situation.
War, since we have not enough "fresh" places... But the worst outcome is not from humans, who can shield themselves a bit (insulated homes + heat pumps + p.v. for instance) but for natural resources, so far we have started loosing many fertile land and no new land arrive in substitute, actually we still need to eat...
This mentions studies not being done in the global South, being done in the US/Europe/China. And forgive my extreme naivety here, I've never lived South of the equator... but Buenos Aires is 3800 miles from the South pole and NYC is 3200 miles from the North pole. Aren't these fairly similar climates? Is there more to it than just distance from the nearest pole/distance from the equator?
Eh, "must" is a strong word. "Should" might be better.
I'd imagine studying climate differences might be like studying sports injuries. Some metrics would seem global ("rate of concussions") but would be pretty regional (e.g., because US plays more American Football). Some would seem regional ("rate of childhood knee sprains"), but would be pretty global (bc kids play soccer almost everywhere).
Similar thing with climate: some metrics would seem global (distance from nearest pole), but are pretty regional (bc jet streams, etc.).
In both cases, you don't HAVE to take a regional view, but it's certainly easy to draw the wrong conclusions looking globally.
A lot of climate studies, especially about impacts, have moved to regional scales. The models have improved to where that is possible, and as GP comment illustrates, these specific factors do matter. E.g., is there a problem with drought, or flooding, or heat waves, or wildfires?
As an example, the most recent US National Climate Assessment (NCA) has an extensive regional breakdown of impacts. Since you mentioned New York, here’s the chapter for US Northeast: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/18/
The regional breakdowns for the upcoming NCA (2023) will be a little finer, I think they are breaking the Great Plains into subregions.
Regional reports are worthwhile for another reason too: observant readers can link some of the changes reported in the NCA to stuff they see in their life. I live in California, and the wildfire/drought rates are obviously growing here. People in the US Midwest will notice creep of growing season, etc.
I didn’t check your numbers, but if they’re correct that’s a 600 mile difference. 600 miles south of NYC puts you in South Carolina, which has a much different climate from NY.
That's true but then let's take South Carolina instead of NY. Is there a lot more to it than to compare studies done in South Carolina to Buenos Aires if they are similar distances from the equator/poles?
Jet streams, elevation, vegetation, and topography are other large factors. Just take a look at the climates of American and European cities at similar latitudes.
Climate depends on a lot more than latitude. Madrid is at about the same latitude as New York.
But also, the climate impacts on a given society will depend on its vulnerability and coping capacity in other ways. E.g., prevalence of air conditioning, or urban vs. rural, or mix of occupations.
We need to start counting aggregate years of life lost in relative terms vs simply counting deaths. Instead of saying that a given issue will cause N deaths, state that it reduces average life expectancy by X%. If the result is less than some threshold (say 0.00001%) it should not be considered newsworthy.
I’m a huge climate person. I come from ancestors that laid down the early climate change work. But This methodology seems kind whacky. I think this kind of thing hurts our credibility in the long run.
This is uselessly dismissive and overlooks that this is one of the worst heat waves in years.
> In Argentina, temperatures in more than 50 cities rose above 40°C, more than 10°C warmer than the typical average temperature in cities such as Buenos Aires.
Saying summer is hot when people die from heat stroke is about as constructive and considerate as saying water is wet when people die in floods.
>>This is uselessly dismissive and overlooks that this is one of the worst heat waves in years.
and yet the article says that 5X as many people die on the colder days, then on the warmer days - wouldn't the average temperature going up be a net positive for temperature related deaths?
I hate articles like this - very heavy on the opinion/advocacy, and very light on any real facts.
80% of the temperature deaths are happening on the cold days, but the whole article is basically saying the temperature going up is the problem.
"" Although deaths on extremely cold days—about 785,000—were much higher than those on extremely hot days—about 103,000—overall there were more days with intense cold, which could explain this difference. """
> wouldn't the average temperature going up be a net positive for temperature related deaths?
A higher average temperature indicates higher energy, which means more chaotic weather, worse storms, more flooding, longer droughts, colder cold days and hotter hot days. As for numbers, you can roughly approximate the cause of death from the difference between an "average" day and an extremely hot or cold day. There's no need to approximate the deaths from the increasingly frequent "once in a lifetime" storms and floods.
Article also says that more people will die from extreme temps, not just high temps. It also says that climate change makes heat waves and cold fronts more extreme.
Hotter on average does not mean hotter everywhere or hotter all the time.
What’s missing from you dismissive analysis is that large swaths of the world don’t have air conditioning. There’s a limit to what a fan can do and in many parts of the world consistent access to clean drinking water is also a challenge.
It’s a very privileged perspective to scoff at these things from your air conditioned office.
> If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6%—almost 1 million—of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold.
So the 36 most extreme days out of 365 only account for 6% of all deaths? Meaning those days are safer than average?