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There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our grou

by tlb 7y ago

There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control. When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist. If it's 100deg out then you shouldn't be doing things that require massive amounts of PPE. If someone dies because they were improperly clothed for the cold we wouldn't allocate all the blame the cold. If someone decides to swim in 8ft surf we wouldn't allocate all the blame to the wind. Obviously there's specific situations where the ambient temperature is more to blame than not (elderly people without air conditioning being the example that comes to mind) but you can't just lump every death that could have possibly been prevented if it were cooler in as a heat death though. Sure some of them are more heat than personal responsibility but a non-negligible amount of them are more personal responsibility than heat. People need to start thinking about heat the way they think about other severe weather (people in tropical countries already do this) because at this point the climate is going to change a substantial amount whether we like it or not. If there's gonna be a hurricane you cancel your outdoor activity unless you're fine with the risk. The same applies to a heat wave. I know that this comment combines two things a large subset of people here generally hate but it's my opinion and I stand by it.
- tlb 7y ago
  I grew up in the Canadian prairies where people frequently did die from the cold. If your car broke down on a lonely road in midwinter, there was a real prospect of freezing to death. People there carried extra parkas, blankets, and thermal candles, but those could only keep you warm for several hours. If you freeze to death in -10C weather, you were improperly clothed. But if you freeze in -50C weather, there's no amount of clothing in which you can both move around and stay warm for a long time. Here's a short story by Jack London with a realistic portrayal of that kind of cold: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to-build-a-fire.pdf https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to.... It gave me nightmares when I read it in grade school. Nobody blamed the cold, because cold isn't a moral agent. But if you ask people living in the North "how bad would it be if winters got 5 degrees colder?", they would certainly expect more deaths.
  - war1025 7y ago
    That's a powerful story... dang.
- anilakar 7y ago
  You can always put on more clothes and work physically during cold weather, but there is a limit on how much heat you can dissipate and more importantly social norms that affect how much clothes you can remove :-)
leftyted 7y ago
> When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up. Should you? If we take this approach, I wonder how many people rain kills. Or how many people El Nino kills. My sense is that there are good reasons we don't speak about these kinds of things in the same terms as we speak about, say, an epidemic.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Yet if an individual person caused it by spraying water over the road they would be responsible under "eggshell patient" rules no matter how infirm the victim. I would lean towards yes for all such considerations. If a flood plain will kill more/fewer people than desert silicosis we should keep them all in mind.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Yeah I would think if you could tease out a correlation between degrees-above-average and all-case mortality it would be an interesting and valuable statistic.

by tlb 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist. If it's 100deg out then you shouldn't be doing things that require massive amounts of PPE. If someone dies because they were improperly clothed for the cold we wouldn't allocate all the blame the cold. If someone decides to swim in 8ft surf we wouldn't allocate all the blame to the wind. Obviously there's specific situations where the ambient temperature is more to blame than not (elderly people without air conditioning being the example that comes to mind) but you can't just lump every death that could have possibly been prevented if it were cooler in as a heat death though. Sure some of them are more heat than personal responsibility but a non-negligible amount of them are more personal responsibility than heat. People need to start thinking about heat the way they think about other severe weather (people in tropical countries already do this) because at this point the climate is going to change a substantial amount whether we like it or not. If there's gonna be a hurricane you cancel your outdoor activity unless you're fine with the risk. The same applies to a heat wave. I know that this comment combines two things a large subset of people here generally hate but it's my opinion and I stand by it.

tlb 7y ago
I grew up in the Canadian prairies where people frequently did die from the cold. If your car broke down on a lonely road in midwinter, there was a real prospect of freezing to death. People there carried extra parkas, blankets, and thermal candles, but those could only keep you warm for several hours. If you freeze to death in -10C weather, you were improperly clothed. But if you freeze in -50C weather, there's no amount of clothing in which you can both move around and stay warm for a long time. Here's a short story by Jack London with a realistic portrayal of that kind of cold: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to-build-a-fire.pdf https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to.... It gave me nightmares when I read it in grade school. Nobody blamed the cold, because cold isn't a moral agent. But if you ask people living in the North "how bad would it be if winters got 5 degrees colder?", they would certainly expect more deaths.
- war1025 7y ago
  That's a powerful story... dang.
anilakar 7y ago
You can always put on more clothes and work physically during cold weather, but there is a limit on how much heat you can dissipate and more importantly social norms that affect how much clothes you can remove :-)

leftyted 7y ago

> When you include cases like that, and you should if you're trying to figure out how important it is to avoid global heating, the death toll goes way up. Should you? If we take this approach, I wonder how many people rain kills. Or how many people El Nino kills. My sense is that there are good reasons we don't speak about these kinds of things in the same terms as we speak about, say, an epidemic.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Yet if an individual person caused it by spraying water over the road they would be responsible under "eggshell patient" rules no matter how infirm the victim. I would lean towards yes for all such considerations. If a flood plain will kill more/fewer people than desert silicosis we should keep them all in mind.
- skohan 7y ago
  Yeah I would think if you could tease out a correlation between degrees-above-average and all-case mortality it would be an interesting and valuable statistic.