Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say
bbc.com
bbc.com
Preparedness for summer is deeply ingrained in everyone's minds here. Many Apartment complexes treat issues with AC units as emergency situations, reach out to on-call handymen and give high priority to their fix.
In the city of Dallas, city code requires that property owners provide refrigerated air to tenants from April 1 to Nov. 1.
"According to state law, landlords must fix any condition that threatens a tenant's health or safety. In Texas, that condition can include a sweltering day in a stuffy apartment with no air conditioning."
It is my hope that people in France look for ways to prepare and better safeguard the health and well-being of their citizens against the heat.
Some information taken from https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2009/10/07/dm...
An often overlooked point is also the situation in workplaces, some parts of Europe simply lack the worker protection needed during heatwaves.
I honestly dont see how most countries in Europe could retrofit buildings to a detectable degree, let alone finance it. There are just to many older buildings build for another kind of climate. Providing air conditioned shelters during the weeks of deadly heat sounds like the most realistic option. That would be similar to what is being done in winter to prevent people from freezing to death.
Also the environmental impact of everyone having an AC, that's not good.
In France and the UK hardly any has an AC because it's not really needed. Your suggestion is that they spend billions of dollars for this? Who buys everyone the AC?
I lived in PNG which is near the equator and hot. It's not the temperature that's the true problem, but humidity. We stayed cool by using the fan, resting, removing clothing, swimming.
A more reasonable shortish term solution is to air condition large communal buildings and allow people to camp out overnight when the temperatures become inhospitable.
I think the most dystopian idea would be Exxon not paying for their crimes against humanity, but rather allowed to continue lying to the public about climate change, lobbying governments to reduce their penalties.
If that one week a year can kill people, still think it doesn't make sense?
Thousands of people just died. It is clearly needed.
The question should be whether AC would be used much, but whether it has a net benefit. And yes, the environmental impact should be taken into account.
To me, that depends (a.o.) on whether those 1,500 excess deaths get ‘compensated’ by lower death rates just after the heat wave (which would mean many of those who died lost ‘only’ a few weeks)
Perhaps laws requiring community centers also function as temperature extreme shelters could be instated.
The laws would have to also provide funding to install and maintain AC and Heating systems suitable for the population around that area.
Additionally, if a business doesn't have AC or heating during extreme temperature alerts, it should close for the safety of the workers.
It would be patronizing if French people offered basic advice on not building on floodplains and storm preparation after Harvey. People just plan based on their prior experiences.
More EU major cities are in-land than US (something about war after war), so there’s less ability to cool off.
And less moderating circulating waters.
Today, there's fewer trees and a lot more AC. It's ironic because AC (especially inefficient window units) contributes to global warming in a big way.
The Texas model offers some good ideas to think about. Why must you get so offended, I didn’t.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
US responsible for about a quarter of cumulative CO2 emissions, and has been #1 since about 1911.
China is emitting more now, but cumulative emissions are only half as much.
That’s... pretty much the definition of ignorant. Being ignorant isn’t bad and being able to recognize what you’re ignorant of it much more important than “not being ignorant”.
Given the super low price of smaller window A/C units, you'd think they'd install a few more of those, maybe it's impractical for some reason. Looking at a chart showing summer highs in Paris since 1900, it would be interesting to look at a newspaper from 1948 and see what happened (the chart shows a roughly 1 C upwards change since 1900 on average, but the last couple of years are outliers similar to a few earlier heatwaves).
I've always wondered what would happen if the power went off for a day or two in Phoenix in August.
The same as the power going off in Minneapolis in the middle of January. It’s treated as a crisis by the utility.
In Europe you generally have another kind of window, which you tilt.
https://www.bew24-fenster.de/media/catalog/category/Kat_Kuns...
https://www.plejadium.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/kippfens...
Given the construction, you cant conveniently seal an AC in there. Due to the houses being made from stone, you cant easily replace the type of windows. People also generally rent in the cities, so you would have to convince your landlord to let you screw with his outer wall, which is a big no no. Some countries like Germany also dont allow renters to change the outer appearance of a house. This mostly means no satellite dishes hung out of the window, but also no bulky ACs.
That's what Zadkey was doing, though.
I live in Houston. When it snows here we will sometimes see sand trucks driving around. They come down from North.
You can't just truck in AC though so I think your example is like comparing apples to oranges.
Texas for the most part is not prepared for blizzards or icy conditions. We do not have winter tires, we do not carry snow shovels. There are no snowplows that I have ever seen or heard of. We close schools after 1 to 2 inches of snow, and we put sand on roads.
Most people have heavy coats/jackets, but rarely ever wear them. But despite our under-preparedness, not many people die from cold weather in Texas.
This data is a bit old(2003-2008), but is illustrative.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/Hotcolddths/hotcolddths...
Mandatory AC is not the solution but many other solutions are being deployed. The first massive heatwave happened in 2003, it wasn't as hot as this summer but took us by surprise and caused over 15,000 death in France, around 70,000 in Europe. Compare this to 1,500 death in the record breaking heatwave of this summer.
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.
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.
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.... 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.
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.
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.
Over the 20 days of high heat, that’s about 70 extra people per day, or about 3 percent, just to put it in perspective. What percent of ordinary deaths would we expect to get attributed to high heat? Especially among the elderly?
Disappointed in the 0% effort journalists make to put things in perspective.
EDIT: regarding CNN, 9% doesn’t add up and the quote is vague. I know I’m crazy to expect journalists to care about numbers but it just bugs me
They report that the mortality rate was 9% higher than baseline during the heat wave.
France/Paris has a deeper problem that comes out in these heatwaves. Older people that live alone, with little or no relatives caring for them, and living in flats without air-conditioning, or have low income/pension that they cannot afford an extended heatwave, happen to pass every summer there is a heatwave in Central Europe (which lately is more frequent). I remember hearing/reading about this every couple of years about France, and apparently not much is being done to make this stop.
And that is literally all I know. The money I earned goes somewhere to do something, supposedly. I'm really starting to feel like I've been defrauded because I also feel not a whole lot has been done.
The money is paid to the CNSA, which has a 26.812 billion euros budget for 2019, according to https://www.cnsa.fr/budget-et-financement/budget#le-budget-2...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/Practical/Health/Flu-killed-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
At least it’s taken seriously rather than “it doesn’t get hot here and it will pass”.
An incentive to replace aging gas and electric heat with high efficiency modern heat-pumps that can both heat and cool is a clear ecological win.
The question is (as ever) how can we fairly deploy this society changing tech so that those who need it most don't get it last.
It’s that “air conditioning makes you sick”.
Even though most EU cars now come standard with AC, my experience is that the French would rather open the windows on the autoroute than turn hit the AC.
It's not the first heat wave and from the speed the global warning is heading, we might see many more heat waves in the near future
I find these claims, and those similar from “activists” like Greta Thunberg, wholly unproductive both to steps taken to actually curb climate change and legitimate science.
Society isn’t going to cease growing and moving forward just because of climate change. It is unfortunately a reality that must be dealt with by creation and not regression.
Even as someone who supports the idea that climate change is a very real challenge for humanity.
I don't think that's really what anyone is suggesting, but if the change impacts enough people society as a whole will focus on fixing the problem rather than doing other things.
The sibling comment to yours suggesting exactly that wasn't the first, not by a long shot. US politicians have suggested everything from ending entire industries to massive increases in abortion to stop population growth. Others have suggested massive taxes to pay for health insurance and UBI so that people who don't feel like working don't have to.
"Stop moving forward" might not a common phrase, but only because their version of "forward" is fundamentally different from the current one. Stopping growth is certainly a goal of many far-left thinkers out there.
Sure you can. The number should be 0 for any country regardless of size, and 1500 is a huge number compared to 0. There's no reason in our modern society, with our ability to build iPhones and measure the weather with satellites, that a single person should die from a heat wave.
That was unconvincing to me.
It makes sense to me that in France a society (which by the way doesn't make iPhones, not sure how that applies here anyway) that has some sort of strange hang up about air conditioning would have people die of heat.
Just by using their AC also in the winter to heat their houses instead of traditional heating systems, these people are already having a lower CO2 footprint (even when using the AC to cool down a few weeks in the year) than people that don't use an AC.
Modern AC systems work with in inverter heat pump and are extremely efficient at cooling down and heating up a house since all they do is to move heat from one place to the other.
No. No more than a cold day in winter means that climate change isn’t real.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/climate/heatwave-climate-...
Doing things like that is why people don't believe alarmists and the NYT anymore.
You can look at the median yearly temperature and see how it is steadily increasing http://www.aemet.es/imagenes_gcd/idi/clima/registros_climati...
Where I come from that's not called a heat wave that's called summer.
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39001.Power_Sex_Suicide?...
And anyway, we’re talking about outlier heat waves, not yearly medians.
"Straddling the equator, the tropics are already hot because they receive the most sunlight. As the sun hits the tropics, enormous columns of air rise skyward and then outward. But as greenhouse gases trap more heat, those columns of air are pushed farther toward the north and south poles. Air that rises in the tropics falls back down over the middle latitudes. With a warming planet, though, the air is falling in different places. ... Near Uruguay, the Brazil Current collides with the cold and nutrient-rich Malvinas Current that flows north from waters off Argentina. Where the two currents meet — what is known as the “confluence” — features sudden temperature contrasts and fosters rich fisheries. But that zone, too, is on the move. Research suggests it is shifting southward at a rate of more than 40 miles per decade."