I guess that demonstrates the concept of “a drop in the ocean”, but turning a massacre of civilians into a unit of energy feels crass at best.
The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.
It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.
The comment I responded to was tone policing for crassness instead of actually contributing to the discussion.
Would it have been better to point out there has been a Russo-Ukraine wars worth of deaths from heat waves each year since 2022?
Or a Rwandan Civil Wars worth of deaths projected in the next year?
Or a Holocaust worth of deaths over the next decade?
What does it take to get people to listen and take it seriously?
Not for nothing but I am growing lemons and coffee beans in Vancouver, BC, and I only need to bring them in for about 2 months a year. What that actually means is that people are already evaluating how we will relocate crops (luxury and essential) to other climates.
What about when major crops like wheat, corn, rice, and beans fail around the world?
Scary.
On a related note, annual deaths from extreme cold are estimated at over 4 million per year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
(Note: I picked this article specifically because it’s written by people who are desperately trying to find a way to make the heat story sound worse, but still have to admit that the facts are the facts.)
When the facts don’t support your story, make up a wild new prediction of the future that can’t be falsified.
[1] ...even though 99% of the world's population lives between -50 and +60 degrees latitude.
Making long-term predictions of deaths due to inherently contradictory outcomes of long-term fluctuations in those “more chaotic” systems. That’s obviously objective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_Maggiore
And read what happened many times in history.
Not a “thesis”, just a fact.
You had made a remark in another post somewhere that there was an unfalsifiable claim in asserting that people will die from both extreme cold and extreme heat, and that claim is one I don't really find all that interesting. Mathematically, it's verging on vacuously true, very firmly in "Yeah, so what?" territory.
I'm more curious if there's some (minimally associative but preferably causal) relationship between those extremes that you might know about; e.g., for every linear step increase in heat deaths, we realize some exponential step increase in cold deaths.
Your feels are not proof.
Starting from a situation where nine times more people die from cold than heat each year, then asserting that not only will those numbers somehow flip, but that actually, they’ll also both go up? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.
No, but it's how I formulate hypotheses for testing. It's why that claim I labeled as verging on vacuously true is uninteresting: how the fuck do I even go about testing that?
> The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.
I fear I may be misunderstanding what you mean by parsimonious here. There's a scientific sense wherein there's an explanation that requires fewer assumptions, and in this sense, I'm still not understanding the argument you're proposing. Simplest hypothesis under what model? I think is the question I want to ask here???
The unfortunate part is that it's prima facie unclear that the climate system would be conservative in this way. I'll admit that's due to some ignorance on my part about how climate systems work, but it's also that ignorance that fuels an understanding that there are variables that I can't account for, let alone control for, which limits the kind of modeling that I can undertake to understand this problem (and, as a consequence, your argument, whatever that happens to be).
Forgive me if it seems like I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm legitimately trying to understand your contributions as positively contributory. I have no real priors for this that I'm trying to validate or invalidate.
If I am wrong, I apologize, but politeness and tone policing to shut down discussion of crises is a recurring problem in society.
You cracked the code, let's just try to equate climate change to Hiroshima! That'll convince people!
"Due to data limitations, adaptation indicators such as access to air conditioning and healthcare resources were not included, and GDP per capita was used as a proxy."
I'm sure this analysis is directionally right, but it's not defensible to use the 178,000 number. Moreover extrapolating out into the future based on such an analysis seem fraught at best.
Sure. There are weaknesses in the study, it doesn't change the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths.
Hiding behind the claims that studies of complex systems are not completely valid because of a lack of rigor in the process or a weakness in the data are easy to overlook when governments around the world (including mine in Canada) are routinely fudging the numbers to achieve political goals.
People are dying from climate change in record numbers, and it's going to get a lot worse, and criticizing the quality of the studies does absolutely nothing helpful.
While it’s important it seems like a tractable problem in a lot of ways, and the study’s lack of data on AC use is a serious flaw.
To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
At the same time, I have a hard time thinking that the destruction of the environment is either necessary or natural. So the death caused by climate change also seems like a particular kind of massacre.
Where I was raised, it was a commonplace to think of the firebombings and nuclear incineration of vast amounts of civilian populations as regrettable but necessary and perhaps even a natural outcome of technological growth.
I hadn't really considered that position until your comment, but my rejoinder would be "perhaps the comparison is unfortunately apt and it is crass to ignore the death caused by climate change."