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Europe has more heat deaths per year than the United States loses to gun deaths
- fortran77 1y agoTyler Cowan pointed this out here: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-once-thought-europeans-lived-as-well-americans https://www.thefp.com/p/i-once-thought-europeans-lived-as-we...
- jrflowers 1y agoIn a similar vein, the band ABBA has more number one hits than the UK has aircraft carriers
- readthenotes1 1y agoMaybe if Europe had more guns we could turn things around.
- jmclnx 1y agoNo AC is the issue, this does not look good for people trying to help with energy consumption vs Climate Change. It is like we are in a loosing race. I know better things are coming, but will it arrive in time and be cheap enough for people to afford ? FWIW, I never had an AC until about 5 or so years ago. These days it is required as people age. And compared to when I was young, summers are far more brutal. I think about 40 years ago I started using a window fan at night, before that an open window was good enough.
- solace_silence 1y agoSeems like all the euro death data comes from one WHO article from 2024. Large claims require large support and all that...
- Booktrope 1y agoYeah, and there seem to be at least two ways to measure heat death. One is to measure "excess deaths" meaning, increase in death rate as temperature increases or exceeds some statistical measure of base death rate. The other is to count deaths medically identified as heat-related (such as heat stroke or heat exhaustion, etc) So just by searching the web, you can also easily find studies that listed the EU death rate recently as much lower.
- dinfinity 1y agoHeat deaths are also pretty much old people close to the end of their life: "A large analysis found that the majority of these deaths were not just among the extremely frail, but in people who likely would not have died within the next six months, and that in most cases, life was shortened by at least one year. Some cases will have less time lost, but it is rare for heat death to simply advance death by only days or weeks. In quantitative terms, heat deaths tend to "cost" between six months and a few years of life per death on average." You gotta die of something.
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- toomuchtodo 1y agoEurope will deploy more air-conditioning units and renewables before the US ever fixes its gun death problem (highest firearm ownership per capita globally, little to no mental health services at scale [suicide is half of all gun violence deaths in the US], etc). Europe can’t control climate change in the near term, but the US could absolutely provide mental health services and more aggressively regulate firearm ownership. It is an active choice not to. https://www.ehpa.org/market-data/ https://www.ehpa.org/market-data/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricity-review-2025/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/05/24/suicides-...
- Brian_K_White 1y agoI don't think suicides will be materially helped by "mental health services". The source of suicides is not a few people falling through cracks, it's many different fundamentally inhumane aspects of society itself. A therapist can not fix that.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoIf we attribute the suicides to economic circumstances, certainly, I agree even more it’s something the US is unwilling to change.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoNot just economic. Lots of different things. Gender relations. Interactions with the government.
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- gregjor 1y agoPopulation of Europe almost double that of USA.
- siddbudd 1y agothe source is talking about deaths per 100K population. Still an utterly ridiculous comparison.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."