14 ms·

Chilling Effects

167 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

superjan 5y ago
We can all read it how we like it: “Climate researchers ignore undesired effects”, or “contrarian outsider is cherry-picking results”. Intention or not, this serves only as flamebait and it will get us nowhere.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that the author should censor himself to appease extremists on both sides ? I would say that on the contrary, this kind of blogpost can be useful to make people that can still change their mind to think about this issue.
redisman 5y ago
Astral codex is now the new Freakonomics
- yboris 5y ago
  Could you elaborate? I don't know if you mean "Freakonomics = bad" or "Freakonomics = good", and if so, why?
  - jonas21 5y ago
    Does everything have to be good or bad?
    - novalis78 5y ago
      Precisely. As long as the planet does not overheat, a warmer planet is a better planet.
      - tdeck 5y ago
        Define "overheat". The crust makes up less than 1% of the planet's mass, so theoretically everything on the surface could burn / boil off and 99% of the planet would still be fine.
      - lalaland1125 5y ago
        Except for the fact that most systems on the planet are adapted for the current temperature. In theory a rising sea level isn't a big deal in the abstract, but we have already built a ton of property along the coast ...
        novalis78 5y ago
        Adaptations change. They will and must. Live is change. I think too many folks on here are too young to remember the very same green doomsday scenarios which we were mentally tormented with and NONE of them panned out. Not buying it. The planet will warm. Faster. Live will go on. The real focus should be on making life multi-planetary asap. That's more important in the long run than anything else.
        lalaland1125 5y ago
        I think you vastly underestimate the cost of redesigning / rebuilding all of our coastal cities to adapt to the fact that they are now below sea level.
      - HappySweeney 5y ago
        It isn't just the amount of heat, but how fast it is being introduced.
        novalis78 5y ago
        Well, let's take a look. In 1978 we were going to be iceball Earth according to the sensationalist media. Let's take a look in 40 years from now and see if it all wasn't just a big scam to scare people into political policies they otherwise would not support.
    - yboris 5y ago
      No, but it would be good to understand the intentions of the original comment. It feels like the author meant to communicate something but because of how vague it is, it feels like it was worse than having no comment. It makes me think "what am I missing about Freakonomics other than the book I read and the numerous episodes I listened to and enjoyed?"
  - smegcicle 5y ago
    or maybe something more subtle like, freakonomics provided a fresh angle that became a meme and therefore ceased being fresh
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Going to choose to interpret this as “seeks counterintuitive results without heed to science”. If this interpretation is wrong, kindly supply clarification and ignore remainder. Posting level of epistemic certainty makes this not so. This is just a hypothesis and summary post. But also in a UI question, it appears that people are unable to read content without updating their priors significantly, even with a low proposed information gain multiplier. This helps understand comments like this.
baybal2 5y ago
The number of people dying of exposure in Russia every years is quite a lot, and you can't call Russians not culturally adapted to cold.
- jahewson 5y ago
  From the article: > One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
  - nradov 5y ago
    The Siberians who couldn't figure out how to survive cold weather were killed off by cold centuries ago. If climate change caused sudden cold snaps in normally warmer regions there would likely be many deaths.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    I used to work with some Russian insurance companies. They had 0 faith in government population data, in particular mortality. At one point, in the 00’s, they were using late USSR data, which they thought was doctored too, but that was cancelled off by the improvement in health standards.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    The weather you have every day tends to not kill many people. It's surprises that are the real killer. What interestingly means that warming Siberia may increase the number of people dying due to the cold.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  The combination of a high average alcohol consumption rate and cold temperatures in particular is dangerous.
jnmandal 5y ago
I think this whole question is naive and simplistic. Its unlikely we'll see straightforward trends like "less deaths from cold" (ignoring that such a concept is ill-defined and inconsistent in the literature the author reviewed); climate is a complex system and heat should really be thought of as energy -- not so much ambient temperature -- in this context. To boot, "excess deaths" is a pretty nebulous topic and once you start analyzing differences between regions using their political borders (comparative politics), you're only making the concept more abstract. Just as an example of what I mean by this: something not analyzed herein was demographic differences between regions. What is the median age of populace in Nigeria vs. Greenland? Just citing this as an example -- my point is really that the variations between a Scandinavian region and equatorial one could really exceed the scope of any topical research.
- firebaze 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you've read TFA, but calling it simplistic is a bit ... simplistic. The question raised is valid: do we suffer more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach. Also, there are no answers, just (intellectually challenging) questions.
  - jnmandal 5y ago
    Not sure what is TFA. > The question raised is valid: do we suffer more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach That was definitely not the question being addressed here. The question was much more specific (which is good, but I still maintain it was not specific enough); it was basically: "will fewer people die of cold?". Which is a simplistic question mainly because: what does it even mean to "die of cold?" The author never defines that but seems to imply that he thinks its "any deaths above the full yaer average level of death during the winter." Meanwhile, he was comparing disparate regions, some of which don't even have winters. Again, I would argue the whole piece revolves around extremely simplistic thinking about a complex issue.
wk_end 5y ago
Global warming is going to increase both cold and heat related deaths, given that it's likely to (and has already started to) produce more extreme temperatures at both ends of the spectrum.
- ars 5y ago
  That wouldn't be global warming then, given that temperature is measured by averaging over an entire year. If it's both hotter and colder the average wouldn't change.
  - Scene_Cast2 5y ago
    At this point, "global warming" is shorthand for "climate change"
  - lm28469 5y ago
    It can be both colder and warmer at different rates, the average would change
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - theptip 5y ago
    The prediction for decades has been: 1. Average global temperature increases. 2. Winters get colder on average 3. Summers get hotter on average, more strongly than 2. Or if you prefer simple arithmetic, the average of -1 and 1 is 0. The average of -2 and 4 is 1. The second one has a colder "winter" but it's still warmer on average.
    - haberman 5y ago
      > 2. Winters get colder on average I have never heard this. Do you have a reference? I am no expert, but I looked for any statement about winter temperatures from the latest IPCC report. I found this in TS.2.6: > Warming of the land surface during the period 1971–2018 > contributed about 5% of the increase in the global energy > inventory (TS.3.1), nearly twice the estimate in AR5 (high > confidence). It is virtually certain that the average > surface warming over land will continue to be higher than > over the ocean throughout the 21st century. The warming > pattern will likely vary seasonally, with northern high > latitudes warming more during winter than summer (medium > confidence). {2.3.1, 4.3.1, 4.5.1, Box 7.2, 7.2.2, > Cross-Chapter Box 9.1, 11.3, Atlas 11.2} > The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (warm days and > nights) and the intensity and duration of heatwaves have > increased globally and in most regions since 1950, while the > frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased > (virtually certain). There is high confidence that the > increases in frequency and severity of hot extremes are due > to human-induced climate change. Some recent extreme events > would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human > influence on the climate system. It is virtually certain > that the further changes in hot and cold extremes will > occur throughout the 21st century in nearly all inhabited > regions, even if global warming is stabilized at 1.5°C > (Table TS.2, Figure TS.12a). This seems to contradict your claim. Also the most recent National Climate Assessment says this in its summary finding (https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/): > Declines in snow and ice cover caused by warmer winter > temperatures are expected to negatively impact the winter > recreation industry in the Northwest, Northern Great Plains, > and the Northeast.
seanc 5y ago
Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top: "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]" This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Wish this were more common. This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.
  - Aachen 5y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking while reading the article. Particularly at > I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas. When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are. I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      The pdf format is partially to blame for the lack of hyperlinks. Hopefully we'll see more html-first papers in the future.
  - 5y ago
evan54 5y ago
how long does an article like this take to write? Felt very well written!?
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  That's Scott Alexander. He's an amazing writer - possibly one of the best of the 21st century. All the more amazing that he just posts this stuff for free.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    I would guess it still takes a while, if only to find the relevant information.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    He's getting paid subs from substack now (and they gave him a good first-year deal), but it's mostly people who pay out of goodwill (there are a few sub-only posts and comment boards, but it's 90% free conent).
tims33 5y ago
Certainly an interesting read. Although, it really makes me think of the words of the Big Lebowski: "That's just like, your opinion, man" which I think aligns with his ultimate conclusion.
- didibus 5y ago
  Ya, I think too often we have a tendency to take a bet on propositions where there simply is no logical conclusion to be had quite yet given the current information. I wish more author instead of saying, this is where my bet would be, they would just say, ya there's no good information and this whole thing is up in the air, we just don't know and here are the next steps if we wanted to get closer to knowing. Because otherwise it leads to a weird bias. For some reason, we have the tendency to believe that someone who's done the research would be more likely to be correct in their bet, but inconclusive research doesn't actually make this true. If the research is inconclusive, having done it doesn't help the prediction.
  - 2arrs2ells 5y ago
    I think that’s unfair to Scott when the entire article is prefaced by “Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this” The rationalist movement is all about being able to accurately forecast the accuracy of your predictions. Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd - by making early/fuzzy predictions (and acknowledging them as such) we may ex find that we are more accurate than we realize.
    - didibus 5y ago
      Ya, this article did an okay job, I was talking more generally, though I still think there is a few places where he's making bets in that article. > Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd I don't think we're even talking low accuracy here, low accuracy still implies some accuracy, what I'm seeing here is random or potentially even worse than random prediction. The data points to things that are way to broad and general to reason about the cause. I think knowing that is valuable, don't get me wrong, but my conclusion would be, don't bet on this, unless you like playing roulette.
Ericson2314 5y ago
What a nice illustration of the limitations of pure empiricism.
- naasking 5y ago
  Is it though? Because it seems like the questions can only be answered with better empirical data. As the author said, the studies of this are unimpressive and the data insufficient.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    I am not sure there is an amount of data where these problems truely go away -- too little, this, too much, other issues. I guess I am a "theory-ladenist" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Who isn't, in our post-modern times ? The author, being an (anti)rationalist, is well aware of these issues : "The map is not the territory." is a popular mantra of theirs. But I guess that it's much harder to apply in practice...
      - naasking 5y ago
        Do you mean the article's author? He is of the rationalist community.
Nasrudith 5y ago
Subsaharan African desert heat cold deaths make perfect sense if you are aware of the side effects of the lack of moisture and vegetation - low thermal mass. There is a reason desert mammals have fur and desert reptiles burrow - it drops fast and low in the night. If you go from minimally dressed in the day for heat from inexperience or poverty and are ill-prepared you die a death that sounds utterly absurd to pop cultural assumptions about the desert. Combine that with jungle-savvanah-desert "exotic foreign wilderness" conflation. The jungle you really do dress scantily for given humidity, temperature, and most importantly the exact opposite thermal mass situation. There is a reason desert dwellers prefer covering garments beyond just sun reflection. Greenland I can only guess as possibly related to volcanic warmth and being used to dressing for warmth combined with familarity with hypothermia's symptoms including feeling hot. If you are used to dealing with getting so cold you feel an urge to strip naked and dive in the snow you may double down on heat because it is usually cold. But if it is actually heat this time you die an absurd seeming death. I also assume heat deaths exclude fire related deaths.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I think for the cold extreme it's less likely confusing too-cold with too-hot, and just the same as your African desert example. People without experience in the heat won't be able to tell when it goes from uncomfortable to dangerous due to inexperience. We're more than capable of bearing deadly heat emotionally, and so if you don't know what that feels like you'll just keep going until you get heatstroke, which will also be a new experience for an Icelander I assume. For those new to extreme heat, the sheer amount of water required to stay safe is usually underestimated.
  - iamhamm 5y ago
    I live in a desert and I’m very active outdoors, even in the summer, and you’re totally right about the misjudging of being safe. First is the confusion people have about clothing choice. You can tell the tourists at Death Valley because there in shorts and short sleeves while those that live here are in pants and long sleeves. Also, water consumption as you point out- I do summer hiking/trail running in the mountains around here and it’s trivial to drink a gallon of water. The biggest distance limiter is the weight of the water you need to carry.
Brassens100 5y ago
Naïve post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]", so I'm commenting in the same manner : Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences ! Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ? I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !
Brassens100 5y ago
Naïve post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]", and I'm commenting in the same manner : Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences ! Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ? I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Why would cold places adapt so hard that they did better than warm places? It's plausible that many of the adaptations are trade offs. You do better in the cold by not doing as well when it's hot. Then if it gets warmer in the place it's usually cold, your adaptations to the cold are impediments and make things worse. And the same thing the other way around. In the place where people have adapted to the heat, if it gets even a little bit cold, they're in trouble. This implies that climate change could still be making everything worse for everyone. You make it warmer for people adapted to the cold and that's bad. You make it warmer for people adapted to the heat and that's still bad, because they're still where they are. Now it's 145 F there instead of 135 F and their adaptations are insufficient.
- ehnto 5y ago
  We built homes in Australia for mostly clement weather, and so when it gets cold or hot, many homes fail to cope for long. If the swings get worse and longer in duration in either direction, we're going to find it really hard to keep houses livable without blasting air conditioning 24/7.
lm28469 5y ago
Kind of off topic but seeing the current comments, keep in mind that excess deaths due to temperature is but a tiny fraction of the equation. Co2 levels and its impact on our cognitive capacity, ocean acidification, loss of crops, access to water, massive population migrations, warming of permafrost, &c. are all much more likely to cause problems
- georgewsinger 5y ago
  CO2 is an input to photosynthesis. How does it lead to a net loss of crops? EDIT: Of course, with changing climate: some crops will benefit; others will not. But how do we know in net that crop yields will definitely decrease under global warming?
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    Bit hard to plant crops during a hurricane, or water them during a drought.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Hurricanes and droughts are regional. Might make growing more expensive and limited in some places, while others are able to grow more.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    More extreme temperatures will clearly affect plant growth rates.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    Different plants have different optimum co2 concentrations, more is going to be bad for some, changing weather patterns and water availability will mean upheaval of agriculture for some regions, rising oceans will put some agriculture underwater.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    It's one of many variable, o2 is an input for respiration but if I'm sitting on your chest you'll still struggle. And rest assured, co2 isn't a bottleneck for crops
didibus 5y ago
As with most data problems, the quality of the data is always the weakling. I think the quality of the data for this analysis is just poor (the analysis is good, but the data is really questionable), there's no way we're going to figure this one out using the data we have for it in my opinion. As an aside, I wish that absolute numbers were also presented. Comparing things in relative ratios gets very confusing to reason about.
nanis 5y ago
Temperature station locations in the GHCN ... Notice how most of Africa is blank. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg
dekhn 5y ago
people outside the field are unqualified to parse the data. please go back and get a degree in the field before commenting.
wittycardio 5y ago
I think the cultural adaptation is severely undervalued here. I grew up in a hot/humid climate and I would be freezing at 25 degrees C . Go to coastal India in the winter if you don't believe me. Conversely I now live in a very cold place and walk around in shorts at 15 and am comfortable with just a sweater all the way to 5 degrees or so.
anp 5y ago
What about biological or habitual adaptation, maybe call it acclimation? People in different climates will have different ways of maintaining homeostasis relative to the weather and technological adaptations they have available for it. If you live your life in high heat environments, your habits and to some degree your body will adapt to keep you cool. If heart attacks are a significant component, then maybe some of these deaths can be explained by what amounts to shock from one's baseline?
heavyset_go 5y ago
If you're wet and in 54 degree F weather, you can get hypothermia and die after ~6 hours if you can't seek shelter or adequate apparel. People die in the wilderness like this often, as do people without homes. Rain and wind are sufficient killers.
P4u1 5y ago
Isn't a global warming usually what precedes an ice age? Just saying...
georgewsinger 5y ago
People continue to point out the (widely known) negative effects of global warming, but how are we so confident that the net effects will be long-term negative?[1] It seems to me an extremely complicated calculation which doesn't merit extreme certainty in either direction. Here are some of the positives of global warming: - Statistically, an order of magnitude more humans die from colder temperatures than from hotter ones (as discussed in this article). So hotter temperatures could easily lead to net lives saved, at least in this area. - Hotter temperatures and higher CO2 in northern/arctic areas will increase (net) crop yields substantially. Many areas which formerly weren't hospitable for certain types of crops will suddenly become so. This isn't so surprising since CO2 is an input to photosynthesis. - Global warming will free up northern trade routes and make potentially millions of square miles of land more habitable for humans. - The distribution of global temperature increases is expected to be tilted towards colder areas (that is: higher temperature increases in colder regions than in hotter regions). This means we get to experience the positive effects of global warming disproportionately to the negative effects. - Slight temperature increases might even hedge against long-term climate risk: we are technically still in an ice age, and there is long-term tail risk that we will recede back into a deeper one within a few millennia. So how do we know that stopping CO2 emissions won't make human climate long-term worse? - Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will positively impact some species (including species which don't even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others. It seems to me a general rule of thumb that more life flourishes in hotter climates than colder ones. So why be so confident that the net effects of global warming will be long-term negative to animals, en totale? Of course, the negative effects of global warming (flooding, rising sea levels, etc) are well-known, so I omit them. My point is not that global warming is definitely a net positive; it's that it's not clear why there is so much confidence it's "definitely" a net negative. [1] Credit to David Friedman for helping point out many of these things.
- afpx 5y ago
  You make some great points. You actually have me wanting to fire up some turbines. Another possibly good societal optimization: backyard pooping. Good for the soil, saves on maintaining a sewage system, and the odds of getting sick from it are surprisingly low.
aaron695 5y ago
[dead]
solidasparagus 5y ago
I think the author lacks domain knowledge to draw conclusions about deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and this article reads as though the author didn't talk to any experts on public health in these regions. Uganda has seasons - rainy seasons and dry seasons. If you are trying to understand seasonal mortality trends, you should be considering the seasons that exist in that part of the world. I would imagine that monsoons and flooding bring public health risk - from hypothermia to compromised access to clean water to stagnant water for mosquitos to breed. Discussing the temperature-dependence of African mortality without discussing other known-to-be-seasonal mortality factors is is bewildering to me. Mosquitoes thrive in certain temperatures. Child and maternal health in Africa remains a serious issue and birth rates are seasonal in many part of Africa. This article asked a question with an incredibly complicated set of answers and tried to come up with a one sentence explanation. I would suggest that the author spend less time analyzing bad data and more time talking to domain experts. Without sufficient domain knowledge, this analysis has no hope of being accurate.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right? > Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500. So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season. This second point isn't confirming the first. A ~10% increase in deaths during the cold season isn't enough to attribute ~10% of all deaths to cold, unless the cold season lasts all year. > But [minimum mortality temperature] is very different in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region > You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F). But the chart shows lots of excess cold mortality in Beijing, with its frigid winters. You can't live in Beijing at all without being able to deal with lethally low temperatures. The cultural adaptation story must be partially true, but it has some serious problems.

167 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

We can all read it how we like it: “Climate researchers ignore undesired effects”, or “contrarian outsider is cherry-picking results”. Intention or not, this serves only as flamebait and it will get us nowhere.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Are you suggesting that the author should censor himself to appease extremists on both sides ? I would say that on the contrary, this kind of blogpost can be useful to make people that can still change their mind to think about this issue.

redisman 5y ago

Astral codex is now the new Freakonomics

yboris 5y ago
Could you elaborate? I don't know if you mean "Freakonomics = bad" or "Freakonomics = good", and if so, why?
- jonas21 5y ago
  Does everything have to be good or bad?
  - novalis78 5y ago
    Precisely. As long as the planet does not overheat, a warmer planet is a better planet.
    - tdeck 5y ago
      Define "overheat". The crust makes up less than 1% of the planet's mass, so theoretically everything on the surface could burn / boil off and 99% of the planet would still be fine.
    - lalaland1125 5y ago
      Except for the fact that most systems on the planet are adapted for the current temperature. In theory a rising sea level isn't a big deal in the abstract, but we have already built a ton of property along the coast ...
      - novalis78 5y ago
        Adaptations change. They will and must. Live is change. I think too many folks on here are too young to remember the very same green doomsday scenarios which we were mentally tormented with and NONE of them panned out. Not buying it. The planet will warm. Faster. Live will go on. The real focus should be on making life multi-planetary asap. That's more important in the long run than anything else.
        lalaland1125 5y ago
        I think you vastly underestimate the cost of redesigning / rebuilding all of our coastal cities to adapt to the fact that they are now below sea level.
    - HappySweeney 5y ago
      It isn't just the amount of heat, but how fast it is being introduced.
      - novalis78 5y ago
        Well, let's take a look. In 1978 we were going to be iceball Earth according to the sensationalist media. Let's take a look in 40 years from now and see if it all wasn't just a big scam to scare people into political policies they otherwise would not support.
  - yboris 5y ago
    No, but it would be good to understand the intentions of the original comment. It feels like the author meant to communicate something but because of how vague it is, it feels like it was worse than having no comment. It makes me think "what am I missing about Freakonomics other than the book I read and the numerous episodes I listened to and enjoyed?"
- smegcicle 5y ago
  or maybe something more subtle like, freakonomics provided a fresh angle that became a meme and therefore ceased being fresh
renewiltord 5y ago
Going to choose to interpret this as “seeks counterintuitive results without heed to science”. If this interpretation is wrong, kindly supply clarification and ignore remainder. Posting level of epistemic certainty makes this not so. This is just a hypothesis and summary post. But also in a UI question, it appears that people are unable to read content without updating their priors significantly, even with a low proposed information gain multiplier. This helps understand comments like this.

baybal2 5y ago

The number of people dying of exposure in Russia every years is quite a lot, and you can't call Russians not culturally adapted to cold.

jahewson 5y ago
From the article: > One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
- nradov 5y ago
  The Siberians who couldn't figure out how to survive cold weather were killed off by cold centuries ago. If climate change caused sudden cold snaps in normally warmer regions there would likely be many deaths.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I used to work with some Russian insurance companies. They had 0 faith in government population data, in particular mortality. At one point, in the 00’s, they were using late USSR data, which they thought was doctored too, but that was cancelled off by the improvement in health standards.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  The weather you have every day tends to not kill many people. It's surprises that are the real killer. What interestingly means that warming Siberia may increase the number of people dying due to the cold.
Symmetry 5y ago
The combination of a high average alcohol consumption rate and cold temperatures in particular is dangerous.

jnmandal 5y ago

I think this whole question is naive and simplistic. Its unlikely we'll see straightforward trends like "less deaths from cold" (ignoring that such a concept is ill-defined and inconsistent in the literature the author reviewed); climate is a complex system and heat should really be thought of as energy -- not so much ambient temperature -- in this context. To boot, "excess deaths" is a pretty nebulous topic and once you start analyzing differences between regions using their political borders (comparative politics), you're only making the concept more abstract. Just as an example of what I mean by this: something not analyzed herein was demographic differences between regions. What is the median age of populace in Nigeria vs. Greenland? Just citing this as an example -- my point is really that the variations between a Scandinavian region and equatorial one could really exceed the scope of any topical research.

firebaze 5y ago
I'm not sure if you've read TFA, but calling it simplistic is a bit ... simplistic. The question raised is valid: do we suffer more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach. Also, there are no answers, just (intellectually challenging) questions.
- jnmandal 5y ago
  Not sure what is TFA. > The question raised is valid: do we suffer more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach That was definitely not the question being addressed here. The question was much more specific (which is good, but I still maintain it was not specific enough); it was basically: "will fewer people die of cold?". Which is a simplistic question mainly because: what does it even mean to "die of cold?" The author never defines that but seems to imply that he thinks its "any deaths above the full yaer average level of death during the winter." Meanwhile, he was comparing disparate regions, some of which don't even have winters. Again, I would argue the whole piece revolves around extremely simplistic thinking about a complex issue.

wk_end 5y ago

Global warming is going to increase both cold and heat related deaths, given that it's likely to (and has already started to) produce more extreme temperatures at both ends of the spectrum.

ars 5y ago
That wouldn't be global warming then, given that temperature is measured by averaging over an entire year. If it's both hotter and colder the average wouldn't change.
- Scene_Cast2 5y ago
  At this point, "global warming" is shorthand for "climate change"
- lm28469 5y ago
  It can be both colder and warmer at different rates, the average would change
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- theptip 5y ago
  The prediction for decades has been: 1. Average global temperature increases. 2. Winters get colder on average 3. Summers get hotter on average, more strongly than 2. Or if you prefer simple arithmetic, the average of -1 and 1 is 0. The average of -2 and 4 is 1. The second one has a colder "winter" but it's still warmer on average.
  - haberman 5y ago
    > 2. Winters get colder on average I have never heard this. Do you have a reference? I am no expert, but I looked for any statement about winter temperatures from the latest IPCC report. I found this in TS.2.6: > Warming of the land surface during the period 1971–2018 > contributed about 5% of the increase in the global energy > inventory (TS.3.1), nearly twice the estimate in AR5 (high > confidence). It is virtually certain that the average > surface warming over land will continue to be higher than > over the ocean throughout the 21st century. The warming > pattern will likely vary seasonally, with northern high > latitudes warming more during winter than summer (medium > confidence). {2.3.1, 4.3.1, 4.5.1, Box 7.2, 7.2.2, > Cross-Chapter Box 9.1, 11.3, Atlas 11.2} > The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (warm days and > nights) and the intensity and duration of heatwaves have > increased globally and in most regions since 1950, while the > frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased > (virtually certain). There is high confidence that the > increases in frequency and severity of hot extremes are due > to human-induced climate change. Some recent extreme events > would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human > influence on the climate system. It is virtually certain > that the further changes in hot and cold extremes will > occur throughout the 21st century in nearly all inhabited > regions, even if global warming is stabilized at 1.5°C > (Table TS.2, Figure TS.12a). This seems to contradict your claim. Also the most recent National Climate Assessment says this in its summary finding (https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/): > Declines in snow and ice cover caused by warmer winter > temperatures are expected to negatively impact the winter > recreation industry in the Northwest, Northern Great Plains, > and the Northeast.

seanc 5y ago

Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top: "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]" This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.

gnicholas 5y ago
Wish this were more common. This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking while reading the article. Particularly at > I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas. When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are. I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    The pdf format is partially to blame for the lack of hyperlinks. Hopefully we'll see more html-first papers in the future.
- 5y ago

evan54 5y ago

how long does an article like this take to write? Felt very well written!?

commandlinefan 5y ago
That's Scott Alexander. He's an amazing writer - possibly one of the best of the 21st century. All the more amazing that he just posts this stuff for free.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  I would guess it still takes a while, if only to find the relevant information.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  He's getting paid subs from substack now (and they gave him a good first-year deal), but it's mostly people who pay out of goodwill (there are a few sub-only posts and comment boards, but it's 90% free conent).

tims33 5y ago

Certainly an interesting read. Although, it really makes me think of the words of the Big Lebowski: "That's just like, your opinion, man" which I think aligns with his ultimate conclusion.

didibus 5y ago
Ya, I think too often we have a tendency to take a bet on propositions where there simply is no logical conclusion to be had quite yet given the current information. I wish more author instead of saying, this is where my bet would be, they would just say, ya there's no good information and this whole thing is up in the air, we just don't know and here are the next steps if we wanted to get closer to knowing. Because otherwise it leads to a weird bias. For some reason, we have the tendency to believe that someone who's done the research would be more likely to be correct in their bet, but inconclusive research doesn't actually make this true. If the research is inconclusive, having done it doesn't help the prediction.
- 2arrs2ells 5y ago
  I think that’s unfair to Scott when the entire article is prefaced by “Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this” The rationalist movement is all about being able to accurately forecast the accuracy of your predictions. Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd - by making early/fuzzy predictions (and acknowledging them as such) we may ex find that we are more accurate than we realize.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Ya, this article did an okay job, I was talking more generally, though I still think there is a few places where he's making bets in that article. > Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd I don't think we're even talking low accuracy here, low accuracy still implies some accuracy, what I'm seeing here is random or potentially even worse than random prediction. The data points to things that are way to broad and general to reason about the cause. I think knowing that is valuable, don't get me wrong, but my conclusion would be, don't bet on this, unless you like playing roulette.

Ericson2314 5y ago

What a nice illustration of the limitations of pure empiricism.

naasking 5y ago
Is it though? Because it seems like the questions can only be answered with better empirical data. As the author said, the studies of this are unimpressive and the data insufficient.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  I am not sure there is an amount of data where these problems truely go away -- too little, this, too much, other issues. I guess I am a "theory-ladenist" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Who isn't, in our post-modern times ? The author, being an (anti)rationalist, is well aware of these issues : "The map is not the territory." is a popular mantra of theirs. But I guess that it's much harder to apply in practice...
    - naasking 5y ago
      Do you mean the article's author? He is of the rationalist community.

Nasrudith 5y ago

Subsaharan African desert heat cold deaths make perfect sense if you are aware of the side effects of the lack of moisture and vegetation - low thermal mass. There is a reason desert mammals have fur and desert reptiles burrow - it drops fast and low in the night. If you go from minimally dressed in the day for heat from inexperience or poverty and are ill-prepared you die a death that sounds utterly absurd to pop cultural assumptions about the desert. Combine that with jungle-savvanah-desert "exotic foreign wilderness" conflation. The jungle you really do dress scantily for given humidity, temperature, and most importantly the exact opposite thermal mass situation. There is a reason desert dwellers prefer covering garments beyond just sun reflection. Greenland I can only guess as possibly related to volcanic warmth and being used to dressing for warmth combined with familarity with hypothermia's symptoms including feeling hot. If you are used to dealing with getting so cold you feel an urge to strip naked and dive in the snow you may double down on heat because it is usually cold. But if it is actually heat this time you die an absurd seeming death. I also assume heat deaths exclude fire related deaths.

ehnto 5y ago
I think for the cold extreme it's less likely confusing too-cold with too-hot, and just the same as your African desert example. People without experience in the heat won't be able to tell when it goes from uncomfortable to dangerous due to inexperience. We're more than capable of bearing deadly heat emotionally, and so if you don't know what that feels like you'll just keep going until you get heatstroke, which will also be a new experience for an Icelander I assume. For those new to extreme heat, the sheer amount of water required to stay safe is usually underestimated.
- iamhamm 5y ago
  I live in a desert and I’m very active outdoors, even in the summer, and you’re totally right about the misjudging of being safe. First is the confusion people have about clothing choice. You can tell the tourists at Death Valley because there in shorts and short sleeves while those that live here are in pants and long sleeves. Also, water consumption as you point out- I do summer hiking/trail running in the mountains around here and it’s trivial to drink a gallon of water. The biggest distance limiter is the weight of the water you need to carry.

Brassens100 5y ago

Naïve post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]", so I'm commenting in the same manner : Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences ! Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ? I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !

Brassens100 5y ago

Naïve post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]", and I'm commenting in the same manner : Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences ! Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ? I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Why would cold places adapt so hard that they did better than warm places? It's plausible that many of the adaptations are trade offs. You do better in the cold by not doing as well when it's hot. Then if it gets warmer in the place it's usually cold, your adaptations to the cold are impediments and make things worse. And the same thing the other way around. In the place where people have adapted to the heat, if it gets even a little bit cold, they're in trouble. This implies that climate change could still be making everything worse for everyone. You make it warmer for people adapted to the cold and that's bad. You make it warmer for people adapted to the heat and that's still bad, because they're still where they are. Now it's 145 F there instead of 135 F and their adaptations are insufficient.

ehnto 5y ago
We built homes in Australia for mostly clement weather, and so when it gets cold or hot, many homes fail to cope for long. If the swings get worse and longer in duration in either direction, we're going to find it really hard to keep houses livable without blasting air conditioning 24/7.

lm28469 5y ago

Kind of off topic but seeing the current comments, keep in mind that excess deaths due to temperature is but a tiny fraction of the equation. Co2 levels and its impact on our cognitive capacity, ocean acidification, loss of crops, access to water, massive population migrations, warming of permafrost, &c. are all much more likely to cause problems

georgewsinger 5y ago
CO2 is an input to photosynthesis. How does it lead to a net loss of crops? EDIT: Of course, with changing climate: some crops will benefit; others will not. But how do we know in net that crop yields will definitely decrease under global warming?
- WalterSear 5y ago
  Bit hard to plant crops during a hurricane, or water them during a drought.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Hurricanes and droughts are regional. Might make growing more expensive and limited in some places, while others are able to grow more.
- danielheath 5y ago
  More extreme temperatures will clearly affect plant growth rates.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  Different plants have different optimum co2 concentrations, more is going to be bad for some, changing weather patterns and water availability will mean upheaval of agriculture for some regions, rising oceans will put some agriculture underwater.
- lm28469 5y ago
  It's one of many variable, o2 is an input for respiration but if I'm sitting on your chest you'll still struggle. And rest assured, co2 isn't a bottleneck for crops

didibus 5y ago

As with most data problems, the quality of the data is always the weakling. I think the quality of the data for this analysis is just poor (the analysis is good, but the data is really questionable), there's no way we're going to figure this one out using the data we have for it in my opinion. As an aside, I wish that absolute numbers were also presented. Comparing things in relative ratios gets very confusing to reason about.

nanis 5y ago

Temperature station locations in the GHCN ... Notice how most of Africa is blank. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg

dekhn 5y ago

people outside the field are unqualified to parse the data. please go back and get a degree in the field before commenting.

wittycardio 5y ago

I think the cultural adaptation is severely undervalued here. I grew up in a hot/humid climate and I would be freezing at 25 degrees C . Go to coastal India in the winter if you don't believe me. Conversely I now live in a very cold place and walk around in shorts at 15 and am comfortable with just a sweater all the way to 5 degrees or so.

anp 5y ago

What about biological or habitual adaptation, maybe call it acclimation? People in different climates will have different ways of maintaining homeostasis relative to the weather and technological adaptations they have available for it. If you live your life in high heat environments, your habits and to some degree your body will adapt to keep you cool. If heart attacks are a significant component, then maybe some of these deaths can be explained by what amounts to shock from one's baseline?

heavyset_go 5y ago

If you're wet and in 54 degree F weather, you can get hypothermia and die after ~6 hours if you can't seek shelter or adequate apparel. People die in the wilderness like this often, as do people without homes. Rain and wind are sufficient killers.

P4u1 5y ago

Isn't a global warming usually what precedes an ice age? Just saying...

georgewsinger 5y ago

People continue to point out the (widely known) negative effects of global warming, but how are we so confident that the net effects will be long-term negative?[1] It seems to me an extremely complicated calculation which doesn't merit extreme certainty in either direction. Here are some of the positives of global warming: - Statistically, an order of magnitude more humans die from colder temperatures than from hotter ones (as discussed in this article). So hotter temperatures could easily lead to net lives saved, at least in this area. - Hotter temperatures and higher CO2 in northern/arctic areas will increase (net) crop yields substantially. Many areas which formerly weren't hospitable for certain types of crops will suddenly become so. This isn't so surprising since CO2 is an input to photosynthesis. - Global warming will free up northern trade routes and make potentially millions of square miles of land more habitable for humans. - The distribution of global temperature increases is expected to be tilted towards colder areas (that is: higher temperature increases in colder regions than in hotter regions). This means we get to experience the positive effects of global warming disproportionately to the negative effects. - Slight temperature increases might even hedge against long-term climate risk: we are technically still in an ice age, and there is long-term tail risk that we will recede back into a deeper one within a few millennia. So how do we know that stopping CO2 emissions won't make human climate long-term worse? - Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will positively impact some species (including species which don't even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others. It seems to me a general rule of thumb that more life flourishes in hotter climates than colder ones. So why be so confident that the net effects of global warming will be long-term negative to animals, en totale? Of course, the negative effects of global warming (flooding, rising sea levels, etc) are well-known, so I omit them. My point is not that global warming is definitely a net positive; it's that it's not clear why there is so much confidence it's "definitely" a net negative. [1] Credit to David Friedman for helping point out many of these things.

afpx 5y ago
You make some great points. You actually have me wanting to fire up some turbines. Another possibly good societal optimization: backyard pooping. Good for the soil, saves on maintaining a sewage system, and the odds of getting sick from it are surprisingly low.

aaron695 5y ago

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solidasparagus 5y ago

I think the author lacks domain knowledge to draw conclusions about deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and this article reads as though the author didn't talk to any experts on public health in these regions. Uganda has seasons - rainy seasons and dry seasons. If you are trying to understand seasonal mortality trends, you should be considering the seasons that exist in that part of the world. I would imagine that monsoons and flooding bring public health risk - from hypothermia to compromised access to clean water to stagnant water for mosquitos to breed. Discussing the temperature-dependence of African mortality without discussing other known-to-be-seasonal mortality factors is is bewildering to me. Mosquitoes thrive in certain temperatures. Child and maternal health in Africa remains a serious issue and birth rates are seasonal in many part of Africa. This article asked a question with an incredibly complicated set of answers and tried to come up with a one sentence explanation. I would suggest that the author spend less time analyzing bad data and more time talking to domain experts. Without sufficient domain knowledge, this analysis has no hope of being accurate.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right? > Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500. So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season. This second point isn't confirming the first. A ~10% increase in deaths during the cold season isn't enough to attribute ~10% of all deaths to cold, unless the cold season lasts all year. > But [minimum mortality temperature] is very different in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region > You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F). But the chart shows lots of excess cold mortality in Beijing, with its frigid winters. You can't live in Beijing at all without being able to deal with lethally low temperatures. The cultural adaptation story must be partially true, but it has some serious problems.