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Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

bbc.com

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Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#11

Post by ainiriand »

egdod wrote: post #3

> Why is it so hot and is climate change to blame? No. No more than a cold day in winter means that climate change isn’t real.

No, and yes. Heatwaves like the one experienced in Spain have been extraordinarily long. We experience heat waves all summers and they usually last 2-3 days. This one lasted 1 week. And last year we had 2 heat waves 5 days each. I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28. You can compare historical data here (es) http://www.aemet.es/es/idi/clima/registros_climaticos

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...

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#12

Post by yardie »

HenryBemis wrote: post #4

> half of those who died were aged over 75 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 hear…

Every year for 10 years, for 1 day, I would work for free and donate my salary to the French state. They had set up a fund to purchase and install air conditioning into the homes of the elderly due to the 2003 heatwave that affected 15,000.

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.

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#13

Post by anilakar »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #7
tlb wrote: post #2

There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control. When you include cases like that, and you should if you'…

While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist. 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…

You can always put on more clothes and work physically during cold weather, but there is a limit on how much heat you can dissipate and more importantly social norms that affect how much clothes you can remove :-)

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#15

Post by leftyted »

tlb wrote: post #2

There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control. When you include cases like that, and you should if you'…

> 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.

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.

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#16

Post by toodillusional »

HenryBemis wrote: post #4

> half of those who died were aged over 75 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 hear…

Imagine being so fragile that minor heat waves kill you.

Now imagine countries near equator, like India where many people don't have electricity 24/7 and still they don't have air-conditioning, 100s of millions of them.

Can any ethicists, tell us why we simply don't nuke Europe and kill of all these resource hungry people who are ravaging our planet?

Every single European person, consumes 20x more resources than a normal person in India.

Why are these Europeans so dillusional?

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#17

Post by TheAsprngHacker »

ainiriand wrote: post #11
egdod wrote: post #3

> Why is it so hot and is climate change to blame? No. No more than a cold day in winter means that climate change isn’t real.

No, and yes. Heatwaves like the one experienced in Spain have been extraordinarily long. We experience heat waves all summers and they usually last 2-3 days. This one lasted 1 week. And last year we had 2 heat waves 5 days each. I am talking about ~40 degrees every day. At night barely 28. You can compare historical data here (es) http://www.aemet.es/es/idi/clima/registros_climaticos You can look at the median yearly…

I think that the parent commenter was being sarcastic to ridicule people who think that there being one cold winter day means that global warming isn't real.

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#18

Post by Khanhanhan »

investologia wrote: post #8

France is rich country and AC might be considered in people from certain age 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

AC is one of the biggest global warming offenders and its use should be limited to certain spaces where people in need - including elderly people - could find shelter.

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#19

Post by ptah »

yardie wrote: post #12
HenryBemis wrote: post #4

> half of those who died were aged over 75 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 hear…

Every year for 10 years, for 1 day, I would work for free and donate my salary to the French state. They had set up a fund to purchase and install air conditioning into the homes of the elderly due to the 2003 heatwave that affected 15,000. 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 who…

it reduced the death toll by 90%, possibly more if you take into account population growth

Re: Summer heat killed nearly 1,500 in France, officials say

#20

Post by tlb »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #7
tlb wrote: post #2

There's a big penumbra of people who were sort-of killed by heat. For example, I was biking through Europe this August during the heat wave, and one of our group suffered a heart attack. He'll recover, but the paramedics told us that they'd responded to two fatal motorcycle accidents that day, probably caused by the riders getting heatstroke and losing control. When you include cases like that, and you should if you'…

While I agree that extreme temperatures certainly contribute to the death of people who would not have otherwise died I don't think it's that cut and clear. In many cases of heat death there is shared responsibility. To lump them all together as heat deaths is sensationalist. 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…

I grew up in the Canadian prairies where people frequently did die from the cold. If your car broke down on a lonely road in midwinter, there was a real prospect of freezing to death. People there carried extra parkas, blankets, and thermal candles, but those could only keep you warm for several hours.

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.

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