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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising that the article doesn't seem to consider the potential benefits of heating, especially when it comes to mitigating the adverse effects of cold weather. For instance, this study conducted in India [0] found that cold-related deaths significantly outnumbered heat-related deaths. Given this, I think it's important to weigh the advantages of heating against its drawbacks when discussing this topic.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2022-01-cold-deaths-india.html

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Both are bad and to be avoided. One doesn’t prevent the other. You can have simultaneously more deaths in the winter and more deaths in the summer. Climate is getting more extreme, not just “hotter”.

Is there any co-relation between heat waves and the temperature during the winter months? Anecdotally, it just seems like we are caught between an ever-lengthening gap of higher temperatures during summer and lower temperatures during winter.

That's because they're more prepared for heat, and have clothes and structures designed to handle the heat at the expense of cold.

Like how Texas has lots of heat waves that cause issues, but there was far more havoc and death during that cold snap.

ok, but people are still overheating due to to the increased heat in the summer. Maybe now only 100million more people risk heatstroke and 200million less risk freezing to death in the winter, that doesn’t mean there’s a very very big problem

This isn’t surprising.

Mentioning facts like that would violate the narrative.

Walk me through how knowing that people also die of cold exposure violates the narrative that there is a deadly heat wave threatening 1B people in India? Is this something logically consistent or a non-sequitor?

Fewer people are dying globally due to climate change net decreasing extreme cold events.

This is an unpopular fact to state for obvious reasons.

If you’re going to make this kind of utilitarian argument, then you have to demonstrate that global warming harms fewer people overall, not just that there are fewer cold-related deaths.

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