5 ms·

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.

xkcd-sucks 5y ago
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)
- hamburgerwah 5y ago
  Or digging a hole or holes, and running air and or water through them, like has been done for thousands of years in very hot places.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    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.
jfoutz 5y ago
Huh. https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/ https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/ 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.
- trashtester 5y ago
  According to this Lancet study, about 5M die from cold globally, annually, while about 500K die from heat: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... I found the article through this link: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_related_deaths/index.html https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_r... 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: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-people-a-year-with-heat-related-deaths-rising-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temper... While it does mention that cold kills more, it does not mention that the ratio is 10:1 in the study.
  - jfoutz 5y ago
    That's good stuff! 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.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      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).
      - jfoutz 5y ago
        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.
spicybright 5y ago
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.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
What numbers are you looking at where cold kills more people than heat?
- trashtester 5y ago
  "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" https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-a-year-20-year-study-77875 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t...
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Excellent! Thank you!
pjerem 5y ago
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.
- briantakita 5y ago
  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...
  - Igelau 5y ago
    In other words, a fire.
    - briantakita 5y ago
      Maybe you can light the entire car on fire, by igniting the gasoline, which will work for a couple of hours depending on how full the tank is... I'm not going to disparage the survival challenges of extreme heat & humidity, but again, cold is no joke, even with a fire...
    - wruza 5y ago
      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=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=animals+frozen+solid&tbm=isc... (dead animals warning)
briantakita 5y ago
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".
- mrpopo 5y ago
  I think it's good to note that Yakutia is burning at a rapid rate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/everything-is-on-fire-siberia-hit-by-unprecedented-burning https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/everything-is-...
  - briantakita 5y ago
    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. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305971138_Evidence_for_a_Solar_Flare_Cause_of_the_Pleistocene_Mass_Extinction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305971138_Evidence_... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018RG000629 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018RG00... 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.
    - mrpopo 5y ago
      No. 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.
aaron695 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mariusor 5y ago
And yet, a lot more populated areas on the globe are susceptible to heat waves than to cold waves.
- trashtester 5y ago
  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. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

xkcd-sucks 5y ago

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)

hamburgerwah 5y ago
Or digging a hole or holes, and running air and or water through them, like has been done for thousands of years in very hot places.
- mlyle 5y ago
  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.

jfoutz 5y ago

Huh. https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/ https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/ 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.

trashtester 5y ago
According to this Lancet study, about 5M die from cold globally, annually, while about 500K die from heat: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... I found the article through this link: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_related_deaths/index.html https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_r... 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: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-people-a-year-with-heat-related-deaths-rising-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temper... While it does mention that cold kills more, it does not mention that the ratio is 10:1 in the study.
- jfoutz 5y ago
  That's good stuff! 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.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    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).
    - jfoutz 5y ago
      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.

spicybright 5y ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

What numbers are you looking at where cold kills more people than heat?

trashtester 5y ago
"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" https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-a-year-20-year-study-77875 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t...
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Excellent! Thank you!

pjerem 5y ago

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.

briantakita 5y ago
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...
- Igelau 5y ago
  In other words, a fire.
  - briantakita 5y ago
    Maybe you can light the entire car on fire, by igniting the gasoline, which will work for a couple of hours depending on how full the tank is... I'm not going to disparage the survival challenges of extreme heat & humidity, but again, cold is no joke, even with a fire...
  - wruza 5y ago
    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=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=animals+frozen+solid&tbm=isc... (dead animals warning)

briantakita 5y ago

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".

mrpopo 5y ago
I think it's good to note that Yakutia is burning at a rapid rate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/everything-is-on-fire-siberia-hit-by-unprecedented-burning https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/everything-is-...
- briantakita 5y ago
  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. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305971138_Evidence_for_a_Solar_Flare_Cause_of_the_Pleistocene_Mass_Extinction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305971138_Evidence_... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018RG000629 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018RG00... 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.
  - mrpopo 5y ago
    No. 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.

aaron695 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mariusor 5y ago

And yet, a lot more populated areas on the globe are susceptible to heat waves than to cold waves.

trashtester 5y ago
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. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...