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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

#101

Post by cryptoz »

skohan wrote: post #77
dv_dt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems increasingly needed now, and is one of many profit externalities to the fossil fuel companies costing everybody else money. The fairest, and market leveraging way would be to make them pay for this.

Shell and EXON buying everyone in France an AC unit so everyone can keep driving cars around is one of the most dystopian ideas I have considered in some time.

Why are cars relevant here? Weren't most of the people who died from this elderly anyway, less likely to be driving?

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.

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

#102

Post by deftnerd »

Someone wrote: post #88
dalore wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to have AC preparedness when it's only used for 1 week out of a year. 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…

By that logic, it doesn’t make sense to fit a building with a sprinkler system when it’s only used for one hour out of a century. 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 wou…

Many areas around the world have storm shelters or bomb shelters.

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.

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

#103

Post by peternicky »

dalore wrote: post #46
zadkey wrote: post #34

I live in Texas. The heat wave that France is experienced this summer is like maybe 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a normal summer for us. 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 owne…

It doesn't make sense to have AC preparedness when it's only used for 1 week out of a year. 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…

Does it make sense for residents in area where hurricanes occur to keep a generator in their garage?

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

#104

Post by PhasmaFelis »

trothamel wrote: post #53

Note that according to https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... , which describes a study in The Lancet, "cold weather kills more than 20 times as many people as hot weather". So it kind of makes you wonder if this is something like the trolley problem - if raising the temperature sacrifices 1,500 lives to save 30,000, is it worth it?

If global warming continues on a worst-case trajectory, then large swathes of equatorial land may be uninhabitable to humans in 50 or 100 years. More than a billion people will be forced to migrate or die. If it comes to that, the death toll will be much worse than a few bad winters.

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

#105

Post by swasheck »

GhostVII wrote: post #63
abootstrapper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all Texas cities basically shut down with any amount of snow or ice. Imagine if there was a blizzard in Houston and some yank was like, “where are their snow plows, snow chains, heavy jackets, insulated pipes, etc?”

If 1500 people died from a blizzard, it would be a reasonable response to suggest that those kind of things would be a good idea.

if 1500 people died from a sustained blizzard lasting a decidedly "abnormal" period of time would be a better equivalency. It's not like someone just turned the heat lamp on France for a day and zapped 1500 people and then turned it off. People are much better equipped to quickly respond to a catastrophic event. They're less prepared for a sustained shift of their fundamental way of experiencing life.

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

#106

Post by swasheck »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #98
prolepunk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe more appropriate topic of discussion should be how climate change affects the people of France and what can be done about it, instead of chastising them for not having Dallas housing codes.

> Maybe more appropriate topic of discussion should be how climate change affects the people of France and what can be done about it That's what Zadkey was doing, though.

Not constructively. Zadkey essentially derided France for being unprepared for a situation for which they had no true context. If you take no issue with Zadkey's comment, then I'd assume you have no issue with the Harvey response.

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

#107

Post by akvadrako »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #40
egdod wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed]

“So you know, a warming of 1 degree Celsius, which is what we’ve seen thus far, can lead to a 10-fold increase in the frequency of 100 degree days in New York City for example,” said Dr. Mann. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, since the 1960s the average number of heat waves — defined as two or more consecutive days where daily lows exceeded historical July and August temperatures — in 50 major Am…

This quote by itself doesn't mean much because the definition of heat wave is arbitrary. It could just be a mathematical consequence of moving the mean 1 degree.

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

#108

Post by wtdata »

We need to stop with this ancient idea that AC is problematic against the environment. There are quite a few uninformed comments on this thread.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning

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

#109

Post by zadkey »

abootstrapper wrote: post #55
zadkey wrote: post #34

I live in Texas. The heat wave that France is experienced this summer is like maybe 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a normal summer for us. 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 owne…

And all Texas cities basically shut down with any amount of snow or ice. Imagine if there was a blizzard in Houston and some yank was like, “where are their snow plows, snow chains, heavy jackets, insulated pipes, etc?”

This is true.

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...

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