I live in Texas. The heat wave that France is experienced this summer is like maybe 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a normal summer for us.
Preparedness for summer is deeply ingrained in everyone's minds here. Many Apartment complexes treat issues with AC units as emergency situations, reach out to on-call handymen and give high priority to their fix.
In the city of Dallas, city code requires that property owners provide refrigerated air to tenants from April 1 to Nov. 1.
"According to state law, landlords must fix any condition that threatens a tenant's health or safety. In Texas, that condition can include a sweltering day in a stuffy apartment with no air conditioning."
It is my hope that people in France look for ways to prepare and better safeguard the health and well-being of their citizens against the heat.
It doesn't make sense to have AC preparedness when it's only used for 1 week out of a year.
Also the environmental impact of everyone having an AC, that's not good.
In France and the UK hardly any has an AC because it's not really needed. Your suggestion is that they spend billions of dollars for this? Who buys everyone the AC?
I lived in PNG which is near the equator and hot. It's not the temperature that's the true problem, but humidity. We stayed cool by using the fan, resting, removing clothing, swimming.
By that logic, it doesn’t make sense to fit a building with a sprinkler system when it’s only used for one hour out of a century.
The question should be whether AC would be used much, but whether it has a net benefit. And yes, the environmental impact should be taken into account.
To me, that depends (a.o.) on whether those 1,500 excess deaths get ‘compensated’ by lower death rates just after the heat wave (which would mean many of those who died lost ‘only’ a few weeks)
It seems increasingly needed now, and is one of many profit externalities to the fossil fuel companies costing everybody else money. The fairest, and market leveraging way would be to make them pay for this.
Shell and EXON buying everyone in France an AC unit so everyone can keep driving cars around is one of the most dystopian ideas I have considered in some time.
It's not even to keep people driving cars. It's just the new normal. Even if we stopped driving today we're still going to bake Paris in the summer. The damage is already done. Think of it more like a fine for destroying the environment.
A more reasonable shortish term solution is to air condition large communal buildings and allow people to camp out overnight when the temperatures become inhospitable.
Why are cars relevant here? Weren't most of the people who died from this elderly anyway, less likely to be driving?
I think the most dystopian idea would be Exxon not paying for their crimes against humanity, but rather allowed to continue lying to the public about climate change, lobbying governments to reduce their penalties.
If you phrase it as "fossil fuel companies should pay large amounts in taxes and the government should use those taxes to help mitigate the effects of climate change" it changes from dystopian to socialism without missing a beat.
Not all dystopias are socialist, but all socialism is dystopian. (Full disclosure: I grew up in a socialist country, and this is not a kind of experience I'd recommend to anyone. Although it may be very educational to millenials who think socialism is cool.)
Air conditioning is better for the environment than heating - if the alternative is living somewhere with cooler summers and colder winters, AC saves energy.
The people of France aren't ignorant. They have just acclimated to a climate that is rapidly getting hotter.
It would be patronizing if French people offered basic advice on not building on floodplains and storm preparation after Harvey. People just plan based on their prior experiences.
My perspective is I'm much more concerned that France has to take US Gulf Coast level climate management steps in the first place. I think all the advice is good, but I don't think the problem is lack of knowledge but rather denial that the climate crisis is as bad as it is. I am not offended, sorry to both of you if it came off that way.
The use of AC in France is also quite foreign. None person in my family use one, despite them living all over the country. But go to the states or to India, and there is AC everywhere.
When I grew up in India AC was actually almost nonexistent (except for very rich people and some offices). Instead there were lots of trees, high-velocity ceiling fans, and ventilation (which is important when there's no electricity). Heatstroke/sunstroke outdoors was known, but deaths from hot conditions indoors were rare.
Today, there's fewer trees and a lot more AC. It's ironic because AC (especially inefficient window units) contributes to global warming in a big way.
There will probably be a period of adjustment here in San Francisco, CA, too. My apartment does not have an air conditioner, and neither do many (most?) other SF apartments. If people start dropping dead because of the heat here, I have no idea what the city could/would do to address that situation.
>People just plan based on their prior experiences.
That’s... pretty much the definition of ignorant. Being ignorant isn’t bad and being able to recognize what you’re ignorant of it much more important than “not being ignorant”.
And all Texas cities basically shut down with any amount of snow or ice. Imagine if there was a blizzard in Houston and some yank was like, “where are their snow plows, snow chains, heavy jackets, insulated pipes, etc?”
if 1500 people died from a sustained blizzard lasting a decidedly "abnormal" period of time would be a better equivalency. It's not like someone just turned the heat lamp on France for a day and zapped 1500 people and then turned it off. People are much better equipped to quickly respond to a catastrophic event. They're less prepared for a sustained shift of their fundamental way of experiencing life.
Texas for the most part is not prepared for blizzards or icy conditions. We do not have winter tires, we do not carry snow shovels. There are no snowplows that I have ever seen or heard of. We close schools after 1 to 2 inches of snow, and we put sand on roads.
Most people have heavy coats/jackets, but rarely ever wear them.
But despite our under-preparedness, not many people die from cold weather in Texas.
This data is a bit old(2003-2008), but is illustrative.
Arguably, the yearly flu death are related the the winter month weather. People dying from that every year are about factor 10 more then the summer heat deaths.
Its not just France, its an issue across northern/western Europe. Combine that with the difficulty of getting a proper AC installed in a rented house/apartment with normal stone walls and it explains the current lack of AC units. Most landlord will immediately be scared for the buildings substance. The few AC units that you see are those "mobile" devices with a single tube hanging out of a window. Even window units are a rare occasion because of the kind of windows installed across the country. Not to mention regulations stopping renters from changing the outer appearance of the house. I really dont see a viable plan to retrofit living spaces in a reasonable time frame. At this point i would even be doubtful, that there would be enough people capable of doing the job available.
An often overlooked point is also the situation in workplaces, some parts of Europe simply lack the worker protection needed during heatwaves.
I honestly dont see how most countries in Europe could retrofit buildings to a detectable degree, let alone finance it. There are just to many older buildings build for another kind of climate. Providing air conditioned shelters during the weeks of deadly heat sounds like the most realistic option. That would be similar to what is being done in winter to prevent people from freezing to death.
You have to understand that my apparent is older than Dallas, Installing AC would be very complicated and expensive. Adapting buildings to the changing climate will take time, rushing it could be disastrous to old buildings.
Mandatory AC is not the solution but many other solutions are being deployed. The first massive heatwave happened in 2003, it wasn't as hot as this summer but took us by surprise and caused over 15,000 death in France, around 70,000 in Europe.
Compare this to 1,500 death in the record breaking heatwave of this summer.
Maybe more appropriate topic of discussion should be how climate change affects the people of France and what can be done about it, instead of chastising them for not having Dallas housing codes.
Heck, cut right to the chase and ask how occasional high peak summer temperatures kill people and what to do about it. An old lady keeling over in an apartment isn't helped a bit by internet climate change wars.
Given the super low price of smaller window A/C units, you'd think they'd install a few more of those, maybe it's impractical for some reason. Looking at a chart showing summer highs in Paris since 1900, it would be interesting to look at a newspaper from 1948 and see what happened (the chart shows a roughly 1 C upwards change since 1900 on average, but the last couple of years are outliers similar to a few earlier heatwaves).
I've always wondered what would happen if the power went off for a day or two in Phoenix in August.
Given the construction, you cant conveniently seal an AC in there. Due to the houses being made from stone, you cant easily replace the type of windows. People also generally rent in the cities, so you would have to convince your landlord to let you screw with his outer wall, which is a big no no. Some countries like Germany also dont allow renters to change the outer appearance of a house. This mostly means no satellite dishes hung out of the window, but also no bulky ACs.
Not constructively. Zadkey essentially derided France for being unprepared for a situation for which they had no true context. If you take no issue with Zadkey's comment, then I'd assume you have no issue with the Harvey response.
They're a bit blunt, maybe, but I don't see any derision. They described factually how Texas prepares for their summer heat, and expressed hope that France can do the same now that their climate is changing.
There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control.
When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up.
> When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up.
Should you? If we take this approach, I wonder how many people rain kills. Or how many people El Nino kills.
My sense is that there are good reasons we don't speak about these kinds of things in the same terms as we speak about, say, an epidemic.
Yet if an individual person caused it by spraying water over the road they would be responsible under "eggshell patient" rules no matter how infirm the victim.
I would lean towards yes for all such considerations. If a flood plain will kill more/fewer people than desert silicosis we should keep them all in mind.
Yeah I would think if you could tease out a correlation between degrees-above-average and all-case mortality it would be an interesting and valuable statistic.
While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist.
If it's 100deg out then you shouldn't be doing things that require massive amounts of PPE. If someone dies because they were improperly clothed for the cold we wouldn't allocate all the blame the cold. If someone decides to swim in 8ft surf we wouldn't allocate all the blame to the wind. Obviously there's specific situations where the ambient temperature is more to blame than not (elderly people without air conditioning being the example that comes to mind) but you can't just lump every death that could have possibly been prevented if it were cooler in as a heat death though. Sure some of them are more heat than personal responsibility but a non-negligible amount of them are more personal responsibility than heat. People need to start thinking about heat the way they think about other severe weather (people in tropical countries already do this) because at this point the climate is going to change a substantial amount whether we like it or not. If there's gonna be a hurricane you cancel your outdoor activity unless you're fine with the risk. The same applies to a heat wave.
I know that this comment combines two things a large subset of people here generally hate but it's my opinion and I stand by it.
I grew up in the Canadian prairies where people frequently did die from the cold. If your car broke down on a lonely road in midwinter, there was a real prospect of freezing to death. People there carried extra parkas, blankets, and thermal candles, but those could only keep you warm for several hours.
If you freeze to death in -10C weather, you were improperly clothed. But if you freeze in -50C weather, there's no amount of clothing in which you can both move around and stay warm for a long time. Here's a short story by Jack London with a realistic portrayal of that kind of cold: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to.... It gave me nightmares when I read it in grade school.
Nobody blamed the cold, because cold isn't a moral agent. But if you ask people living in the North "how bad would it be if winters got 5 degrees colder?", they would certainly expect more deaths.
You can always put on more clothes and work physically during cold weather, but there is a limit on how much heat you can dissipate and more importantly social norms that affect how much clothes you can remove :-)
France population is 67 million and life expectancy is 82 years, so about 2000 people die every day.
Over the 20 days of high heat, that’s about 70 extra people per day, or about 3 percent, just to put it in perspective. What percent of ordinary deaths would we expect to get attributed to high heat? Especially among the elderly?
Disappointed in the 0% effort journalists make to put things in perspective.
No information is provided whether the rate changed, only that the deaths were attributed to heat. This is the sort of homework I would expect of the journalist
EDIT: regarding CNN, 9% doesn’t add up and the quote is vague. I know I’m crazy to expect journalists to care about numbers but it just bugs me
France/Paris has a deeper problem that comes out in these heatwaves. Older people that live alone, with little or no relatives caring for them, and living in flats without air-conditioning, or have low income/pension that they cannot afford an extended heatwave, happen to pass every summer there is a heatwave in Central Europe (which lately is more frequent). I remember hearing/reading about this every couple of years about France, and apparently not much is being done to make this stop.
Every year for 10 years, for 1 day, I would work for free and donate my salary to the French state. They had set up a fund to purchase and install air conditioning into the homes of the elderly due to the 2003 heatwave that affected 15,000.
And that is literally all I know. The money I earned goes somewhere to do something, supposedly. I'm really starting to feel like I've been defrauded because I also feel not a whole lot has been done.
I believe that this is a noble sentiment. But the bigger issue here is shouldnt just not stealing money on taxes be enough ? I cannot fathom why a lot of people have to act like heroes to get things done. EU in general doesnt seem to have a corruption problem or a moeny problem and yet the infrastructure feels lacking.
The way you worded that is insulting. Just because someone is old, has a limited budget, and no family doesn't mean they can't care for themselves. They should know the risks of heat stroke by that age. It doesn't require a lot of money to go sit in a coffee shop or buy a $100 window AC unit.
Imagine being so fragile that minor heat waves kill you.
Now imagine countries near equator, like India where many people don't have electricity 24/7 and still they don't have air-conditioning, 100s of millions of them.
Can any ethicists, tell us why we simply don't nuke Europe and kill of all these resource hungry people who are ravaging our planet?
Every single European person, consumes 20x more resources than a normal person in India.
As an American expat that has been living in Paris for the last 7 years, France could really use some AC upgrades. I couldn't survive the summers without mine.
When I lived there, I was surprised nearly none of the buildings had AC. I guess because the buildings are so old, and it is only very hot for a short time every year when most people are away on vacation, and, because it's France.
I'd just like to take a moment (in light of some of the comments here) to say that air-conditioning is neither a moral failure nor an ecological disaster.
An incentive to replace aging gas and electric heat with high efficiency modern heat-pumps that can both heat and cool is a clear ecological win.
The question is (as ever) how can we fairly deploy this society changing tech so that those who need it most don't get it last.
Note that according to https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... , which describes a study in The Lancet, "cold weather kills more than 20 times as many people as hot weather". So it kind of makes you wonder if this is something like the trolley problem - if raising the temperature sacrifices 1,500 lives to save 30,000, is it worth it?
If global warming continues on a worst-case trajectory, then large swathes of equatorial land may be uninhabitable to humans in 50 or 100 years. More than a billion people will be forced to migrate or die. If it comes to that, the death toll will be much worse than a few bad winters.
My experience with a lot of French people isn’t just “we don’t need air conditioning”.
It’s that “air conditioning makes you sick”.
Even though most EU cars now come standard with AC, my experience is that the French would rather open the windows on the autoroute than turn hit the AC.
AC is one of the biggest global warming offenders and its use should be limited to certain spaces where people in need - including elderly people - could find shelter.
Why worry when according to alarmist politicians in the U.S. we only have “12 years left”.
I find these claims, and those similar from “activists” like Greta Thunberg, wholly unproductive both to steps taken to actually curb climate change and legitimate science.
Society isn’t going to cease growing and moving forward just because of climate change. It is unfortunately a reality that must be dealt with by creation and not regression.
Even as someone who supports the idea that climate change is a very real challenge for humanity.
Society isn’t going to cease growing and moving forward just because of climate change.
I don't think that's really what anyone is suggesting, but if the change impacts enough people society as a whole will focus on fixing the problem rather than doing other things.
> I don't think that's really what anyone is suggesting
The sibling comment to yours suggesting exactly that wasn't the first, not by a long shot. US politicians have suggested everything from ending entire industries to massive increases in abortion to stop population growth. Others have suggested massive taxes to pay for health insurance and UBI so that people who don't feel like working don't have to.
"Stop moving forward" might not a common phrase, but only because their version of "forward" is fundamentally different from the current one. Stopping growth is certainly a goal of many far-left thinkers out there.
Society grew because we made laws to protect people from killing and stealing from each other. Now for society to keep growing we have to make new laws that do not allow people to kill others with pollution and its effects.
Just imagine the hilarity when a society made up of 20 billion people living efficient, highrise-dwelling, car-pooling, vegetarian, recycling kind of lives breaks down.
As opposed to what other kind of lives? Suburban and rural folks will be just as screwed when they don't have a wal-mart or a costco to get supplies from.
That's certainly many people, and it sucks if someone you know died because of the head. However, I can't tell for a population like France if this is a large number. Would love to see something like, how many people die from cold in France each year, or other environmental effects.
> However, I can't tell for a population like France if this is a large number.
Sure you can. The number should be 0 for any country regardless of size, and 1500 is a huge number compared to 0. There's no reason in our modern society, with our ability to build iPhones and measure the weather with satellites, that a single person should die from a heat wave.
It makes sense to me that in France a society (which by the way doesn't make iPhones, not sure how that applies here anyway) that has some sort of strange hang up about air conditioning would have people die of heat.
We need to stop with this ancient idea that AC is problematic against the environment. There are quite a few uninformed comments on this thread.
Just by using their AC also in the winter to heat their houses instead of traditional heating systems, these people are already having a lower CO2 footprint (even when using the AC to cool down a few weeks in the year) than people that don't use an AC.
Modern AC systems work with in inverter heat pump and are extremely efficient at cooling down and heating up a house since all they do is to move heat from one place to the other.
No, and yes. Heatwaves like the one experienced in Spain have been extraordinarily long. We experience heat waves all summers and they usually last 2-3 days. This one lasted 1 week. And last year we had 2 heat waves 5 days each. I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28. You can compare historical data here (es) http://www.aemet.es/es/idi/clima/registros_climaticos
Would people be able to physically adapt to longer periods of higer temperatures? I mean, it is around 40 degrees every day for most of the two months of hot season where I live. And a lot of people don't have air conditioning. On the hottest days they sit around in the village in the shade, drinking a lot and not moving much. Lots of complaining but we don't hear much about heat related deaths.
Adaptation works until the wet bulb temperature is above human body temperature, at which point you'll just slowly broil since you can't lose energy by sweating. Not very likely to get there in Europe, but other (hotter, wetter) countries may.
I was in Doah recently, and people live almost their entire lives indoors. We even went to the main street market after dark and it was too hot to stand without sweating. It's hard to imagine what would happen there if the temperature were to increase by even a few degrees.
I read about this wet bulb temperature thing too, but then I wondered what about saunas? Super humid, can't lose energy by sweating, hotter than human body temperature, yet people stay in them for hours? (Not me personally, I don't like saunas)
Yes of course, if the same would happen here in Dublin half of the population would be in trouble! Just kidding, it is just funny sometimes how they present the weather information, painting/coloring the numbers of the temperature as red when they get over 20C.
We have already physically adapted to different environments. People in Africa can stand higher temperatures. People in Scandinavia can withstand lower temperatures. This is what "races" are, humans adapted to their environments.
I was thinking in the short term, not on evolutionay time scales. Personally, when I moved to the tropics I sweat non-stop for about the first two years. But I seem to have adjusted and don't break much of a sweat until the temperature gets to about the mid 30's. On the other hand, I really feel the cold now when it gets below 20.
Where can I read more on this? I live in Sweden but there are plenty of African immigrants that cope with the cold just fine. I've also not had trouble in much warmer climates, but I haven't been abroad for more than three weeks at a time.
Nick Lane's book on mitochondria[1] has a section on adaptations to hot or cold places related to them. The topic is a bit more complicated than you might think and I'm pretty sure that people of any race can adapt to colder climates though the brown fat response[2].
I think that the parent commenter was being sarcastic to ridicule people who think that there being one cold winter day means that global warming isn't real.
And your buildings have been adapted for that environment. If Paris was relocated to North America it would lie a bit north of halfway between Seattle and Vancouver (Right about Bellingham, WA). Those cities would suffer quite a bit as well with long sustained temps that high.
That graph suggest that climate change has caused a 2 degree change in the last 50 year. No one believes that—the number is more like 1 degree in the last hundred.
And anyway, we’re talking about outlier heat waves, not yearly medians.
One degree globally, perhaps, but then there can be regional variation that's larger. The Washington Post just ran a long story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...) on a region in Uruguay that's been heating up more rapidly. Quoting from that article:
"Straddling the equator, the tropics are already hot because they receive the most sunlight. As the sun hits the tropics, enormous columns of air rise skyward and then outward. But as greenhouse gases trap more heat, those columns of air are pushed farther toward the north and south poles. Air that rises in the tropics falls back down over the middle latitudes. With a warming planet, though, the air is falling in different places. ... Near Uruguay, the Brazil Current collides with the cold and nutrient-rich Malvinas Current that flows north from waters off Argentina. Where the two currents meet — what is known as the “confluence” — features sudden temperature contrasts and fosters rich fisheries. But that zone, too, is on the move. Research suggests it is shifting southward at a rate of more than 40 miles per decade."
“So you know, a warming of 1 degree Celsius, which is what we’ve seen thus far, can lead to a 10-fold increase in the frequency of 100 degree days in New York City for example,” said Dr. Mann. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, since the 1960s the average number of heat waves — defined as two or more consecutive days where daily lows exceeded historical July and August temperatures — in 50 major American cities has tripled.
This quote by itself doesn't mean much because the definition of heat wave is arbitrary. It could just be a mathematical consequence of moving the mean 1 degree.
I live in Texas. The heat wave that France is experienced this summer is like maybe 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a normal summer for us.
Preparedness for summer is deeply ingrained in everyone's minds here. Many Apartment complexes treat issues with AC units as emergency situations, reach out to on-call handymen and give high priority to their fix.
In the city of Dallas, city code requires that property owners provide refrigerated air to tenants from April 1 to Nov. 1.
"According to state law, landlords must fix any condition that threatens a tenant's health or safety. In Texas, that condition can include a sweltering day in a stuffy apartment with no air conditioning."
It is my hope that people in France look for ways to prepare and better safeguard the health and well-being of their citizens against the heat.
Some information taken from https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2009/10/07/dm...
It doesn't make sense to have AC preparedness when it's only used for 1 week out of a year.
Also the environmental impact of everyone having an AC, that's not good.
In France and the UK hardly any has an AC because it's not really needed. Your suggestion is that they spend billions of dollars for this? Who buys everyone the AC?
I lived in PNG which is near the equator and hot. It's not the temperature that's the true problem, but humidity. We stayed cool by using the fan, resting, removing clothing, swimming.
By that logic, it doesn’t make sense to fit a building with a sprinkler system when it’s only used for one hour out of a century.
The question should be whether AC would be used much, but whether it has a net benefit. And yes, the environmental impact should be taken into account.
To me, that depends (a.o.) on whether those 1,500 excess deaths get ‘compensated’ by lower death rates just after the heat wave (which would mean many of those who died lost ‘only’ a few weeks)
Many areas around the world have storm shelters or bomb shelters.
Perhaps laws requiring community centers also function as temperature extreme shelters could be instated.
The laws would have to also provide funding to install and maintain AC and Heating systems suitable for the population around that area.
Additionally, if a business doesn't have AC or heating during extreme temperature alerts, it should close for the safety of the workers.
It seems increasingly needed now, and is one of many profit externalities to the fossil fuel companies costing everybody else money. The fairest, and market leveraging way would be to make them pay for this.
Shell and EXON buying everyone in France an AC unit so everyone can keep driving cars around is one of the most dystopian ideas I have considered in some time.
It's not even to keep people driving cars. It's just the new normal. Even if we stopped driving today we're still going to bake Paris in the summer. The damage is already done. Think of it more like a fine for destroying the environment.
A more reasonable shortish term solution is to air condition large communal buildings and allow people to camp out overnight when the temperatures become inhospitable.
Why are cars relevant here? Weren't most of the people who died from this elderly anyway, less likely to be driving?
I think the most dystopian idea would be Exxon not paying for their crimes against humanity, but rather allowed to continue lying to the public about climate change, lobbying governments to reduce their penalties.
If you phrase it as "fossil fuel companies should pay large amounts in taxes and the government should use those taxes to help mitigate the effects of climate change" it changes from dystopian to socialism without missing a beat.
Not all dystopias are socialist, but all socialism is dystopian. (Full disclosure: I grew up in a socialist country, and this is not a kind of experience I'd recommend to anyone. Although it may be very educational to millenials who think socialism is cool.)
> It doesn't make sense to have AC preparedness when it's only used for 1 week out of a year.
If that one week a year can kill people, still think it doesn't make sense?
Air conditioning is better for the environment than heating - if the alternative is living somewhere with cooler summers and colder winters, AC saves energy.
Does it make sense for residents in area where hurricanes occur to keep a generator in their garage?
> In France and the UK hardly any has an AC because it's not really needed
Thousands of people just died. It is clearly needed.
people don't die from the heat. they die from being old.
The people of France aren't ignorant. They have just acclimated to a climate that is rapidly getting hotter.
It would be patronizing if French people offered basic advice on not building on floodplains and storm preparation after Harvey. People just plan based on their prior experiences.
Im from Belgium and like France we are completely unprepared when it comes to these summers.
The Texas model offers some good ideas to think about. Why must you get so offended, I didn’t.
My perspective is I'm much more concerned that France has to take US Gulf Coast level climate management steps in the first place. I think all the advice is good, but I don't think the problem is lack of knowledge but rather denial that the climate crisis is as bad as it is. I am not offended, sorry to both of you if it came off that way.
Ah so it's the fault of the US for France's heatwave?
If it's related to climate change, then definitely yes.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
US responsible for about a quarter of cumulative CO2 emissions, and has been #1 since about 1911.
China is emitting more now, but cumulative emissions are only half as much.
And France has done its best to invest in nuclear power.
Clearly not what he meant. One shit comment doesn't need to beget another.
No they go on holiday in august - the last time this happened it was mostly older people who stayed behind in the city who died.
The use of AC in France is also quite foreign. None person in my family use one, despite them living all over the country. But go to the states or to India, and there is AC everywhere.
When I grew up in India AC was actually almost nonexistent (except for very rich people and some offices). Instead there were lots of trees, high-velocity ceiling fans, and ventilation (which is important when there's no electricity). Heatstroke/sunstroke outdoors was known, but deaths from hot conditions indoors were rare.
Today, there's fewer trees and a lot more AC. It's ironic because AC (especially inefficient window units) contributes to global warming in a big way.
There will probably be a period of adjustment here in San Francisco, CA, too. My apartment does not have an air conditioner, and neither do many (most?) other SF apartments. If people start dropping dead because of the heat here, I have no idea what the city could/would do to address that situation.
Being on the Pacific will moderate the chances of that; and give you somewhere to chill.
More EU major cities are in-land than US (something about war after war), so there’s less ability to cool off.
And less moderating circulating waters.
>People just plan based on their prior experiences.
That’s... pretty much the definition of ignorant. Being ignorant isn’t bad and being able to recognize what you’re ignorant of it much more important than “not being ignorant”.
And all Texas cities basically shut down with any amount of snow or ice. Imagine if there was a blizzard in Houston and some yank was like, “where are their snow plows, snow chains, heavy jackets, insulated pipes, etc?”
If 1500 people died from a blizzard, it would be a reasonable response to suggest that those kind of things would be a good idea.
if 1500 people died from a sustained blizzard lasting a decidedly "abnormal" period of time would be a better equivalency. It's not like someone just turned the heat lamp on France for a day and zapped 1500 people and then turned it off. People are much better equipped to quickly respond to a catastrophic event. They're less prepared for a sustained shift of their fundamental way of experiencing life.
This is true.
Texas for the most part is not prepared for blizzards or icy conditions. We do not have winter tires, we do not carry snow shovels. There are no snowplows that I have ever seen or heard of. We close schools after 1 to 2 inches of snow, and we put sand on roads.
Most people have heavy coats/jackets, but rarely ever wear them. But despite our under-preparedness, not many people die from cold weather in Texas.
This data is a bit old(2003-2008), but is illustrative.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/Hotcolddths/hotcolddths...
Arguably, the yearly flu death are related the the winter month weather. People dying from that every year are about factor 10 more then the summer heat deaths.
> * “where are their snow plows, snow chains, heavy jackets, insulated pipes, etc?”*
I live in Houston. When it snows here we will sometimes see sand trucks driving around. They come down from North.
You can't just truck in AC though so I think your example is like comparing apples to oranges.
In France it's very very uncommon to have AC.
Its not just France, its an issue across northern/western Europe. Combine that with the difficulty of getting a proper AC installed in a rented house/apartment with normal stone walls and it explains the current lack of AC units. Most landlord will immediately be scared for the buildings substance. The few AC units that you see are those "mobile" devices with a single tube hanging out of a window. Even window units are a rare occasion because of the kind of windows installed across the country. Not to mention regulations stopping renters from changing the outer appearance of the house. I really dont see a viable plan to retrofit living spaces in a reasonable time frame. At this point i would even be doubtful, that there would be enough people capable of doing the job available.
An often overlooked point is also the situation in workplaces, some parts of Europe simply lack the worker protection needed during heatwaves.
I honestly dont see how most countries in Europe could retrofit buildings to a detectable degree, let alone finance it. There are just to many older buildings build for another kind of climate. Providing air conditioned shelters during the weeks of deadly heat sounds like the most realistic option. That would be similar to what is being done in winter to prevent people from freezing to death.
Many supermarkets have AC (here in the Netherlands), and I seriously considered camping out in one for a bit during the heat a few weeks ago...
You have to understand that my apparent is older than Dallas, Installing AC would be very complicated and expensive. Adapting buildings to the changing climate will take time, rushing it could be disastrous to old buildings.
Mandatory AC is not the solution but many other solutions are being deployed. The first massive heatwave happened in 2003, it wasn't as hot as this summer but took us by surprise and caused over 15,000 death in France, around 70,000 in Europe. Compare this to 1,500 death in the record breaking heatwave of this summer.
Maybe more appropriate topic of discussion should be how climate change affects the people of France and what can be done about it, instead of chastising them for not having Dallas housing codes.
Heck, cut right to the chase and ask how occasional high peak summer temperatures kill people and what to do about it. An old lady keeling over in an apartment isn't helped a bit by internet climate change wars.
Given the super low price of smaller window A/C units, you'd think they'd install a few more of those, maybe it's impractical for some reason. Looking at a chart showing summer highs in Paris since 1900, it would be interesting to look at a newspaper from 1948 and see what happened (the chart shows a roughly 1 C upwards change since 1900 on average, but the last couple of years are outliers similar to a few earlier heatwaves).
I've always wondered what would happen if the power went off for a day or two in Phoenix in August.
>I've always wondered what would happen if the power went off for a day or two in Phoenix in August.
The same as the power going off in Minneapolis in the middle of January. It’s treated as a crisis by the utility.
>Given the super low price of smaller window A/C units, you'd think they'd install a few more of those, maybe it's impractical for some reason.
In Europe you generally have another kind of window, which you tilt.
https://www.bew24-fenster.de/media/catalog/category/Kat_Kuns...
https://www.plejadium.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/kippfens...
Given the construction, you cant conveniently seal an AC in there. Due to the houses being made from stone, you cant easily replace the type of windows. People also generally rent in the cities, so you would have to convince your landlord to let you screw with his outer wall, which is a big no no. Some countries like Germany also dont allow renters to change the outer appearance of a house. This mostly means no satellite dishes hung out of the window, but also no bulky ACs.
> Maybe more appropriate topic of discussion should be how climate change affects the people of France and what can be done about it
That's what Zadkey was doing, though.
Not constructively. Zadkey essentially derided France for being unprepared for a situation for which they had no true context. If you take no issue with Zadkey's comment, then I'd assume you have no issue with the Harvey response.
They're a bit blunt, maybe, but I don't see any derision. They described factually how Texas prepares for their summer heat, and expressed hope that France can do the same now that their climate is changing.
There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control.
When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up.
> When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up.
Should you? If we take this approach, I wonder how many people rain kills. Or how many people El Nino kills.
My sense is that there are good reasons we don't speak about these kinds of things in the same terms as we speak about, say, an epidemic.
Yet if an individual person caused it by spraying water over the road they would be responsible under "eggshell patient" rules no matter how infirm the victim.
I would lean towards yes for all such considerations. If a flood plain will kill more/fewer people than desert silicosis we should keep them all in mind.
Yeah I would think if you could tease out a correlation between degrees-above-average and all-case mortality it would be an interesting and valuable statistic.
While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist.
If it's 100deg out then you shouldn't be doing things that require massive amounts of PPE. If someone dies because they were improperly clothed for the cold we wouldn't allocate all the blame the cold. If someone decides to swim in 8ft surf we wouldn't allocate all the blame to the wind. Obviously there's specific situations where the ambient temperature is more to blame than not (elderly people without air conditioning being the example that comes to mind) but you can't just lump every death that could have possibly been prevented if it were cooler in as a heat death though. Sure some of them are more heat than personal responsibility but a non-negligible amount of them are more personal responsibility than heat. People need to start thinking about heat the way they think about other severe weather (people in tropical countries already do this) because at this point the climate is going to change a substantial amount whether we like it or not. If there's gonna be a hurricane you cancel your outdoor activity unless you're fine with the risk. The same applies to a heat wave.
I know that this comment combines two things a large subset of people here generally hate but it's my opinion and I stand by it.
I grew up in the Canadian prairies where people frequently did die from the cold. If your car broke down on a lonely road in midwinter, there was a real prospect of freezing to death. People there carried extra parkas, blankets, and thermal candles, but those could only keep you warm for several hours.
If you freeze to death in -10C weather, you were improperly clothed. But if you freeze in -50C weather, there's no amount of clothing in which you can both move around and stay warm for a long time. Here's a short story by Jack London with a realistic portrayal of that kind of cold: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to.... It gave me nightmares when I read it in grade school.
Nobody blamed the cold, because cold isn't a moral agent. But if you ask people living in the North "how bad would it be if winters got 5 degrees colder?", they would certainly expect more deaths.
That's a powerful story... dang.
You can always put on more clothes and work physically during cold weather, but there is a limit on how much heat you can dissipate and more importantly social norms that affect how much clothes you can remove :-)
France population is 67 million and life expectancy is 82 years, so about 2000 people die every day.
Over the 20 days of high heat, that’s about 70 extra people per day, or about 3 percent, just to put it in perspective. What percent of ordinary deaths would we expect to get attributed to high heat? Especially among the elderly?
Disappointed in the 0% effort journalists make to put things in perspective.
I would consider a 3% increase in mortality rate to be quite alarming.
No information is provided whether the rate changed, only that the deaths were attributed to heat. This is the sort of homework I would expect of the journalist
EDIT: regarding CNN, 9% doesn’t add up and the quote is vague. I know I’m crazy to expect journalists to care about numbers but it just bugs me
CNN's reporting was better: https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/08/europe/france-heat-wave-death...
They report that the mortality rate was 9% higher than baseline during the heat wave.
what about mortality rate after? probably lower than baseline as well
> half of those who died were aged over 75
France/Paris has a deeper problem that comes out in these heatwaves. Older people that live alone, with little or no relatives caring for them, and living in flats without air-conditioning, or have low income/pension that they cannot afford an extended heatwave, happen to pass every summer there is a heatwave in Central Europe (which lately is more frequent). I remember hearing/reading about this every couple of years about France, and apparently not much is being done to make this stop.
Every year for 10 years, for 1 day, I would work for free and donate my salary to the French state. They had set up a fund to purchase and install air conditioning into the homes of the elderly due to the 2003 heatwave that affected 15,000.
And that is literally all I know. The money I earned goes somewhere to do something, supposedly. I'm really starting to feel like I've been defrauded because I also feel not a whole lot has been done.
I believe that this is a noble sentiment. But the bigger issue here is shouldnt just not stealing money on taxes be enough ? I cannot fathom why a lot of people have to act like heroes to get things done. EU in general doesnt seem to have a corruption problem or a moeny problem and yet the infrastructure feels lacking.
Parts of EU have enormous corruption and (partly as a consequence of corruption) money problems.
Here's the English Wikipedia page related to that workday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journ%C3%A9e_de_solidarit%C3%A...
The money is paid to the CNSA, which has a 26.812 billion euros budget for 2019, according to https://www.cnsa.fr/budget-et-financement/budget#le-budget-2...
it reduced the death toll by 90%, possibly more if you take into account population growth
Any thoughts about the other 118 days you work for free and donate your salary to the French state?
The way you worded that is insulting. Just because someone is old, has a limited budget, and no family doesn't mean they can't care for themselves. They should know the risks of heat stroke by that age. It doesn't require a lot of money to go sit in a coffee shop or buy a $100 window AC unit.
Imagine being so fragile that minor heat waves kill you.
Now imagine countries near equator, like India where many people don't have electricity 24/7 and still they don't have air-conditioning, 100s of millions of them.
Can any ethicists, tell us why we simply don't nuke Europe and kill of all these resource hungry people who are ravaging our planet?
Every single European person, consumes 20x more resources than a normal person in India.
Why are these Europeans so dillusional?
For comparison last winter 13,000 died of influenza in France
https://www.connexionfrance.com/Practical/Health/Flu-killed-...
This is a vast improvement over previous heat waves where 15k died in 2003 France.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
At least it’s taken seriously rather than “it doesn’t get hot here and it will pass”.
As an American expat that has been living in Paris for the last 7 years, France could really use some AC upgrades. I couldn't survive the summers without mine.
When I lived there, I was surprised nearly none of the buildings had AC. I guess because the buildings are so old, and it is only very hot for a short time every year when most people are away on vacation, and, because it's France.
I'd just like to take a moment (in light of some of the comments here) to say that air-conditioning is neither a moral failure nor an ecological disaster.
An incentive to replace aging gas and electric heat with high efficiency modern heat-pumps that can both heat and cool is a clear ecological win.
The question is (as ever) how can we fairly deploy this society changing tech so that those who need it most don't get it last.
Note that according to https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... , which describes a study in The Lancet, "cold weather kills more than 20 times as many people as hot weather". So it kind of makes you wonder if this is something like the trolley problem - if raising the temperature sacrifices 1,500 lives to save 30,000, is it worth it?
If global warming continues on a worst-case trajectory, then large swathes of equatorial land may be uninhabitable to humans in 50 or 100 years. More than a billion people will be forced to migrate or die. If it comes to that, the death toll will be much worse than a few bad winters.
Not nearly as much as the 2003 heat wave; which took almost fifteen thousand lives in France alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
The 2006 heatwave was as bad as 2003 but people were better prepared so not as many died.
My experience with a lot of French people isn’t just “we don’t need air conditioning”.
It’s that “air conditioning makes you sick”.
Even though most EU cars now come standard with AC, my experience is that the French would rather open the windows on the autoroute than turn hit the AC.
France is rich country and AC might be considered in people from certain age
It's not the first heat wave and from the speed the global warning is heading, we might see many more heat waves in the near future
AC is one of the biggest global warming offenders and its use should be limited to certain spaces where people in need - including elderly people - could find shelter.
Why worry when according to alarmist politicians in the U.S. we only have “12 years left”.
I find these claims, and those similar from “activists” like Greta Thunberg, wholly unproductive both to steps taken to actually curb climate change and legitimate science.
Society isn’t going to cease growing and moving forward just because of climate change. It is unfortunately a reality that must be dealt with by creation and not regression.
Even as someone who supports the idea that climate change is a very real challenge for humanity.
It might be worth considering that society shouldn't keep growing. Eventually we will outstrip the planet's ability to sustain us.
Society isn’t going to cease growing and moving forward just because of climate change.
I don't think that's really what anyone is suggesting, but if the change impacts enough people society as a whole will focus on fixing the problem rather than doing other things.
> I don't think that's really what anyone is suggesting
The sibling comment to yours suggesting exactly that wasn't the first, not by a long shot. US politicians have suggested everything from ending entire industries to massive increases in abortion to stop population growth. Others have suggested massive taxes to pay for health insurance and UBI so that people who don't feel like working don't have to.
"Stop moving forward" might not a common phrase, but only because their version of "forward" is fundamentally different from the current one. Stopping growth is certainly a goal of many far-left thinkers out there.
Society grew because we made laws to protect people from killing and stealing from each other. Now for society to keep growing we have to make new laws that do not allow people to kill others with pollution and its effects.
Just imagine the hilarity when a society made up of 20 billion people living efficient, highrise-dwelling, car-pooling, vegetarian, recycling kind of lives breaks down.
As opposed to what other kind of lives? Suburban and rural folks will be just as screwed when they don't have a wal-mart or a costco to get supplies from.
That's certainly many people, and it sucks if someone you know died because of the head. However, I can't tell for a population like France if this is a large number. Would love to see something like, how many people die from cold in France each year, or other environmental effects.
> However, I can't tell for a population like France if this is a large number.
Sure you can. The number should be 0 for any country regardless of size, and 1500 is a huge number compared to 0. There's no reason in our modern society, with our ability to build iPhones and measure the weather with satellites, that a single person should die from a heat wave.
No I can't.
That was unconvincing to me.
It makes sense to me that in France a society (which by the way doesn't make iPhones, not sure how that applies here anyway) that has some sort of strange hang up about air conditioning would have people die of heat.
We need to stop with this ancient idea that AC is problematic against the environment. There are quite a few uninformed comments on this thread.
Just by using their AC also in the winter to heat their houses instead of traditional heating systems, these people are already having a lower CO2 footprint (even when using the AC to cool down a few weeks in the year) than people that don't use an AC.
Modern AC systems work with in inverter heat pump and are extremely efficient at cooling down and heating up a house since all they do is to move heat from one place to the other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning
Funny thing is, the record high temperatures on France were LOWER than regular temperatures in several cities in Brazil.
Europe needs to get into the culture of air conditioning, cooling centers, and LARGE iced drinks.
> Why is it so hot and is climate change to blame?
No. No more than a cold day in winter means that climate change isn’t real.
No, and yes. Heatwaves like the one experienced in Spain have been extraordinarily long. We experience heat waves all summers and they usually last 2-3 days. This one lasted 1 week. And last year we had 2 heat waves 5 days each. I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28. You can compare historical data here (es) http://www.aemet.es/es/idi/clima/registros_climaticos
You can look at the median yearly temperature and see how it is steadily increasing http://www.aemet.es/imagenes_gcd/idi/clima/registros_climati...
Would people be able to physically adapt to longer periods of higer temperatures? I mean, it is around 40 degrees every day for most of the two months of hot season where I live. And a lot of people don't have air conditioning. On the hottest days they sit around in the village in the shade, drinking a lot and not moving much. Lots of complaining but we don't hear much about heat related deaths.
Adaptation works until the wet bulb temperature is above human body temperature, at which point you'll just slowly broil since you can't lose energy by sweating. Not very likely to get there in Europe, but other (hotter, wetter) countries may.
I was in Doah recently, and people live almost their entire lives indoors. We even went to the main street market after dark and it was too hot to stand without sweating. It's hard to imagine what would happen there if the temperature were to increase by even a few degrees.
I read about this wet bulb temperature thing too, but then I wondered what about saunas? Super humid, can't lose energy by sweating, hotter than human body temperature, yet people stay in them for hours? (Not me personally, I don't like saunas)
Yes of course, if the same would happen here in Dublin half of the population would be in trouble! Just kidding, it is just funny sometimes how they present the weather information, painting/coloring the numbers of the temperature as red when they get over 20C.
We have already physically adapted to different environments. People in Africa can stand higher temperatures. People in Scandinavia can withstand lower temperatures. This is what "races" are, humans adapted to their environments.
I was thinking in the short term, not on evolutionay time scales. Personally, when I moved to the tropics I sweat non-stop for about the first two years. But I seem to have adjusted and don't break much of a sweat until the temperature gets to about the mid 30's. On the other hand, I really feel the cold now when it gets below 20.
Where can I read more on this? I live in Sweden but there are plenty of African immigrants that cope with the cold just fine. I've also not had trouble in much warmer climates, but I haven't been abroad for more than three weeks at a time.
Nick Lane's book on mitochondria[1] has a section on adaptations to hot or cold places related to them. The topic is a bit more complicated than you might think and I'm pretty sure that people of any race can adapt to colder climates though the brown fat response[2].
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39001.Power_Sex_Suicide?...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue
I think that the parent commenter was being sarcastic to ridicule people who think that there being one cold winter day means that global warming isn't real.
Sufficiently advanced denialism is indistinguishable of satire of said denialism.
Meaningless as written.
> I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28.
Where I come from that's not called a heat wave that's called summer.
And your buildings have been adapted for that environment. If Paris was relocated to North America it would lie a bit north of halfway between Seattle and Vancouver (Right about Bellingham, WA). Those cities would suffer quite a bit as well with long sustained temps that high.
That graph suggest that climate change has caused a 2 degree change in the last 50 year. No one believes that—the number is more like 1 degree in the last hundred.
And anyway, we’re talking about outlier heat waves, not yearly medians.
One degree globally, perhaps, but then there can be regional variation that's larger. The Washington Post just ran a long story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...) on a region in Uruguay that's been heating up more rapidly. Quoting from that article:
"Straddling the equator, the tropics are already hot because they receive the most sunlight. As the sun hits the tropics, enormous columns of air rise skyward and then outward. But as greenhouse gases trap more heat, those columns of air are pushed farther toward the north and south poles. Air that rises in the tropics falls back down over the middle latitudes. With a warming planet, though, the air is falling in different places. ... Near Uruguay, the Brazil Current collides with the cold and nutrient-rich Malvinas Current that flows north from waters off Argentina. Where the two currents meet — what is known as the “confluence” — features sudden temperature contrasts and fosters rich fisheries. But that zone, too, is on the move. Research suggests it is shifting southward at a rate of more than 40 miles per decade."
The frequency of unusually hot days is going up dramatically because of climate change.
[citation needed]
“So you know, a warming of 1 degree Celsius, which is what we’ve seen thus far, can lead to a 10-fold increase in the frequency of 100 degree days in New York City for example,” said Dr. Mann. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, since the 1960s the average number of heat waves — defined as two or more consecutive days where daily lows exceeded historical July and August temperatures — in 50 major American cities has tripled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/climate/heatwave-climate-...
You pasted a quote of Michael Mann, aka the hockey stick guy, a known scientific fraud.
Doing things like that is why people don't believe alarmists and the NYT anymore.
If you think the entire discipline of climatology is a fraud that's fine but mainstream climatology says that the hockey stick graph was accurate.
This quote by itself doesn't mean much because the definition of heat wave is arbitrary. It could just be a mathematical consequence of moving the mean 1 degree.
So the more informative phrasing is that the same number of heatwaves will happen, but they’ll be one degree warmer.
Literally 30s of googling: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_17/
Last week people on HN didn't like air-conditioners.
Could we get a coherent thought process going, or is it just jump on the latest dopamine buzz.
Either they are everywhere in society and incidents like this are reduced.
Or old people die.
I'm 100% for better efficiency in buildings, as is everyone, but this is not what the anti-air-conditioner league want.
They want buildings designed to work without them, a different idea, you can't just kick an air-conditioner on when you hit the 1 in a 1000 hot days.
PS The cold kills more people, but outside of deaths from hypothermia (a small %) it's not talked about as much.