People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
I was skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. You’re right. Globally, about 9x as many people die due to cold-related causes than heat-related causes. It’s not freezing, though, but longer-term effects like kidney failure in elderly people. [1]
I’m still dubious about the argument that weather events could save lives, though, partially because climate change makes weather more extreme, not simply “more pleasant for people in colder climates.”
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/part-one-how-many-people-die-from...
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2 shows it another way:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Official reports have been downplaying the impact for decades, while countries have been setting climate targets that they had no intention of achieving.
The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.
>Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Predictions are warnings. When we have the evidence it will be too late. So let me ask you, what direction are we headed?
Figure 11-9:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Chapter 11:
Thanks.
Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.
Climate change is not just about it getting warmer. The problem also lies with changes in climate, the pattern of weather. Sudden changes in climate do not allow for adaptation to compensate. This includes human adaptation.
But it may be better just to read the IPCC summary:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic...
Did I say those words?
This is the latest assessment report, AR6, published 2021-2023. It's the latest IPCC data available. The next one won't come out until after 2029.
The fact that you don't understand this indicates that you don't really know the details of what you're talking about.
They said nothing of the kind. So your opening sentence immediately indicates you aren’t here to discuss this in good faith.
This is still a problem! But the people who run around screaming about heat waves causing mass casualty today are simply not credible commentators. Far more people die of cold than heat in any given year, so a reduction in cold days will tend to net out to a gain in human life, not a loss.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.
Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.
I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.
Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant also permits cooling - it’s based on the heating credentials of a unit only.
So in Britain at least, installing cooling systems in private residences seems to be getting easier.
Not sure it makes sense, most of those countries are already phasing out fuel/gas boilers.
IMO it's just cultural shift is slow to adjust (in those countries, a few decades ago AC would have been a wasteful luxury, summer temperature would be well below 30 except for a few days).
mMy phone tells me that the temperature this week has been 15°C above the long term average for this time of year.
Don’t really need air con when the peak temperature in the past has been 20–25°C
Furthermore, the way the last mile distribution of power works is often underground (with the cables directly in the sand, no hose or tube around it) which makes it expensive to upgrade to handle a much higher peak consumption. Only lucky thing is that you mostly need AC when the sun is shining, thus local production via photovoltaic cells is a good solution that sidesteps the power grid problem.
Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?
Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.
A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.
Unless stuff like "Why not give solar an advantage..." is a rhetorical question with the answer of "Because lots of current billionaires would make less money", I don't think they are pointing out the same stuff I said.
Oligarchy and regulatory capture are undeniably real, but they are not scientific. They’re social phenomena, and much harder to theorize about and model than e.g. what happens to rainfall in Northern Europe with a 1.5c El Niño.
Worse, while oligarchy is absolutely real and causing great harm, its amorphous nature means some people blame it the way people used to blame demons, or humours. Flat tire? The oligarchs! Sprained ankle? The oligarchs!
So while both climate change and oligarchy are real problems, I don’t see them as the same class of problem at all, and the tools to address are different. They’re entangled (oligarchs who will never feel discomfort short of defenestration are unlikely to allow disruption of their wealth just for feeding people), but different.