Global mortality burden attributable to non-optimal temperatures
They report that 2.98% of deaths globally could be attributed to non-optimal temperatures in 2019; 2.37% of deaths from low temperatures and 0.63% of deaths from high temperatures.
Yup. No one wants to talk about this though. We need to get cheap reliable energy to as many people as quickly as possible to help prevent this. Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear.
Similarly, a lot of people think it's inherently wasteful (at least in terms of climate change-related sensitivities) to live in the southern US where it's commonly accepted to run air conditioning for many months of the year, whereas nobody blinks twice at the number of oil-fired furnaces in New England.
Or wood-fired, surprisingly common still in parts of Europe.
Related, but sad news is e.g. in Hungary, they removed protection from basically all forests to be used as firewood. We will pay dearly for this hubris.
Can you imagine chopping up Redwood national park for firewood? This is what is happening currently in Europe.
What would you have Hungarians do? The comment above yours seems to suggest that it's ecologically irresponsible to live in hot climates where AC is required, but also ecologically irresponsible to live in cold climates where heating is required. Hungary has a temperate climate, but the summers there still get dangerously hot, and the winters dangerously cold.
Why did Hungary remove protection for forests to allow people to collect firewood? Presumably because they think it's necessary. So what would you have them do instead, abandon their country?
They had a policy of freezing energy prices at 2013 prices, in 2013. This limit was removed after 9 years, in the first of September of this year. Since then, prices increased tenfold, so households are receiving shock bills. On average hungarians lived their lives incredibly wasteful, leaving lights on all the time, because it was dirt cheap. They never invested anything in renewables, because it didn't matter. They thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it eventually caught up to them.
I remember literally all my friends 'back home' outright mocking me how much more I spend on electricity. Their only trump card was always, "yeah but life here is so cheap!"
This winter I can guarantee you we will see people burn their furniture and household trash to stay warm.
As to what they should be doing, well, I'm not an energy policy specialist, but every other country in Europe is able to solve this situation without chopping down their protected forests, so there must be some other ways.
For people who have studied the history of how countries and their leadership make decisions, even just superficially (eg, you've followed the news for 20 years), this is actually a very strange presumption.
It is historically just as plausible that it's not thought necessary for society as a whole, but is simply profitable for some special interest, such as (just an example, not an actual suggestion) a large forest land owner.
I thought this was obvious, unless one is very young still or one has never taken any interest in history or current events.
How do you think Hungarians should heat their homes this winter?
Not, 'What could they have done five years ago?' or 'What could they do five years from now?' I want to know how Hungarians can heat their homes 5 months from now. That's the question the government of Hungary is forced to address.
Since burning forests to heat homes is not sustainable nor renewable (at a timescale that makes sense), it's not a rational solution. What will they do 5 years from now (or however many years that all forests are gone)?
> What will they do 5 years from now (or however many years that all forests are gone)?
Solar panels and heat pumps seem like a good long-term solution, but that can't be done in time to keep people warm this winter. So for this winter, what would you have them do? Freeze? Travel back in time a few years and come up with a better solution?
Same in rich Austria. I saw many apartments around the million euro ballpark in the older posh city center buildings, that are still heated by firewood stoves and many countryside houses are still heated by oil. Heat pumps? Ha! Never saw them anywhere around here.
It all feels incredibly dirty and inefficient to me for such a rich country.
*) Depending on time and location of course, but it's the case surprisingly often.
As a Swede, the more I learn about about how central Europe has been heating their homes the more disgusted I become. Like, the way e.g. Germany seems to think of burning gas as "clean". I mean, maybe compared to coal, but... you shut down nuclear plants with a plan to replace with (Russian) gas? You do understand burning this causes CO2 emissions, right?
That was the many-billion-Euro German green energy revolution your environmentalists wouldn't stop talking about a decade ago?
And now our electricity in southern Sweden (which is what we generally use to heat our houses, in contrast to most of Europe, since it used to be very cheap and clean here, just a year ago. Most use an air-to-air/water heat pump or three) is insane costly, because of a combination of idiotic leftist politicans/voters also shutting down nuclear plants while at the same time building export power connections to Europe.
It's like everyone is doing the opposite of what's sane. /rant over
Germany actually didn't plan to replace nuclear with gas, it wanted to replace nuclear with renewables+gas (later to be replaced by electrolysis). It was of course unfortunate for the climate to shut down the nuclear plants before shutting down the lignite plants.
Those export connections are there to benefit Germany industry who basically shut down some domestic production, because "green", and is instead importing its deficit from the others, raising the prices for everyone.
Portugal and Spain together are the only ones not connected to the shared grid and now have the cheapest energy prices in Europe, with Germany mumbling about it that this should change. Well done guys.
That would be something us in the north would need right now. Most house owners need like 1500-2000 kWh/month in the 6 cold winter months (november-april). With projected prices, we're looking at average family heating costs around EUR 1000-1500/month for 6 months. It will be extremely tough for homes with a single income. (That's about all of the average monthly pension.)
At the moment this is leading to a quite a lot of resentment towards the EU (and Germany) here amongst people.
Yes, it is insane and it makes clear once more the only real solution to this conundrum it to become as much energy independent as possible. We heat our house with two wood-burning stoves - a 4.5 kW one in the kitchen ('vedspis' or wood-burning kitchen stove, another item the 'green' party wanted to ban by the way) and a 12 kW one in the living room. The large brick chimney warms up the second floor together with some venting to release warm air to move upstairs at the end of the evening. With 15 kW of solar panels on one of the barn roofs we're set for the months the sun makes itself known but in winter that doesn't help all that much which is why I'm looking into developing a combined heat-power system for small-scale (domestic, farm) use to solve the power + heat problem when there is no sun to be had.
Even if the nuclear plants the 'greens' forced to shut down were started again this probably will not bring down the power prices very much since the demand from neighbouring states will keep them up. As an aside and since you're in the south, would you have any idea why the wind park at Lillgrund (off the coast of Malmö) is not being used [1] when power costs 5.70 SEK/kWh? It is not because of a lack of wind as the linked video - which is taken from a boat sailing at ~8 knots past the wind park - clearly shows.
The winter is coming. Despite global warming, somebody (starts with U, ends with S) will make a pretty penny. It will teach those EU socialists (healthcare, education, functional public transport) how to do business. Fixing somebody's problem that you yourself created--Godfather would be proud.
> Europe essentially banned cheap energy sources. The winter is coming. Despite global warming, somebody (starts with U, ends with S) will make a pretty penny.
Ah yes, the country of Urussias. Or perhaps you mean Unorways. Or Ualgerias? Or Usaudi Arabias?
"The tug of war between Europe and the biggest buyers in North Asia caused the price of LNG to soar, and contributed to a quadrupling of European benchmark gas prices between the start of 2022 and late August."
That graphic needs to be updated to reflect an entirely different new world, it’s from 2016, the same year the US lifted a 40 year old ban on oil & gas exports.
It’s now the largest LNG exporter in the world in 2022, though that hardly benefits the country directly in terms of making a pretty penny.
EU imports of US LNG eclipsed monthly Russian pipeline output as recently as June.
These figures will be updated to reflect an entirely different new world. They’re from 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe’s energy supply was dramatically changed at both ends.
Natural gas in the EU is generally used to heat homes and power industry, it and other sources of energy aren’t immediately fungible.
I don’t subscribe to realism and don’t personally blame anyone but Russia and the EU member energy policies responsible for this situation unlike the Russian sympathetic commenter you originally responded to, but using pre war figures on top of pre export ban statistics does border closely on disingenuity given how loudly and rapidly changes have been occurring in 2022.
Knock Russia off those lists and America still isn't close to the largest source of energy imported by the EU. Even for somebody inclined to conspiracy beliefs, why blame the US instead of Norway? Because he has a grudge against America, obviously.
Keeping your house at 80F when its 115F outside would seem to use less energy than keeping your house at 60F when it is -1F out. Maybe humidity makes it closer to even? For me one bill was gas and one was electric, so harder to compare. I'll ask some coworkers with only a heat pump.
Part of it is everything creates waste heat - so a well insulated house can take a looooong time to cool (my furnace died in the winter and I didn’t notice for over a week).
And you can survive “unaided” quite low (sleeping bags rated to -30°?) but there is a heat point where you die if you cannot escape it somehow.
If the humidity is high enough, it can take it past even. But you won't find that out by comparing summer and winter numbers in the same location, because there aren't a significant number of locations that have both summer and winter conditions severe enough to push the numbers. You would want to compare, say, Canada in winter with south Florida or south Texas in summer (or, for even more extreme, northern Scandinavia in winter with southeast Asia or equatorial Africa in summer).
Scandinavia in winter won't usually be a heat pump to air though right? Don't they heatpump from geothermal?
Even just locally here the 25 degree F differential with ~50% relative humidity in summer would be interesting to compare to the 60 degree F differential in winter. Maybe those ultra efficient hygroscopic dehumidifiers will finally enter production.
And heat pumping to geothermal for summer might help too. I know some people locally do that. Big investment though.
Sweden can range from -25 to 35 °C. Heat pumps are common, both downhole heat exchangers (rock heat we call it) and air source heat pumps, among home owners.
Central heating is also common and often heated by garbage.
An elected official is by definition not neutral. I think representative government is as good as it gets, but it will never be neutral or bereft of politics.
> Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear.
That's a misinterpretation. Those are global numbers. Those people dying are dying primarily from exposure due to housing shortfalls, it's not an energy distribution problem. And it's absolutely not a problem due to (as you seem to imply) inappropriate regulation of fuels, which isn't happening anywhere anyway.
If you want to keep these people alive then cut a check to a global housing construction NGO. Letting GE build a reactor or BP dill a well does nothing.
I would prefer that we consider power efficient housing first. Use more insulation and less energy to keep comfortable temperatures inside never-mind if it's too cold or too hot outside.
Modern building codes in most developed countries already require good power efficiency in terms of insulation and climate control systems. However, we have a huge stock of less efficient buildings that will take decades to replace or update.
Stricter building codes and other mandates to improve efficiency will also increase housing costs at a time when many people are struggling to afford a home at all. Efficiency pays back in the long term but the capital expenses are painful in the short term.
At least in the US, this could be helped by getting rid of SFH zoning so that buildings would occasionally replaced rather than continually remodeled in ways that mostly dress up the underlying building.
Is it really preventable though? Isn’t it pretty much a basic law of nature that resources will be consumed maximally? If you increase the amount of available energy, it too will be used up until a point where people on the fringes are left wanting. Not sure how you solve that short of some version of population control.
That is often true, but isn't necessarily always true, and certainly not always true for every resource. Total electricity use in the US has been fairly flat for the past 20 years, and that's despite increasing in population by about 50million over the same period.
Electricity use has only stayed flat in the US because we have outsourced much of our heavy industry to China and other countries. If you properly account for the electricity we are effectively importing in the form of manufactured goods then the curve goes way up.
No, often very small subset of resources become the limit not every single resource. Irrigation can work on land, but kelp don’t have that problem. Conversely on land iron is abundant but at sea it’s a limited resource.
Prey population density declines predictors need to expend more energy to get a meal, this space is frequently the limiting factor for prey species not the availability of food or water.
Thanks for the sanity. The key word in your post being reliable.
There are 1001 ways to generate electricity but with no good storage options we need to prize reliability over all other attributes when considering what we invest in.
part of that are infectious diseases which is more an indirect effect of staying more inside and not having enough fresh air inside compared to with warmer temperatures.
I was recently in one of these hot climates at peak times and did a lot of research on this while pushing my limits as an athlete. So many factors play into human adaptability to heat even including things like how exposed your veins are (phlebotomists love you!). People think areas like Vegas are hot, but cities like Dallas can have higher wet-bulb temps (WBGT) due to humidity. WBGT is the gold standard for performance considerations in hot climates:
These are good guides but don't let this info plant anxiety in your mind either. Heat can kill you over time, but if you get into a situation where you feel heat exhausted, stay calm and stick to a single plan to unwind and rest. Carry around a frozen water bottle or two if you're headed somewhere hot for awhile. Neck + palms are one of the best ways to cool core temps [1]. Pre-hydration is also important, water + electrolyte intake days before exertion affects performance.
>>"Yet some local governments are still not taking extreme heat seriously"
Given that extreme heat is not even close to being at the top 50 ways that Americans die on an annual basis, it seems to me that there is much better bang for the buck having federal state and local governments focusing on those things that kills the most people first - if the goal is saving lives (which it should be), than attack those societal/public health problems that kill the most people first.
Basic triaging is necessary - if you don't have unlimited resources, and you can't save everybody (both of those things are objectively true), then the best benefit to society is to attack the problems that will save or extend the lives of the most people.
The top ten causes of death alone account for 1.5 million USA deaths per year; extreme heat is less than 1/10 of 1% of just those top 10 - I want the government to prioritize making progress on those things first.
Just having a healthier population alone would probably cut way down on # number of people that die from extreme heat - a healthier person will almost certainly fare better in extreme heat than someone that already has 2-3 comorbidities.
It’s cheaper to intervene in the acute event as from a policy perspective solving the actual problem is not politically viable.
A person with breathing difficulty, for example, should be getting routine medical care. If they lack insurance, don’t qualify for Medicaid or are unable to access healthcare, that won’t happen.
So it’s easier to have old people hang out at a school gym or whatever than engage in some “socialist” pursuit.
I feel like we need a better metric to use when something "kills" people. When heat waves kill people, the vast majority of the time it means these people already had major health problems that (a) let the heat do more damage and (b) prevented the person from seeking help in the first place. To be clear, I'm not saying that heat wasn't the final cause, but I think it's a fair assumption that most of these people didn't have much healthy life ahead of them regardless.
Compare that to, say, a tornado that wipes out a family with 2 young kids and 2 middle-aged adults. That to me feels orders of magnitude worse, both in the violent manner of death, and the fact that these people had years and years of healthy life left.
And, to hopefully kill this anticipated straw man, I am not making the assertion that "it's no big deal" if elderly or sick people die. I am only commenting on the comparison to other forms of death, and arguing that I think it's fair to think those other forms are death are much worse if you look beyond just "number of people killed".
We do have a better metric. It’s “years of life lost” (YLL) and it is a commonly used metric for the exact reasons you mentioned. My guess as to why you rarely see it being used outside of the scientific community is because “number of deaths” drives more clicks.
I remember COVID deaths being compared to WW2 deaths by the media a few years ago. If YLL were used instead I think (but don't know for certain) that WW2 would be much more egregious.
WW2 happened to kill significantly more civilians then soldiers. And among those, old, sick, poor and weak died the most. Babies and small kids too, so it is not entirely clear how exactly it would cut.
Absolutely not true. The age at which countries recruited were up to 45 normally (united states) or even 60 (Germany UK) and in Germany every able bodied male eventually ended in some kind of unit - if only home defense. Starting with 14 actually.
The ration of civilians to soldiers killed is 3:2 to 2:1.
Average being 27 and almost all being in 18-25 range are massively different statements.
The civilian to soldier death ration in wwi was different. The civilians were not directly targeted the way they were in wwii. The ideologization was lower and population itself was not the enemy the way it was in wwii.
Also, both Amrica and UK sent soldiers away to fight. UK was bombed, but did not had large displacement of population or ethnic cleansing or retaliation for those going on in their territories.
I would guess all given those two options. Officers are involved in combat situations. More importantly, huge amount of soldiers is needed for logistic - it can be over 50% or even more for logistics.
Excluding officers and keeping in logistics would not make much sense. (Tho logistics does not mean safe either).
One more, pretty sad, reason that extremely hot and extremely cold weather don't get that much attention that (at least my assumption) it mainly kills the poor, whereas hurricanes and tornadoes do not "discriminate" based on income to that extent.
If you and your family are well off, you can be reasonably sure that hot or cold weather will not affect you so dramatically.
Cold weather is probably worse. Lot of heart attacks that don't necessarily register as cold related. It is more difficult for the heart to pump the blood.
This map shows the average annual low temperature (in zones divided by 10 degrees F). It's designed for plants but should give you a good idea of where it reaches freezing temperature (like, all of Florida until you get to Palm Bay or Tampa but only on the coast, for example; and all of Texas except the tip by Brownsville, and the coast by Corpus Christi). https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/
> it’s much easier to warm up in cold weather than it is to cool down in hot weather
May be true for the human body, but when you're talking about heating a living space to a comfortable temperature versus cooling the same, in the majority of places (at least in the US) it takes way less energy to accomplish the latter.
Even in a hot place like Dallas, TX with an average daytime high of 97 degrees Fahrenheit in the hottest month, it's only a 20-degree differential to bring it to 77 degrees indoors, vs. an average overnight low of 38 degrees in the coldest month, where you would need to bring it up 30 degrees and might still feel cold inside.
This is not to mention how much more energy-efficient air conditioning (which just moves heat around) is compared to furnaces (which generate heat from fuel).
It's not the heat, it's the humidity. For typical summer conditions in Dallas (even more so in, say, Houston or Brownsville), if I'm remembering the numbers from my time as an automotive HVAC engineer correctly, it takes 5 to 6 times as much energy to dehumidify the air as to cool it. And those are by no means the worst conditions on the planet: try southeast Asia or equatorial Africa.
It's true that you can claw some of that back from the fact that A/C can have a coefficient of performance greater than 1, but COP also gets worse (i.e., closer to 1, less of an advantage) as the conditions get more extreme.
Yes, because dehumidification involves a phase change (water vapor to liquid) and the heat of vaporization is much higher than needed to effect a simple temperature change in dry air.
One thing I was surprised to learn, mostly because growing up I always thought of AC as extravagant, it’s more energy efficient to cool a building than it is to heat it.
If you flip your windows AC unit around, then you get the exact amount of heat energy removed by the AC in the form of hot air going into your room. This is called a heat exchanger. It was just cheaper to use gas furnace heater when most home was built and it is still true in many places.
That's both a function of technological efficiency (direct heating vs heat pump), and the temperature deltas we need to achieve. Using my Southern Ontario reference point, typical cooling needs are only 10-20 degrees C, while typical heating needs would be closer to 20-30 degrees.
As use of heat pumps increase, and average temperatures continue to climb, the balance between heating and cooling costs will shift (this is obviously a very regional phenomenon).
No idea. I live in the PNW where we have freezing temperatures about as often as heat waves (not very often), but grew up in south Florida where we never had freezing temperatures but everyday felt like a heat wave.
People do acclimatize to greater or lesser degrees. But what I'd call a heat wave in New England is pretty much just "summer" in a big chunk of the US.
Hurricanes and floods do far more infrastructure damage on large scales (tornado effects being more localized) than extreme heatwaves do, however - and decaying infrastructure is a huge problem across much of the United States.
Why exactly the USA has such a huge infrastructure problem is debatable. Maybe it's the concentration of wealth and political power in fewer locations, i.e. some regions of the West and East Coasts? Maybe it's too much money being earmarked by Congress to military-industrial projects in their home districts, leaving little for things like rebuilding water supply systems, railroads and bridges, improved electricity grids, etc.? A decreased overall tax base due to a steep reduction in tax rates (particularly on the wealthiest) since the 1960s? Financialization of the economy and a resulting lack of engineering expertise and interest in infrastructure development?
As far as infrastructure for heat waves, termite-mound-inspired architecture would be the way to go. Build bunkers with large capacity that people can retreat to, with built-in cooling mechanisms.
> "The team’s observations show that thin, outer channels of the mound heat up rapidly during the day when compared to the deeper tunnels in the mound, which causes air to circulate in a closed-loop convection cell. During the day, air moves up along the outer channels and down the center. At night, the flow is reversed. This reversal flushes out the carbon dioxide from deep inside the mound, and the gas then diffuses through the porous walls."
Most regions have good infrastructure for their local endemic disasters. If you live in areas with relatively frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, etc there are plans and infrastructure in place to deal with them when they occur. Where I live in the US we have visible disaster plans for lahars[0] because there is a severe lahar risk; most Americans don't even know what a lahar is.
Parts of the US where heatwaves are endemic rarely have serious issues with heatwaves, they've learned how to live with them for a long time and the local customs and infrastructure reflect that. Like in Europe, much of the human hazard from heatwaves is in areas where extreme heat is rare such that appropriate infrastructure has never been needed. As an example from the US, the extreme heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was bad in part because it is a rare region of the US where few people have air-conditioning. It is a wealthy region with some of the cheapest electricity in the world so lack of air-conditioning was not a failure of infrastructure or spending, there was no good reason to invest in it.
If you live in a place that has regular heatwaves, no one needs to "retreat to bunkers". Almost all of the infrastructure is built with the assumption that heatwaves will occur at relatively low cost. The only implication for infrastructure is that it can stress power generation and distribution systems, but that isn't specific to heatwaves or natural disasters generally.
Heat waves do cause massive infrastructure damage, it’s simply less focused. You can model how much faster say a single streetlight fails when the temperature reaches 105f vs 95f, but it’s all abstract without the visceral impact of obviously broken stuff.
Further preparing for heat waves is also quite expensive, as you need more power generation capacity that sits unused 99% of the time etc.
I was referring less obvious damage rather than just lightbulbs/LED’s etc. So yes stuff not designed for the heat may fail like sagging power lines, but the real damage is less obvious.
Even paint degrades faster with heat, as does just about everything else. Individual Solar panels don’t show any obvious issues, but multiply a little damage by 10’s of billions of dollars worth of panels and it adds up.
PS: Rust seems like a counter example because water and salt dramatically speed things up, but all things being equal heat does increase the rate stuff rusts.
My point was more that if there was really significant damage being done, then you’d be able to provide a better example than lightbulbs. For instance, a hurricane taking down a street light also destroys the bulb, and a whole lot more. Even if it’s true that lightbulbs burn out faster due to heat waves, it seems like it’d be hard to generate a lot of sympathy with a statement like “heatwaves are as bad as hurricanes because heatwaves cause light bulbs to burn out faster.”
Also, society generally designs things with the knowledge that light bulbs go bad, exposed metal rusts, etc. Unless a heatwave were to shorten the lifespan of things by an order of magnitude, it’s likely that a slightly shorter lifespan is within the designed limits of many things.
Why would you assume significant damage must be obvious at the time? You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer, and it’s killed vastly more people than bullets.
Hurricanes are infrequent and don’t inflict devastation over nearly as much area as heat waves can. Hurricanes are obvious like bullets, but add up the numbers globally and average over a decade and they’re not that big a deal.
> You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer
Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.
My point still stands: it's understandable that heatwaves aren't considered as serious as hurricanes if the only impact of a heatwave you can point to is that lightbulbs theoretically burn out more quickly during a heat wave.
I also mentioned paint and everything that rusts, not just lightbulbs. Let’s add all electronics exposed to the elements, tires, and just about every structure outside.
> Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.
No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure. It’s easy to correlate unusual symptoms with workplace hazards after the fact, but by then it’s too late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
> No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure.
Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?
Look, you’re free to attempt to quantify the impact. Either via direct measurement or a theoretical calculation. However, a baseless opination without any data backing it up isn’t that convincing or interesting.
> Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?
No, instinctive reflex for example is a response to a stimulus without inference.
If uranium had a horrific taste the radium girls wouldn’t have licked their uranium paint brushes thus avoiding Radium jaw. Horrific taste doesn’t always mean something is harmful, but it generally causes people to limit ingestion.
Bad taste is simply a perception, you’re making an inference that the bad taste was caused by something but the perception precedes the inference.
Further the perception and response to that taste isn’t a inference that something is physically harmful. You can dislike perfectly healthy food. That said, if uranium had a bad taste people wouldn’t have been as harmed demonstrating the lack of perception of the initial minute harm resulted in greater long term harm.
Termite mounds may be overkill, but you are right that design matters.
There’s lots of problems, but imo a big one is just like the “low fat” crisis of the 80s and 90s… we changed building codes to make buildings like envelopes and pursued HVAC efficiency over everything else.
I live in 1920s frame home. We have at minimum 2 windows per room, often more. Every side of the house has windows, allowing for cross-drafts and adjusting for the sun through the day.
The average modern development typically skips windows on the sides, and builders put the smallest windows possible in the rear and ceilings are lower. Modern construction techniques designed to slow fire often reduce airflow to the second floor of houses as well.
We live in the northeast, and we use window ac units for probably less than 30 days a year, in our bedrooms only. The key is to manage the windows/blinds and have an attic exhaust fan. My sister lives a few miles away in
a circa 1999 home, and totally different story… they use the AC from May to October.
A substantial amount of housing, especially on East and West Coast, was built prewar or only just postwar. That housing has the potential to have toxic chemicals like lead and asbestos, poor plumbing, lack of insulation, and poor ventilation. It almost certainly doesn't have AC/central heating in places that don't require it year-round to be livable.
Down at the lake with my family one year, we watched a guy mowing his lawn collapse. My dad went to go help, but the guy ended up dying from heat exhaustion. Over exerting yourself in the heat is never a good idea, please remember to always stay hydrated.
Obesity has a large effect on heat wave damage but the tornado will kill you just as effectively thin or fat, so its no surprise there's been an intense coordinated media push on the dangers of heat as obesity rises death rates will rise.
This feels like one of those things that sounds interesting until you take a minute and think about it.
Hurricanes don't come from nowhere. You can evacuate for a hurricane. And the actual hurricane is over relatively quickly. I'm also not sure how knock-on deaths are counted. Hurricanes cause flooding, spin off tornadoes, and can disable services during some of the hottest months of the year. So a hurricane will make you susceptible to floods, tornadoes, and heatwaves. But still. We know what to do when hurricanes come.
Tornadoes are violent, but quick. You usually have some amount of time to clear out of the path if necessary.
Floods come in many forms. A lot of them are less lethal. Water slowly rising 4 feet over several hours is a different scenario than water rising 4 feet over several seconds.
Heat. Heat is different. There's no real indicator that there's too much of it. Yeah, you got hot, but you get hot a lot of times. It's fine. "Just got to finish this lawn, this run, this game, etc." And heat usually covers a huge area, enough that it could take over a day just to drive out of the affected area.
We're given a lot of warning with hurricanes. The biggest hurdle with evacuation is that a lot of people don't have the means. Either a lack of transportation or lack of funds to secure shelter.
Yes, that's why I said there are different types of floods. I explicitly acknowledged that floods come in several varieties. Pakistan is notable for a lot of reasons. It's also notable because even for a flood, it is out of the ordinary.
You tried to pick edge cases to try and say the typical doesn't apply. It still does. The issue is that the typical heatwave is different from the typical variety of other disasters.
The overall problem with climate talking points is that it has become a trendy political topic, which often deduces into a battle between two sides instead of a civil discussion on the scope of a potential threat and logical solutions.
I admittedly don't pay much attention to it since I live pretty minimally anyway. Though, I cannot tell you how many homes in my area have "Climate Action" signs in front of their unnecessarily large homes. One home in particular has one right next to a gas guzzling jeep.
It's sad that so many human issues have fallen into the political spectrum where they are weaponized for power rather than resolved for the common good.
It's interesting to observe this moral panic pattern repeat itself in so many areas of debate. I wonder if this is an immutable part of living in a society, or just an externality of the media's business model.
> Though, I cannot tell you how many homes in my area have "Climate Action" signs in front of their unnecessarily large homes. One home in particular has one right next to a gas guzzling jeep.
Better than one next to a Prius that commutes 50 miles every day.
It’s not a joke. Judging someone by a vehicle that gets poor gas mileage is idiotic unless you know their usage pattern.
Someone with a Jeep in their driveway who has no commute at all and works from home so they only drive 10k miles a year is far better than the Prius driver who does 40k a year and has to buy vehicles 4x as frequently.
This doesn't make sense. It would be better if the person who owns the jeep and only puts 10k on a year has a Prius as well. The Prius is always more fuel efficient.
> better than the Prius driver who does 40k a year and has to buy vehicles 4x as frequently.
But worse than the F-150 driver who never hauls anything and works in an office and has to buy the same amount of vehicles. Again, doesn't make sense. You can always compare the other way.
From 4th grade until I left home at age 16, I lived in a single wide mobile home in lower Alabama. My mother had a window unit AC in her bedroom but other than that, there was no cooling.
Looking back now, I have no idea how I survived. My pet chinchilla died one summer because it was too hot in my bedroom.
I could never imagine allowing my own son to grow up on such conditions.
I suppose I have regressed and I am now weaker. But I couldn’t possibly live without AC now.
It's quite a coincidence that you mention passive cooling. I moved to the Caribbean after high school, and I never once had AC during the 10 years I spent there. But the windows were always open and the fans were always on. The Caribbean doesn't suffer from the humidity of the Deep South, and there was most always a breeze. It was much more bearable even though the temps were often just as high as those I experienced in Alabama.
wasting limited resources on initiatives that save less lives per dollar spent vs other initiatives that save more lives and/or cost less per lived saved IS the enemy of the good.
my own example - I live in a tiny town at about 1700 ft elevation, nowhere near the ocean, no bodies of water than can flood, not anywhere near the ocean, just 1 tornado in the past 80+ years, and no hurricanes above a cat 1 in a century (which caused almost no damage)- i.e. almost zero immediate 'environmental threats' - the town was given a $120K state/federal grant to "prepare" for climate change effects.
What do you think would save more lives in my little place in the world? - giving out free car seats to all newborns, free smoke detectors every few years to every residence, free CO2 monitors, and tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices such as drugs thru more education or recreational opportunities for kids etc - or 'studying' the possible effects of climate change in nowhereville USA?
giving out free car seats to all newborns, free smoke detectors every few years to every residence, free CO2 monitors, and tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices such as drugs thru more education or recreational opportunities for kids etc - or 'studying' the possible effects of climate change in nowhereville USA
There are already government programs and charities that give out free car seats, and car seats are required by law for infants in every state. There's not much more the government can do to get more babies in car seats.
Most areas require hardwired smoke detectors in new construction, as well as in rental units. The Red Cross and other charities (and some fire departments) provide free smoke detectors to those that can't afford them.
Spending money now to prepare for worse climate in the future sounds like a good investment since many mitigations can take years or decades to fund and complete. (like building generator backed community cooling centers, building or improving levees, etc).
We should be continuously discussing and evaluating how to solve all real problems humanity faces.
Your criticism of the Federal Grant you mention is valid. It would have been great if you could have expressed that thought _before_ they wrote that check, right?
That's what this entire comment section is: People discussing a specific problem. Not the other problem, this one.
Unfortunately arguments like these are meant to deflect and then nothing gets done. It's almost always a tactic to undercut, not advance meaningful measures.
If you have a list of problems you don't only focus on solving the one with the largest impact. You need to balance resource allocation between how the problem negatively impacts AND ability to solve.
If we followed your logic, we would stop trying to cure cancer and just focus all healthcare resources exclusively on developing life extension drugs.
How comprehensive is the data source? E.g. are all such events recorded? And, is there clustering, in relation to weather events or lack of response policies?
Lots of things kill more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods can be quite destructive, but they don't really kill a lot of people in the grand scheme of things.
Having lived in Saudi Arabia and Finland, I'll take Saudi Arabia (for weather purposes) any day of the week.
You would be surprised at how many ways cold, snows, and very diminished sunlight have to kill you.
This is what I'm wondering. How many years of life are really being taken by a heat wave compared to a hurricane or flooding that can also kill a 15-year-old just as easily? There's a word for this, something like disability-adjusted years of life expectancy (because living without eyesight or your legs is also annoying, and should be taken into account when comparing badness of some health-affecting issue).
I guess this is a good time to yell at everyone that's not building within an hour of the ocean. How dare all of you that don't want to pay $5000 per month rent!
Makes me wonder if this is also a problem in countries that get those kinds of temperatures much more frequently (e.g. Qatar). Or have they learned to deal with this?
It's a problem because so many Americans are unhealthy and more easily succumb to environmental conditions. It doesn't help that these same people flock to areas where they're more vulnerable.
There's lots of bad reporting on the increase in heat related deaths since the 1950s which glosses over the fact that few people were fat back then and air conditioning was exceedingly rare. A fraction of the people were living in the hottest areas of the US and those that were could handle it.
They have learned and forgotten due to western influence. During heat waves, cross ventilating wind allows for cooler temperatures indoor. Building architectures in a lot of middle east is designed for cross ventilation. Newer modern buildings appear to have forgotten this ancient technology though.
Still seems to be about twice as many dying from cold weather.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Globally: About 4x more dying from cold than from warm weather.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... (March 2022)
Global mortality burden attributable to non-optimal temperatures
They report that 2.98% of deaths globally could be attributed to non-optimal temperatures in 2019; 2.37% of deaths from low temperatures and 0.63% of deaths from high temperatures.
Yup. No one wants to talk about this though. We need to get cheap reliable energy to as many people as quickly as possible to help prevent this. Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear.
Similarly, a lot of people think it's inherently wasteful (at least in terms of climate change-related sensitivities) to live in the southern US where it's commonly accepted to run air conditioning for many months of the year, whereas nobody blinks twice at the number of oil-fired furnaces in New England.
Or wood-fired, surprisingly common still in parts of Europe. Related, but sad news is e.g. in Hungary, they removed protection from basically all forests to be used as firewood. We will pay dearly for this hubris. Can you imagine chopping up Redwood national park for firewood? This is what is happening currently in Europe.
What would you have Hungarians do? The comment above yours seems to suggest that it's ecologically irresponsible to live in hot climates where AC is required, but also ecologically irresponsible to live in cold climates where heating is required. Hungary has a temperate climate, but the summers there still get dangerously hot, and the winters dangerously cold.
Why did Hungary remove protection for forests to allow people to collect firewood? Presumably because they think it's necessary. So what would you have them do instead, abandon their country?
They had a policy of freezing energy prices at 2013 prices, in 2013. This limit was removed after 9 years, in the first of September of this year. Since then, prices increased tenfold, so households are receiving shock bills. On average hungarians lived their lives incredibly wasteful, leaving lights on all the time, because it was dirt cheap. They never invested anything in renewables, because it didn't matter. They thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it eventually caught up to them. I remember literally all my friends 'back home' outright mocking me how much more I spend on electricity. Their only trump card was always, "yeah but life here is so cheap!" This winter I can guarantee you we will see people burn their furniture and household trash to stay warm. As to what they should be doing, well, I'm not an energy policy specialist, but every other country in Europe is able to solve this situation without chopping down their protected forests, so there must be some other ways.
> Presumably because they think it's necessary.
For people who have studied the history of how countries and their leadership make decisions, even just superficially (eg, you've followed the news for 20 years), this is actually a very strange presumption.
It is historically just as plausible that it's not thought necessary for society as a whole, but is simply profitable for some special interest, such as (just an example, not an actual suggestion) a large forest land owner.
I thought this was obvious, unless one is very young still or one has never taken any interest in history or current events.
How do you think Hungarians should heat their homes this winter?
Not, 'What could they have done five years ago?' or 'What could they do five years from now?' I want to know how Hungarians can heat their homes 5 months from now. That's the question the government of Hungary is forced to address.
Since burning forests to heat homes is not sustainable nor renewable (at a timescale that makes sense), it's not a rational solution. What will they do 5 years from now (or however many years that all forests are gone)?
> What will they do 5 years from now (or however many years that all forests are gone)?
Solar panels and heat pumps seem like a good long-term solution, but that can't be done in time to keep people warm this winter. So for this winter, what would you have them do? Freeze? Travel back in time a few years and come up with a better solution?
Recruit some of the displaced Ukrainians from Poland, and get them to install insulation.
Edit: you seem to be under the impression that this "firewood" will go to households of all income levels. GP's statement about naivete is reinforced.
They could buy natural gas like they always have if they so chose to?
I'm sure it would sting to do so, but it is an option.
Same in rich Austria. I saw many apartments around the million euro ballpark in the older posh city center buildings, that are still heated by firewood stoves and many countryside houses are still heated by oil. Heat pumps? Ha! Never saw them anywhere around here.
It all feels incredibly dirty and inefficient to me for such a rich country.
Well, oil is cheaper than electricity now*.
*) Depending on time and location of course, but it's the case surprisingly often.
As a Swede, the more I learn about about how central Europe has been heating their homes the more disgusted I become. Like, the way e.g. Germany seems to think of burning gas as "clean". I mean, maybe compared to coal, but... you shut down nuclear plants with a plan to replace with (Russian) gas? You do understand burning this causes CO2 emissions, right?
That was the many-billion-Euro German green energy revolution your environmentalists wouldn't stop talking about a decade ago?
And now our electricity in southern Sweden (which is what we generally use to heat our houses, in contrast to most of Europe, since it used to be very cheap and clean here, just a year ago. Most use an air-to-air/water heat pump or three) is insane costly, because of a combination of idiotic leftist politicans/voters also shutting down nuclear plants while at the same time building export power connections to Europe.
It's like everyone is doing the opposite of what's sane. /rant over
Germany actually didn't plan to replace nuclear with gas, it wanted to replace nuclear with renewables+gas (later to be replaced by electrolysis). It was of course unfortunate for the climate to shut down the nuclear plants before shutting down the lignite plants.
>building export power connections to Europe
Those export connections are there to benefit Germany industry who basically shut down some domestic production, because "green", and is instead importing its deficit from the others, raising the prices for everyone.
Portugal and Spain together are the only ones not connected to the shared grid and now have the cheapest energy prices in Europe, with Germany mumbling about it that this should change. Well done guys.
> Portugal and Spain are the only ones not connected to the shared grid
(More believable.)
Source?
We are connected, but were allowed to detach electricity prices from natural gas prices. It was dubbed the 'iberian exception' at the time.
That would be something us in the north would need right now. Most house owners need like 1500-2000 kWh/month in the 6 cold winter months (november-april). With projected prices, we're looking at average family heating costs around EUR 1000-1500/month for 6 months. It will be extremely tough for homes with a single income. (That's about all of the average monthly pension.)
At the moment this is leading to a quite a lot of resentment towards the EU (and Germany) here amongst people.
This comment reads weird after France just vetoed again Spain's proposal to export natural gas to Germany through France - the medgas pipeline.
I think people here are mostly upset about Germany shutting down their nuclear plants. Also Germany is seen as nation that controls the EU.
Yes, it is insane and it makes clear once more the only real solution to this conundrum it to become as much energy independent as possible. We heat our house with two wood-burning stoves - a 4.5 kW one in the kitchen ('vedspis' or wood-burning kitchen stove, another item the 'green' party wanted to ban by the way) and a 12 kW one in the living room. The large brick chimney warms up the second floor together with some venting to release warm air to move upstairs at the end of the evening. With 15 kW of solar panels on one of the barn roofs we're set for the months the sun makes itself known but in winter that doesn't help all that much which is why I'm looking into developing a combined heat-power system for small-scale (domestic, farm) use to solve the power + heat problem when there is no sun to be had.
Even if the nuclear plants the 'greens' forced to shut down were started again this probably will not bring down the power prices very much since the demand from neighbouring states will keep them up. As an aside and since you're in the south, would you have any idea why the wind park at Lillgrund (off the coast of Malmö) is not being used [1] when power costs 5.70 SEK/kWh? It is not because of a lack of wind as the linked video - which is taken from a boat sailing at ~8 knots past the wind park - clearly shows.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxOgmXJ5NiU
Sorry, I got some facts wrong.
Y’all gonna Easter Island yourselves
Europe essentially banned cheap energy sources.
The winter is coming. Despite global warming, somebody (starts with U, ends with S) will make a pretty penny. It will teach those EU socialists (healthcare, education, functional public transport) how to do business. Fixing somebody's problem that you yourself created--Godfather would be proud.
> Europe essentially banned cheap energy sources. The winter is coming. Despite global warming, somebody (starts with U, ends with S) will make a pretty penny.
Ah yes, the country of Urussias. Or perhaps you mean Unorways. Or Ualgerias? Or Usaudi Arabias?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_European_...
"The tug of war between Europe and the biggest buyers in North Asia caused the price of LNG to soar, and contributed to a quadrupling of European benchmark gas prices between the start of 2022 and late August."
x4 price increase!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-lng-can-...
Though the increase in military spendings may eclipse that.
That graphic needs to be updated to reflect an entirely different new world, it’s from 2016, the same year the US lifted a 40 year old ban on oil & gas exports.
It’s now the largest LNG exporter in the world in 2022, though that hardly benefits the country directly in terms of making a pretty penny.
> LNG
LNG only accounts for a small portion of the EU natural gas imports, most of their gas is imported in gaseous form.
Main extra-EU partners for imports of natural gas, 2021:
All natural gas import, LNG and gaseous combined, only account for 24.9% of EU energy imports. In 2021, 61.8% of EU energy imports were crude oil.Main extra-EU partners for imports of petroleum oil, 2021:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...EU imports of US LNG eclipsed monthly Russian pipeline output as recently as June.
These figures will be updated to reflect an entirely different new world. They’re from 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe’s energy supply was dramatically changed at both ends.
Natural gas in the EU is generally used to heat homes and power industry, it and other sources of energy aren’t immediately fungible.
I don’t subscribe to realism and don’t personally blame anyone but Russia and the EU member energy policies responsible for this situation unlike the Russian sympathetic commenter you originally responded to, but using pre war figures on top of pre export ban statistics does border closely on disingenuity given how loudly and rapidly changes have been occurring in 2022.
Knock Russia off those lists and America still isn't close to the largest source of energy imported by the EU. Even for somebody inclined to conspiracy beliefs, why blame the US instead of Norway? Because he has a grudge against America, obviously.
Though there is a sense of hypocrisy here.
Europe used to be a one big jungle and the western Europe was first to chop it all and build their wealth on it.
If now we regret it then those who did chop off all their forests should share part of their wealth if they don't want others to follow suit.
Keeping your house at 80F when its 115F outside would seem to use less energy than keeping your house at 60F when it is -1F out. Maybe humidity makes it closer to even? For me one bill was gas and one was electric, so harder to compare. I'll ask some coworkers with only a heat pump.
Part of it is everything creates waste heat - so a well insulated house can take a looooong time to cool (my furnace died in the winter and I didn’t notice for over a week).
And you can survive “unaided” quite low (sleeping bags rated to -30°?) but there is a heat point where you die if you cannot escape it somehow.
> Maybe humidity makes it closer to even?
If the humidity is high enough, it can take it past even. But you won't find that out by comparing summer and winter numbers in the same location, because there aren't a significant number of locations that have both summer and winter conditions severe enough to push the numbers. You would want to compare, say, Canada in winter with south Florida or south Texas in summer (or, for even more extreme, northern Scandinavia in winter with southeast Asia or equatorial Africa in summer).
Scandinavia in winter won't usually be a heat pump to air though right? Don't they heatpump from geothermal?
Even just locally here the 25 degree F differential with ~50% relative humidity in summer would be interesting to compare to the 60 degree F differential in winter. Maybe those ultra efficient hygroscopic dehumidifiers will finally enter production.
And heat pumping to geothermal for summer might help too. I know some people locally do that. Big investment though.
Sweden can range from -25 to 35 °C. Heat pumps are common, both downhole heat exchangers (rock heat we call it) and air source heat pumps, among home owners.
Central heating is also common and often heated by garbage.
Yes, but a lot of that heat comes "for free" from cooking, your fridge/computer/apliances, hot water usage, body heat, etc.
I have a heat pump for heating and cooling, and my electric bills are only slightly higher in winter (5-10%).
That's the reason there's now a major push in a lot of places to replace those with heat pumps...
We can’t let politics run the nation’s energy policies. The decision makers need to be a neutral body of elected officials.
An elected official is by definition not neutral. I think representative government is as good as it gets, but it will never be neutral or bereft of politics.
The usage of the word "politics" has somehow become so distorted that people are begging for non-political government.
Neutral and elected are mutually exclusive. ;-)
Neutral and decisions are mutually exclusive, even
> Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear.
That's a misinterpretation. Those are global numbers. Those people dying are dying primarily from exposure due to housing shortfalls, it's not an energy distribution problem. And it's absolutely not a problem due to (as you seem to imply) inappropriate regulation of fuels, which isn't happening anywhere anyway.
If you want to keep these people alive then cut a check to a global housing construction NGO. Letting GE build a reactor or BP dill a well does nothing.
Building reactors and drilling wells increases supply which decreases cost.
Saying this wouldn't help is just false. Of course increased supply helps with shortages.
Cheap electricity doesn't help someone who doesn't have a house to heat. There is no electricity shortage in this scenario.
A society in which energy is cheap is better able to help the homeless than one in which it is expensive. Same with food or any other necessity.
Also, the mere existence of housing problems doesn't negate the point that cheap energy is immensely beneficial to human flourishing in general.
Two different problems that you need to separate to have a cogent argument.
The fact that one person cannot heat their home has nothing to do with a person with no home.
I would prefer that we consider power efficient housing first. Use more insulation and less energy to keep comfortable temperatures inside never-mind if it's too cold or too hot outside.
Modern building codes in most developed countries already require good power efficiency in terms of insulation and climate control systems. However, we have a huge stock of less efficient buildings that will take decades to replace or update.
Stricter building codes and other mandates to improve efficiency will also increase housing costs at a time when many people are struggling to afford a home at all. Efficiency pays back in the long term but the capital expenses are painful in the short term.
At least in the US, this could be helped by getting rid of SFH zoning so that buildings would occasionally replaced rather than continually remodeled in ways that mostly dress up the underlying building.
Is it really preventable though? Isn’t it pretty much a basic law of nature that resources will be consumed maximally? If you increase the amount of available energy, it too will be used up until a point where people on the fringes are left wanting. Not sure how you solve that short of some version of population control.
That is often true, but isn't necessarily always true, and certainly not always true for every resource. Total electricity use in the US has been fairly flat for the past 20 years, and that's despite increasing in population by about 50million over the same period.
Sources for anyone else who wanted to upgrade this from 'internet stranger fact' to 'thing I would repeat to my acquaintances':
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...
Electricity use has only stayed flat in the US because we have outsourced much of our heavy industry to China and other countries. If you properly account for the electricity we are effectively importing in the form of manufactured goods then the curve goes way up.
No, often very small subset of resources become the limit not every single resource. Irrigation can work on land, but kelp don’t have that problem. Conversely on land iron is abundant but at sea it’s a limited resource.
Prey population density declines predictors need to expend more energy to get a meal, this space is frequently the limiting factor for prey species not the availability of food or water.
Thanks for the sanity. The key word in your post being reliable.
There are 1001 ways to generate electricity but with no good storage options we need to prize reliability over all other attributes when considering what we invest in.
People have always died from cold weather, but now it’s an emergency that justifies accelerating the ruin of the planet through fracking?
If people freeze to death because they’re homeless or get lost hiking no amount of cheap energy is going to help.
> We need to get cheap reliable energy
We nees to address social problems too. You energy policy won't help a homeless person
part of that are infectious diseases which is more an indirect effect of staying more inside and not having enough fresh air inside compared to with warmer temperatures.
I was recently in one of these hot climates at peak times and did a lot of research on this while pushing my limits as an athlete. So many factors play into human adaptability to heat even including things like how exposed your veins are (phlebotomists love you!). People think areas like Vegas are hot, but cities like Dallas can have higher wet-bulb temps (WBGT) due to humidity. WBGT is the gold standard for performance considerations in hot climates:
Current WBGT - https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt
Fahrenheit - https://arielschecklist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/CHART...
Celsius - https://arielschecklist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/CHART...
WBGT Work Recs - http://blog.mesonet.org/agriculture/wp-content/uploads/sites...
These are good guides but don't let this info plant anxiety in your mind either. Heat can kill you over time, but if you get into a situation where you feel heat exhausted, stay calm and stick to a single plan to unwind and rest. Carry around a frozen water bottle or two if you're headed somewhere hot for awhile. Neck + palms are one of the best ways to cool core temps [1]. Pre-hydration is also important, water + electrolyte intake days before exertion affects performance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_cooling
>>"Yet some local governments are still not taking extreme heat seriously"
Given that extreme heat is not even close to being at the top 50 ways that Americans die on an annual basis, it seems to me that there is much better bang for the buck having federal state and local governments focusing on those things that kills the most people first - if the goal is saving lives (which it should be), than attack those societal/public health problems that kill the most people first.
Basic triaging is necessary - if you don't have unlimited resources, and you can't save everybody (both of those things are objectively true), then the best benefit to society is to attack the problems that will save or extend the lives of the most people.
The top ten causes of death alone account for 1.5 million USA deaths per year; extreme heat is less than 1/10 of 1% of just those top 10 - I want the government to prioritize making progress on those things first.
Just having a healthier population alone would probably cut way down on # number of people that die from extreme heat - a healthier person will almost certainly fare better in extreme heat than someone that already has 2-3 comorbidities.
It’s cheaper to intervene in the acute event as from a policy perspective solving the actual problem is not politically viable.
A person with breathing difficulty, for example, should be getting routine medical care. If they lack insurance, don’t qualify for Medicaid or are unable to access healthcare, that won’t happen.
So it’s easier to have old people hang out at a school gym or whatever than engage in some “socialist” pursuit.
I feel like we need a better metric to use when something "kills" people. When heat waves kill people, the vast majority of the time it means these people already had major health problems that (a) let the heat do more damage and (b) prevented the person from seeking help in the first place. To be clear, I'm not saying that heat wasn't the final cause, but I think it's a fair assumption that most of these people didn't have much healthy life ahead of them regardless.
Compare that to, say, a tornado that wipes out a family with 2 young kids and 2 middle-aged adults. That to me feels orders of magnitude worse, both in the violent manner of death, and the fact that these people had years and years of healthy life left.
And, to hopefully kill this anticipated straw man, I am not making the assertion that "it's no big deal" if elderly or sick people die. I am only commenting on the comparison to other forms of death, and arguing that I think it's fair to think those other forms are death are much worse if you look beyond just "number of people killed".
We do have a better metric. It’s “years of life lost” (YLL) and it is a commonly used metric for the exact reasons you mentioned. My guess as to why you rarely see it being used outside of the scientific community is because “number of deaths” drives more clicks.
https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
I remember COVID deaths being compared to WW2 deaths by the media a few years ago. If YLL were used instead I think (but don't know for certain) that WW2 would be much more egregious.
WW2 happened to kill significantly more civilians then soldiers. And among those, old, sick, poor and weak died the most. Babies and small kids too, so it is not entirely clear how exactly it would cut.
The majority of covid deaths would be toward the elderly range.
Almost every soldier death would be 18-25. I suspect the civilian would lean older but I don’t think it would entirely offset it.
> Almost every soldier death would be 18-25.
Absolutely not true. The age at which countries recruited were up to 45 normally (united states) or even 60 (Germany UK) and in Germany every able bodied male eventually ended in some kind of unit - if only home defense. Starting with 14 actually.
The ration of civilians to soldiers killed is 3:2 to 2:1.
British average was 27in ww 1. I was off by a few years.
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/greatwar/ages-of-the-dead/
Certainly lower than 55+, though ww2 could be moderately higher than 27 I doubt it.
Average being 27 and almost all being in 18-25 range are massively different statements.
The civilian to soldier death ration in wwi was different. The civilians were not directly targeted the way they were in wwii. The ideologization was lower and population itself was not the enemy the way it was in wwii.
Also, both Amrica and UK sent soldiers away to fight. UK was bombed, but did not had large displacement of population or ethnic cleansing or retaliation for those going on in their territories.
Modern wars kill more civilians then soldiers.
You would be surprised, but most of those 6 millions that died in concentration camps was not soldiers.
The average age of an American soldier in WW2 was 26.
Is that just combat soldiers or is that all military including the officer ranks?
I would guess all given those two options. Officers are involved in combat situations. More importantly, huge amount of soldiers is needed for logistic - it can be over 50% or even more for logistics.
Excluding officers and keeping in logistics would not make much sense. (Tho logistics does not mean safe either).
One more, pretty sad, reason that extremely hot and extremely cold weather don't get that much attention that (at least my assumption) it mainly kills the poor, whereas hurricanes and tornadoes do not "discriminate" based on income to that extent.
If you and your family are well off, you can be reasonably sure that hot or cold weather will not affect you so dramatically.
It’s like any other risk management problem.
We’re wired to respond to a crisis that comes upon us. Most city fire departments try to target a 5-10m response time to a fairly rare event.
We’re not good at responding to longer term or complex cause and effect issues.
Cold weather is probably worse. Lot of heart attacks that don't necessarily register as cold related. It is more difficult for the heart to pump the blood.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/12/14/fac...
Clearing snow, especially from roofs, is probably also one of the more energetic things that a lot of people do.
Wet sloppy snow is known as "heartattack snow" around these parts.
What percentage of America has to deal with freezing weather versus heatwaves though?
Also, it’s much easier to warm up in cold weather than it is to cool down in hot weather.
This map shows the average annual low temperature (in zones divided by 10 degrees F). It's designed for plants but should give you a good idea of where it reaches freezing temperature (like, all of Florida until you get to Palm Bay or Tampa but only on the coast, for example; and all of Texas except the tip by Brownsville, and the coast by Corpus Christi). https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/
> it’s much easier to warm up in cold weather than it is to cool down in hot weather
May be true for the human body, but when you're talking about heating a living space to a comfortable temperature versus cooling the same, in the majority of places (at least in the US) it takes way less energy to accomplish the latter.
Even in a hot place like Dallas, TX with an average daytime high of 97 degrees Fahrenheit in the hottest month, it's only a 20-degree differential to bring it to 77 degrees indoors, vs. an average overnight low of 38 degrees in the coldest month, where you would need to bring it up 30 degrees and might still feel cold inside.
This is not to mention how much more energy-efficient air conditioning (which just moves heat around) is compared to furnaces (which generate heat from fuel).
It's not the heat, it's the humidity. For typical summer conditions in Dallas (even more so in, say, Houston or Brownsville), if I'm remembering the numbers from my time as an automotive HVAC engineer correctly, it takes 5 to 6 times as much energy to dehumidify the air as to cool it. And those are by no means the worst conditions on the planet: try southeast Asia or equatorial Africa.
It's true that you can claw some of that back from the fact that A/C can have a coefficient of performance greater than 1, but COP also gets worse (i.e., closer to 1, less of an advantage) as the conditions get more extreme.
Yes, because dehumidification involves a phase change (water vapor to liquid) and the heat of vaporization is much higher than needed to effect a simple temperature change in dry air.
One thing I was surprised to learn, mostly because growing up I always thought of AC as extravagant, it’s more energy efficient to cool a building than it is to heat it.
If you flip your windows AC unit around, then you get the exact amount of heat energy removed by the AC in the form of hot air going into your room. This is called a heat exchanger. It was just cheaper to use gas furnace heater when most home was built and it is still true in many places.
That's both a function of technological efficiency (direct heating vs heat pump), and the temperature deltas we need to achieve. Using my Southern Ontario reference point, typical cooling needs are only 10-20 degrees C, while typical heating needs would be closer to 20-30 degrees.
As use of heat pumps increase, and average temperatures continue to climb, the balance between heating and cooling costs will shift (this is obviously a very regional phenomenon).
A reverse-cycle air conditioner is equally efficient at heating a building as cooling one.
No idea. I live in the PNW where we have freezing temperatures about as often as heat waves (not very often), but grew up in south Florida where we never had freezing temperatures but everyday felt like a heat wave.
People do acclimatize to greater or lesser degrees. But what I'd call a heat wave in New England is pretty much just "summer" in a big chunk of the US.
Something that affects the cold north where only idiots and moose live is boring and nobody cares.
But if Silicon Valley gets slightly uncomfortable for a week it’s the end of the worlds.
Not probably, certainly. Way more people die from cold than from heat, it’s not even close. There is no dispute the data is very clear here.
Hurricanes and floods do far more infrastructure damage on large scales (tornado effects being more localized) than extreme heatwaves do, however - and decaying infrastructure is a huge problem across much of the United States.
Why exactly the USA has such a huge infrastructure problem is debatable. Maybe it's the concentration of wealth and political power in fewer locations, i.e. some regions of the West and East Coasts? Maybe it's too much money being earmarked by Congress to military-industrial projects in their home districts, leaving little for things like rebuilding water supply systems, railroads and bridges, improved electricity grids, etc.? A decreased overall tax base due to a steep reduction in tax rates (particularly on the wealthiest) since the 1960s? Financialization of the economy and a resulting lack of engineering expertise and interest in infrastructure development?
As far as infrastructure for heat waves, termite-mound-inspired architecture would be the way to go. Build bunkers with large capacity that people can retreat to, with built-in cooling mechanisms.
https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/termite-mounds-could-inspire-n...
> "The team’s observations show that thin, outer channels of the mound heat up rapidly during the day when compared to the deeper tunnels in the mound, which causes air to circulate in a closed-loop convection cell. During the day, air moves up along the outer channels and down the center. At night, the flow is reversed. This reversal flushes out the carbon dioxide from deep inside the mound, and the gas then diffuses through the porous walls."
Most regions have good infrastructure for their local endemic disasters. If you live in areas with relatively frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, etc there are plans and infrastructure in place to deal with them when they occur. Where I live in the US we have visible disaster plans for lahars[0] because there is a severe lahar risk; most Americans don't even know what a lahar is.
Parts of the US where heatwaves are endemic rarely have serious issues with heatwaves, they've learned how to live with them for a long time and the local customs and infrastructure reflect that. Like in Europe, much of the human hazard from heatwaves is in areas where extreme heat is rare such that appropriate infrastructure has never been needed. As an example from the US, the extreme heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was bad in part because it is a rare region of the US where few people have air-conditioning. It is a wealthy region with some of the cheapest electricity in the world so lack of air-conditioning was not a failure of infrastructure or spending, there was no good reason to invest in it.
If you live in a place that has regular heatwaves, no one needs to "retreat to bunkers". Almost all of the infrastructure is built with the assumption that heatwaves will occur at relatively low cost. The only implication for infrastructure is that it can stress power generation and distribution systems, but that isn't specific to heatwaves or natural disasters generally.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahar
Interesting about lahars, thanks for the link
Heat waves do cause massive infrastructure damage, it’s simply less focused. You can model how much faster say a single streetlight fails when the temperature reaches 105f vs 95f, but it’s all abstract without the visceral impact of obviously broken stuff.
Further preparing for heat waves is also quite expensive, as you need more power generation capacity that sits unused 99% of the time etc.
You gotta have a better example than lightbulbs. Maybe rail lines buckling?
I was referring less obvious damage rather than just lightbulbs/LED’s etc. So yes stuff not designed for the heat may fail like sagging power lines, but the real damage is less obvious.
Even paint degrades faster with heat, as does just about everything else. Individual Solar panels don’t show any obvious issues, but multiply a little damage by 10’s of billions of dollars worth of panels and it adds up.
PS: Rust seems like a counter example because water and salt dramatically speed things up, but all things being equal heat does increase the rate stuff rusts.
My point was more that if there was really significant damage being done, then you’d be able to provide a better example than lightbulbs. For instance, a hurricane taking down a street light also destroys the bulb, and a whole lot more. Even if it’s true that lightbulbs burn out faster due to heat waves, it seems like it’d be hard to generate a lot of sympathy with a statement like “heatwaves are as bad as hurricanes because heatwaves cause light bulbs to burn out faster.”
Also, society generally designs things with the knowledge that light bulbs go bad, exposed metal rusts, etc. Unless a heatwave were to shorten the lifespan of things by an order of magnitude, it’s likely that a slightly shorter lifespan is within the designed limits of many things.
Why would you assume significant damage must be obvious at the time? You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer, and it’s killed vastly more people than bullets.
Hurricanes are infrequent and don’t inflict devastation over nearly as much area as heat waves can. Hurricanes are obvious like bullets, but add up the numbers globally and average over a decade and they’re not that big a deal.
> You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer
Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.
My point still stands: it's understandable that heatwaves aren't considered as serious as hurricanes if the only impact of a heatwave you can point to is that lightbulbs theoretically burn out more quickly during a heat wave.
I also mentioned paint and everything that rusts, not just lightbulbs. Let’s add all electronics exposed to the elements, tires, and just about every structure outside.
> Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.
No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure. It’s easy to correlate unusual symptoms with workplace hazards after the fact, but by then it’s too late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
> No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure.
Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?
Look, you’re free to attempt to quantify the impact. Either via direct measurement or a theoretical calculation. However, a baseless opination without any data backing it up isn’t that convincing or interesting.
> Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?
No, instinctive reflex for example is a response to a stimulus without inference.
If uranium had a horrific taste the radium girls wouldn’t have licked their uranium paint brushes thus avoiding Radium jaw. Horrific taste doesn’t always mean something is harmful, but it generally causes people to limit ingestion.
How is “I licked my paint brush and then my mouth tasted bad” not causal inference?
Bad taste is simply a perception, you’re making an inference that the bad taste was caused by something but the perception precedes the inference.
Further the perception and response to that taste isn’t a inference that something is physically harmful. You can dislike perfectly healthy food. That said, if uranium had a bad taste people wouldn’t have been as harmed demonstrating the lack of perception of the initial minute harm resulted in greater long term harm.
If there are enough lightbulbs impacted then why not. We should measure these things and then compare them.
only because you've built a society based on air conditioning.
Just the opposite, it’s equipment left outside that needs to deal with the heat.
Termite mounds may be overkill, but you are right that design matters.
There’s lots of problems, but imo a big one is just like the “low fat” crisis of the 80s and 90s… we changed building codes to make buildings like envelopes and pursued HVAC efficiency over everything else.
I live in 1920s frame home. We have at minimum 2 windows per room, often more. Every side of the house has windows, allowing for cross-drafts and adjusting for the sun through the day.
The average modern development typically skips windows on the sides, and builders put the smallest windows possible in the rear and ceilings are lower. Modern construction techniques designed to slow fire often reduce airflow to the second floor of houses as well.
We live in the northeast, and we use window ac units for probably less than 30 days a year, in our bedrooms only. The key is to manage the windows/blinds and have an attic exhaust fan. My sister lives a few miles away in a circa 1999 home, and totally different story… they use the AC from May to October.
> Why exactly the USA has such a huge infrastructure problem is debatable.
I thought it's because we didn't build it nearly from scratch about 70 yers ago.
Most of the infrastructure in the US was built after WWII, including the entire interstate Highway system and almost all of suburbia.
A substantial amount of housing, especially on East and West Coast, was built prewar or only just postwar. That housing has the potential to have toxic chemicals like lead and asbestos, poor plumbing, lack of insulation, and poor ventilation. It almost certainly doesn't have AC/central heating in places that don't require it year-round to be livable.
>Maybe it's the concentration of wealth and political power in fewer locations, i.e. some regions of the West and East Coasts?
Well here in Boston our transit infrastructure is falling apart . . . and we don't lack for political influence especially among elites.
I am not certain of the cause, but cost disease seems to be a related phenomenon.
Down at the lake with my family one year, we watched a guy mowing his lawn collapse. My dad went to go help, but the guy ended up dying from heat exhaustion. Over exerting yourself in the heat is never a good idea, please remember to always stay hydrated.
Interestingly, cold may kill more than heat (but it’s complicated) https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...
Obesity has a large effect on heat wave damage but the tornado will kill you just as effectively thin or fat, so its no surprise there's been an intense coordinated media push on the dangers of heat as obesity rises death rates will rise.
I’m guessing climate change is also on most peoples minds.
This feels like one of those things that sounds interesting until you take a minute and think about it.
Hurricanes don't come from nowhere. You can evacuate for a hurricane. And the actual hurricane is over relatively quickly. I'm also not sure how knock-on deaths are counted. Hurricanes cause flooding, spin off tornadoes, and can disable services during some of the hottest months of the year. So a hurricane will make you susceptible to floods, tornadoes, and heatwaves. But still. We know what to do when hurricanes come.
Tornadoes are violent, but quick. You usually have some amount of time to clear out of the path if necessary.
Floods come in many forms. A lot of them are less lethal. Water slowly rising 4 feet over several hours is a different scenario than water rising 4 feet over several seconds.
Heat. Heat is different. There's no real indicator that there's too much of it. Yeah, you got hot, but you get hot a lot of times. It's fine. "Just got to finish this lawn, this run, this game, etc." And heat usually covers a huge area, enough that it could take over a day just to drive out of the affected area.
We respect violence, and heat is not violent.
> Hurricanes don't come from nowhere. You can evacuate for a hurricane.
Actually, we can't realistically evacuate Miami/Dade county. There is only one highway leading north, and no other direction to go.
Ask Pakistan about floods.
But yes, you are right about heat. My theory is that it is the fourth rider of the apocalypse. Covers a huge area and just kills everyone.
We're given a lot of warning with hurricanes. The biggest hurdle with evacuation is that a lot of people don't have the means. Either a lack of transportation or lack of funds to secure shelter.
Yes, that's why I said there are different types of floods. I explicitly acknowledged that floods come in several varieties. Pakistan is notable for a lot of reasons. It's also notable because even for a flood, it is out of the ordinary.
You tried to pick edge cases to try and say the typical doesn't apply. It still does. The issue is that the typical heatwave is different from the typical variety of other disasters.
Alligator Alley is not an evacuation route?
The overall problem with climate talking points is that it has become a trendy political topic, which often deduces into a battle between two sides instead of a civil discussion on the scope of a potential threat and logical solutions.
I admittedly don't pay much attention to it since I live pretty minimally anyway. Though, I cannot tell you how many homes in my area have "Climate Action" signs in front of their unnecessarily large homes. One home in particular has one right next to a gas guzzling jeep.
It's sad that so many human issues have fallen into the political spectrum where they are weaponized for power rather than resolved for the common good.
It's interesting to observe this moral panic pattern repeat itself in so many areas of debate. I wonder if this is an immutable part of living in a society, or just an externality of the media's business model.
> Though, I cannot tell you how many homes in my area have "Climate Action" signs in front of their unnecessarily large homes. One home in particular has one right next to a gas guzzling jeep.
Better than one next to a Prius that commutes 50 miles every day.
Not sure I get this joke. What would you rather them do? Commute 50 miles in a gas-guzzling SUV?
It’s not a joke. Judging someone by a vehicle that gets poor gas mileage is idiotic unless you know their usage pattern.
Someone with a Jeep in their driveway who has no commute at all and works from home so they only drive 10k miles a year is far better than the Prius driver who does 40k a year and has to buy vehicles 4x as frequently.
This doesn't make sense. It would be better if the person who owns the jeep and only puts 10k on a year has a Prius as well. The Prius is always more fuel efficient.
> better than the Prius driver who does 40k a year and has to buy vehicles 4x as frequently.
But worse than the F-150 driver who never hauls anything and works in an office and has to buy the same amount of vehicles. Again, doesn't make sense. You can always compare the other way.
From 4th grade until I left home at age 16, I lived in a single wide mobile home in lower Alabama. My mother had a window unit AC in her bedroom but other than that, there was no cooling.
Looking back now, I have no idea how I survived. My pet chinchilla died one summer because it was too hot in my bedroom.
I could never imagine allowing my own son to grow up on such conditions.
I suppose I have regressed and I am now weaker. But I couldn’t possibly live without AC now.
The advent of termites put paid to traditional New Orleans house designs that would passively cool. It looks like we are all in the same boat.
It's quite a coincidence that you mention passive cooling. I moved to the Caribbean after high school, and I never once had AC during the 10 years I spent there. But the windows were always open and the fans were always on. The Caribbean doesn't suffer from the humidity of the Deep South, and there was most always a breeze. It was much more bearable even though the temps were often just as high as those I experienced in Alabama.
Why look at the very bottom of mortality list? (llᴉɥs ɐ sᴉ sᴉɥʇ ǝsnɐɔǝq)
Second-hand smoke kills almost 100 times more Americans.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...
We can't talk about one problem because some other problem exists?
Perfect is the enemy of good.
wasting limited resources on initiatives that save less lives per dollar spent vs other initiatives that save more lives and/or cost less per lived saved IS the enemy of the good.
my own example - I live in a tiny town at about 1700 ft elevation, nowhere near the ocean, no bodies of water than can flood, not anywhere near the ocean, just 1 tornado in the past 80+ years, and no hurricanes above a cat 1 in a century (which caused almost no damage)- i.e. almost zero immediate 'environmental threats' - the town was given a $120K state/federal grant to "prepare" for climate change effects.
What do you think would save more lives in my little place in the world? - giving out free car seats to all newborns, free smoke detectors every few years to every residence, free CO2 monitors, and tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices such as drugs thru more education or recreational opportunities for kids etc - or 'studying' the possible effects of climate change in nowhereville USA?
My money is on the former.
giving out free car seats to all newborns, free smoke detectors every few years to every residence, free CO2 monitors, and tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices such as drugs thru more education or recreational opportunities for kids etc - or 'studying' the possible effects of climate change in nowhereville USA
There are already government programs and charities that give out free car seats, and car seats are required by law for infants in every state. There's not much more the government can do to get more babies in car seats.
Most areas require hardwired smoke detectors in new construction, as well as in rental units. The Red Cross and other charities (and some fire departments) provide free smoke detectors to those that can't afford them.
Spending money now to prepare for worse climate in the future sounds like a good investment since many mitigations can take years or decades to fund and complete. (like building generator backed community cooling centers, building or improving levees, etc).
We should be continuously discussing and evaluating how to solve all real problems humanity faces.
Your criticism of the Federal Grant you mention is valid. It would have been great if you could have expressed that thought _before_ they wrote that check, right?
That's what this entire comment section is: People discussing a specific problem. Not the other problem, this one.
Part of discussing the problem is placing it in context with similar problems.
Unfortunately arguments like these are meant to deflect and then nothing gets done. It's almost always a tactic to undercut, not advance meaningful measures.
It would be quite unwise to talk about spoiled food when your house is on fire.
>Perfect is the enemy of good.
Agree. Looking at the bottom of mortality list is perfectionism.
Wrong and somewhat naive.
If you have a list of problems you don't only focus on solving the one with the largest impact. You need to balance resource allocation between how the problem negatively impacts AND ability to solve.
If we followed your logic, we would stop trying to cure cancer and just focus all healthcare resources exclusively on developing life extension drugs.
Then what is the point of doing a relative comparison to any other causes of death?
For context.
How comprehensive is the data source? E.g. are all such events recorded? And, is there clustering, in relation to weather events or lack of response policies?
https://archive.ph/xwKRl
The headline doesn't really quantify the problem.
Lots of things kill more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods can be quite destructive, but they don't really kill a lot of people in the grand scheme of things.
Having lived in Saudi Arabia and Finland, I'll take Saudi Arabia (for weather purposes) any day of the week. You would be surprised at how many ways cold, snows, and very diminished sunlight have to kill you.
The difference is heat usually kills the weak and elderly, so no one cares
This is what I'm wondering. How many years of life are really being taken by a heat wave compared to a hurricane or flooding that can also kill a 15-year-old just as easily? There's a word for this, something like disability-adjusted years of life expectancy (because living without eyesight or your legs is also annoying, and should be taken into account when comparing badness of some health-affecting issue).
I guess this is a good time to yell at everyone that's not building within an hour of the ocean. How dare all of you that don't want to pay $5000 per month rent!
latest paper on the topic:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01092-9
Makes me wonder if this is also a problem in countries that get those kinds of temperatures much more frequently (e.g. Qatar). Or have they learned to deal with this?
It's a problem because so many Americans are unhealthy and more easily succumb to environmental conditions. It doesn't help that these same people flock to areas where they're more vulnerable.
There's lots of bad reporting on the increase in heat related deaths since the 1950s which glosses over the fact that few people were fat back then and air conditioning was exceedingly rare. A fraction of the people were living in the hottest areas of the US and those that were could handle it.
They have learned and forgotten due to western influence. During heat waves, cross ventilating wind allows for cooler temperatures indoor. Building architectures in a lot of middle east is designed for cross ventilation. Newer modern buildings appear to have forgotten this ancient technology though.
Do they have termites in the Middle East?
Tornadoes don’t kill many people to start with… and nearly all of them are preventable in this day and age… but that point withstanding
What is cause of death? Heart failure? Dehydration? I cannot read whole article to find out.
This makes me actually wonder how the daily peak temperatures changed over the years
I'm quite sure obesity gives a helping hand as well.
Almost seems like the worst thing we can do is compromise the durability of our energy grid…