It's hilarious to me that people somehow think hot is MUCH more dangerous than cold. If you do any homework you will see which end results in more deaths.
We can distribute blankets and warm clothes to practically anywhere at scale. You can't scale air conditioners the same.
Your "homework" doesn't matter if super heat waves are a new phenomenon since data was collected.
You can't even glean anything useful from total deaths of heat vs cold. You'd need an equal number of people in equally hostile hot/cold environments of the same size. And even then there's still so many other variables can contribute to a result.
If you clicked on the link you are commenting about, you would have learn that we are talking about 35°C wet bulb. Which will kill you, whatever your age, your health, or what you try to do to overcome it. Basically, without air conditioning, so without energy, you are dead.
Cold, instead, will not kill you if you are able to cover yourself with a sufficient coat and/or you are able to start some fire.
Most places in the world, even in rich countries, neither have air conditioning nor sufficient energy power plants to cool everyone.
People who own a car in Yakutsk must leave it running all winter, or the oil will freeze & cause engine damage. A toolbox is always present in the car, since being stranded on the road, without cell phone signal, will lead to death within a couple of hours. Having a part of your ears exposed for 15 minutes will lead to frostbite. Cold is no joke...
Couple notes from someone who lives somewhere less cold than Yakutsk, but still cold:
* Synthetic oil won't really ever freeze. Other car components will freeze up prior to oil ever freezing - notably the battery will freeze if it's cold enough, which will permanently damage it. Most any other car component won't suffer permanent damage from cold.
* A toolbox isn't the best option to rely on if you're driving in a remote area in the cold (I'm basically incapable of wrenching anything at -40 other than a tire change) - if I'm driving in the winter I carry (among some other things) a) a sleeping bag that's warm enough to keep me alive indefinitely given the shelter that a car provides, b) snacks and water that I can thaw with body heat in my sleeping bag and c) a PLB that, in a life or death situation, I can activate regardless of cell service.
From ~ 8:43 in the video:
"The scariest thing about being on the road is that people whose cars break down have a risk of dying if they cannot fix it within 30 minutes. Otherwise, engine oil under the hood freezes in minutes. If people get stranded in these rural areas with no phone signal, they have no choice but to freeze to death within a couple of hours. That's why every driver carries a toolbox in his or her car."
He mentioned engine oil freezing a few times throughout that video.
Perhaps their information & strategies are outdated, or perhaps there's some specifics to Yakutsk that is different from your circumstances. The people there seem to recognize changes in temperature based on the visibility & other heuristics, where it's recognized that a 10 degree Fahrenheit difference in temperature is something to consider.
Perhaps you have some innovations that could help these people. The PLB seems like a good idea, though 30 minutes does not seem like enough time for a search/rescue effort. Either way, it's interesting to see how people adapt to their circumstances.
I've watched documentaries on Mt. Everest ascents where the climbers faced brutal cold, wind, & avalanches. Perhaps gear adapted to the conditions of the tundra could be an effective "survival pack" enabling people to survive for a few more hours should a car be stranded.
> I've watched documentaries on Mt. Everest ascents where the climbers faced brutal cold, wind, & avalanches. Perhaps gear adapted to the conditions of the tundra could be an effective "survival pack" enabling people to survive for a few more hours should a car be stranded.
Having a car simplifies life a lot compared to alpine ascents. A car is going to be a better shelter than any tent available, and you don't really need to be concerned about volume/weight/water resistance of sleeping bags. (So it's still not cheap, but buying and layering some cheaper synthetic options saves a lot of money compared to -40C down bags.)
I’m afraid that you’re taking gp comment too lightly. The described frosts are really dangerous, it’s not your regular get-two-blankets cold. One may die or become disabled in minutes after a technical failure, which is similar to failure of an AC. A little camp fire and running in circles will barely help you, because animals become frozen literally mid-step in it, https://www.google.com/search?q=animals+frozen+solid&tbm=isc... (dead animals warning)
Well, one can warm up by eatnig lots of food, wearing other critters' skins, and burning stuff; all of which are stone-age (or earlier) technologies. Cooling down requires air conditioning (modern tech) or access to natural cold water (privilege)
Which isn't likely to be a reasonable solution when we have a few days notice of an extreme hot weather event reaching a region for the first time. Predicting how common they'll be in a given place and arguing to prepare beforehand for what will likely still be a somewhat rare event (with unknown exact frequency) is hard.
That's of course cherry picked. But I think the sucky part is increasing the variance of the temperature distribution. So the hot is hotter and the cold is colder, and both ends really suck.
Interestingly, the emory link did not quote how many deaths were due to cold vs heat, but it did say that cold related deaths were going down and heat related deaths were going up.
By cherry picking just the part of the article that support a global warming narrative, but leaving out that cold is still, by far, the main danger, emory is seriously misrepresenting the science, imo.
Btw, the Guardian coverage for the same article is only slightly better:
I peeked at the lancet study, but it didn't support my trollish response to the OP.
The real point I was trying to make was the crazy extremes, the higher variance. I vividly recall running one morning when it got to -40F/-40C the night before. It sucked. The house was cold, work was cold. But one day is just a freak thing we all deal with, like snow in Atlanta. I remember a lot of government buildings shut down, to conserve natural gas. they made that resource available to everyone. Some people lost heat. I don't remember if people died. If that lasted for a week, I don't know what would have happened. I imagine it would have been bad. not riots, but heading in that direction.
There are 7 billion of us. We're pretty well adapted to our environments. We can handle a few bumps and potholes. Pushing those extremes, longer and deeper, that's not going to be fun.
Heat will kill. Cold will kill. Both are tolerable in the short run, but days of it is pretty scary. We're facing more of both. I don't have an answer to solve either case.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I can't say I'll get much use out of it tomorrow, but this is a long haul problem. I'll try to commit this evidence to memory. Maybe in a few months or years I can point at these references.
If the ratio is 10:1, then even if you have increasing variance (which is bad), an increase in the mean may offset that badness. I can't comment beyond that, I'm just talking generally about distributions with two fixed cutoffs at both extremes (beyond which = death or high likelihood of death).
I'm going to quibble. This is all unfounded, you're probably right and I'm a fool.
the statistic, adding 1 degree to the temperature isn't that bad. That statistic nicely glosses over the huge amount of energy added to the system. 1 degree isn't going to melt the icecaps. 1 degree is a huge amount of energy. I think, that energy is going to make things hotter and colder and less predictable.
Moving the mean is, well not fine but that's what we're doing. Have to accept reality as it is. But as far as I can tell, we're not shifting the distribution to the right. We are flattening the distribution, the median is moving +X. So, we've got fatter tails.
Those fat tails suck. we're finely attuned to current variance, we can deal with a cold or hot day. But that fatter tail, that's the fucker. A cold or hot week is deadly.
It makes sense that adding energy to the system can lead to higher temperatures and more extreme cases of winds and precipitation.
It makes less sense that it should lead to extreme cold.
Indeed, the Lancet study did say that the number of deaths from cold were on the way down.
Also, if examining the data further, most deaths are NOT in extremely cold countries, but rather in South East Asia and Africa.
I remember spending some time in a tropical country about 10 years ago, and when I was there, there was a few nights of "extreme" weather, where nighttime temperatures fell all the way to +14C (plus!). The government declared a state of emergency, and distributed blankets to the poorest people, to prevent oo many deaths.
Clearly, the main problem is poverty, not extreme weather.
Not true. In fact, Africa is the place with the highest cold-related excess mortality. This [1] Lancet study estimates that almost 1.2M people die in Africa yearly due to cold, while only 25000 die from heat.
All-in-all 10 times more people die from cold every year (according to the study) than from heat.
"The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat"
It's sadly probably more a societal wide mental illness. Big corps like the environmental movements can use the internet for wide spread control and have destroyed peoples minds.
You could argue the idea hot is bad meets expectations for hackers, computers should be kept air-conditioned. Although this is not quite true, I think uniformity is what matters (same as humans, sudden drops in cold like walking outside is what can kill)
And what runs better, a warm car or a cold car.
The number don't lie, but number don't matter. Telling people they will die in more and more crazy ways gets more control.
There's a far larger area of the world which is too cold & dry for human tolerance, yet people survive & thrive there. Probably the same for places which are hot & humid.
There are some interesting documentaries on Yakutsk, the "coldest city in the world".
There's historical evidence of global fires & mass extinctions due to Geomagnetic excursions, which we are currently going through right now, leaving Earth vulnerable to space weather.
We are in for a bumpy ride of wild temperature swings & extreme terrestrial weather driven by space weather & Earth being relatively under-protected. We need to adapt to these changes & focus on surviving & thriving with new conditions. Guilt trips about human emissions will not help our survivability when there are significantly bigger forces at play. Only preparedness & focus on the cyclical changes that have occurred on Earth throughout history, some of which is recorded in human history in books, myths, & prehistoric art, will help humanity.
IPCC 6th assessment report, summary for policymakers, page 8/42. Read it.
IPCC is the most conservative science body ever created. It comprises hundreds of scientists from all over the world, including Saudi Arabia and others, who need to unanimously approve each sentence. The role of human emissions in the current warming has been assessed without any possible doubt.
The IPCC is focusing on sensationalist & self-admitted "unlikely" models in their editorials. It's not even the majority view of the models that are being trumped up. Sensation sells. Money talks.
The role of human emissions as the key driver of climate change has plenty of doubt & plenty of money involved pushing a pre-determined outcome with the purpose of imposing taxes & centralizing power.
In the meantime, humanity is left unprepared for cosmic & geologic events (volcanic activity is driven by ionic activity from space) that are going to occur within 1-2 decades which will have drastic impacts. Since other planets in our solar system are seeing major perturbations in their climates, we should take nature more seriously.
There are other models that more heavily use solar forcing, which are gaining in number. It seems like there is increasing momentum in models which feature Solar forcing & recognizing the Geomagnetic field strength as a major factor in climate. These are all just models, but there are a growing number of scientists who are taking natural cycles more seriously than the APGW crowd.
The big global institutions are behind APGW with $Trillions invested in that industrial complex, but there are many independent scientists who are finding that natural phenomena have always been and are still the key drivers of climate change. My bet is on nature, not the wealthy 1% owned institutions with PR departments & editorial spin.
No one discusses IPCC reports. It came out this week, and was discussed at most 10 min per day on major news channels.
IPCC scientists are volunteering for the report, they are not wealthy. They are literally spending their own free time and money writing thousand-pages long reports.
You just choose not to believe the most rational answer because it's inconvenient.
The most rational answer is that the Geomagnetic excursion is causing many of this strange weather phenomenon, amplifying Solar forcing to unprecedented level in modern times, & that the modern warm period has peaked & we are going into a Grand Solar Minimum.
Most of the models factor in Solar Forcing, which was only introduced in CMIP6, to varying degrees. This means models based on <CMIP6 did not include Solar Forcing, which means there has been institutional inertia that completely ignored an important factor into what drives the climate.
This meta-analysis shows the different models & how the different factors are weighted.
> You just choose not to believe the most rational answer because it's inconvenient.
Key word is "believe". You have a belief & your scientific opinion follows that belief. Are you willing to look at the data from the perspective of other beliefs? Are you open to unknown unknowns? If not, you are in danger of practicing Pseudoscience with a pre-determined outcome. Your "belief" determines your understanding of nature.
What's "convenient" is to go along to get along, make as much money as possible over APGW, & receive the social validation that one is "saving the world". There's plenty of money, personal reputation, & many careers that depend on APGW being an "existential crisis".
You should consider if you just choose not to believe the most rational answer because it's inconvenient.
Very few people live in the cold and dry areas, though. If you compare the population densities of places like Siberia or Canada north of the Arctic circle, I think you will struggle to find a single city.
Norway and Russia have a handful of towns near the cost north of the Arctic Circle, but that is largely due to the Gulf Stream keeping the temperatures more livable. Inland, temperatures are not very compatible with human life.
