[HN Gopher] Chilling Effects
___________________________________________________________________
Chilling Effects
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-10-22 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (astralcodexten.substack.com)
| aaron695 wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| Then industrial environmental complex and scientist don't care
| enough about facts to even bother to check if temperature changes
| are good or bad to human health.
|
| This is expected. The environment complex is about fear, indepth
| studies are not needed or worse can be bad for that. And
| scientists are in their back pockets for $$$$
|
| I am surprised with the conclusion we don't understand why the
| flu is more poplar in winter. I would have thought it's as simple
| as more interaction indoors. I guess saying that out loud most
| people work in offices every day, winter or summer, but maybe the
| air-conditioning pushes the virus to the floor quicker.... I
| guess it is complicated.
| tims33 wrote:
| Certainly an interesting read.
|
| Although, it really makes me think of the words of the Big
| Lebowski: "That's just like, your opinion, man" which I think
| aligns with his ultimate conclusion.
| didibus wrote:
| Ya, I think too often we have a tendency to take a bet on
| propositions where there simply is no logical conclusion to be
| had quite yet given the current information.
|
| I wish more author instead of saying, this is where my bet
| would be, they would just say, ya there's no good information
| and this whole thing is up in the air, we just don't know and
| here are the next steps if we wanted to get closer to knowing.
|
| Because otherwise it leads to a weird bias. For some reason, we
| have the tendency to believe that someone who's done the
| research would be more likely to be correct in their bet, but
| inconclusive research doesn't actually make this true. If the
| research is inconclusive, having done it doesn't help the
| prediction.
| 2arrs2ells wrote:
| I think that's unfair to Scott when the entire article is
| prefaced by "Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low
| confidence in all of this"
|
| The rationalist movement is all about being able to
| accurately forecast the accuracy of your predictions. Saying
| we shouldn't discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems
| odd - by making early/fuzzy predictions (and acknowledging
| them as such) we may ex find that we are more accurate than
| we realize.
| didibus wrote:
| Ya, this article did an okay job, I was talking more
| generally, though I still think there is a few places where
| he's making bets in that article.
|
| > Saying we shouldn't discuss low accuracy predictions at
| all seems odd
|
| I don't think we're even talking low accuracy here, low
| accuracy still implies some accuracy, what I'm seeing here
| is random or potentially even worse than random prediction.
| The data points to things that are way to broad and general
| to reason about the cause.
|
| I think knowing that is valuable, don't get me wrong, but
| my conclusion would be, don't bet on this, unless you like
| playing roulette.
| cornel_io wrote:
| Scott Alexander is a very careful quantifier of his bets, he
| tracks them year over year and always goes back to evaluate
| them and make sure he's well calibrated.
|
| I take your point, but he is one of a very few people on this
| planet who _would_ reliably say he just didn 't know if that
| was a more accurate statement than what he said. The whole
| thing is _not_ up in the air, there is limited but useful
| information available now, and he 's trying to correctly
| integrate that.
| didibus wrote:
| Can he accurately predict the accuracy of his predictions?
| I think that's an important factor.
|
| That said, you're right, but I was not focused on him, but
| on the bias that can be produced in other people when
| reading things like this.
|
| Though to be honest, I even worry that I have this bias as
| well. Like because I researched something, yet pretty
| inconclusive, I feel somehow better equipped to bet on it,
| and yet I have no idea if at that point I'm doing better
| than random.
| mousepilot wrote:
| I think its ok, I'd start with hypotheses and when I can,
| I would test them, and in the absense of a spare planet
| and mammalian species as your test tube, the only thing I
| can think of as a proxy for the proverbial test tube
| would be what statistics we can find.
|
| I thought it was well worth the read and he left no
| uncertainty about the uncertainty of his test results.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Kind of off topic but seeing the current comments, keep in mind
| that excess deaths due to temperature is but a tiny fraction of
| the equation. Co2 levels and its impact on our cognitive
| capacity, ocean acidification, loss of crops, access to water,
| massive population migrations, warming of permafrost, &c. are all
| much more likely to cause problems
| georgewsinger wrote:
| CO2 is an input to photosynthesis. How does it lead to a net
| loss of crops?
|
| EDIT: Of course, with changing climate: some crops will
| benefit; others will not. But how do we know _in net_ that crop
| yields will definitely decrease under global warming?
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm guessing among other reasons: droughts, floods, loss of
| pollinators, extreme temperatures, loss of natural
| fertilizers, etc.
| danielheath wrote:
| More extreme temperatures will clearly affect plant growth
| rates.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Different plants have different optimum co2 concentrations,
| more is going to be bad for some, changing weather patterns
| and water availability will mean upheaval of agriculture for
| some regions, rising oceans will put some agriculture
| underwater.
| Symmetry wrote:
| More CO2 is generally good for photosynthesis. Higher
| temperatures are generally bad for photosynthesis. Which
| dominates depends on a lot of factors including base
| temperature, C3 versus C4 photosynthesis, etc. And then
| there's the changes in rainfall.
|
| Personally I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the first
| .5 C of global warming was a net benefit for humanity. I'd be
| pretty surprised if the second was, though, and _very_ very*
| surprised if the third was. And that's just what takes us to
| our current target for limiting warming.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's one of many variable, o2 is an input for respiration but
| if I'm sitting on your chest you'll still struggle. And rest
| assured, co2 isn't a bottleneck for crops
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| More intense weather leads to more crop damage, changes in
| precipitation patterns and average temperature affect the
| range and numbers of insect pests, etc.
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/warmer-wetter-
| climate...
| WalterSear wrote:
| Bit hard to plant crops during a hurricane, or water them
| during a drought.
| goatlover wrote:
| Hurricanes and droughts are regional. Might make growing
| more expensive and limited in some places, while others are
| able to grow more.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Co2 levels and its impact on our cognitive capacity
|
| This is junk science.
|
| The CO2 level of the open atmosphere is ~400 ppm. The CO2 level
| aboard a nuclear submarine can range between ~2000-10000 ppm.
| 10000 ppm is enough to cause sleep disturbances and headaches,
| and we're less sure about the range between 5000-10000, but
| we're talking orders of magnitude away before we start seeing
| issues among people who engage in cognitively challenging work
| on a daily basis. The CO2 levels aboard the ISS are usually a
| bit lower--they try to keep it under 5000 ppm--but the
| astronauts there are even more closely monitored for medical
| issues and also have to perform cognitively challenging work.
| These are over extended periods of time between 3-9 months.
|
| If the CO2 concentration of the Earth's atmosphere went up 10x,
| you'd have much bigger problems than the cognitive effects of
| CO2 exposure.
| moultano wrote:
| You'll notice CO2 levels at 1000 ppm. The air will feel
| "stuffy," you'll feel lethargic, and feel like going outside.
| This is the primary reason why meetings at work are so
| stultifying. There's just too much CO2 in the room for anyone
| to think clearly. Just carry a CO2 meter around and measure
| it yourself. Once you're aware of it, the feeling is
| impossible to miss.
| philwelch wrote:
| If the CO2 level of the atmosphere doubles, we are still
| going to have bigger problems to solve.
|
| > Just carry a CO2 meter around and measure it yourself.
| Once you're aware of it, the feeling is impossible to miss.
|
| Sounds like a combination of confirmation bias and
| psychosomatic placebo effect to me. Plus you're assuming a
| specific correlation between subjective minor discomfort
| and cognitive performance.
| moultano wrote:
| I would posit that the level of CO2 you need to cause
| detectable society wide problems is probably lower than
| the level that makes a room actively uncomfortable to be
| in.
|
| There's a reason why we already have universal colloquial
| language to describe a room with too much CO2, "stuffy,"
| "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We all know
| this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it directly our
| whole lives.
| philwelch wrote:
| You can posit whatever you like, but I don't see any
| evidence.
|
| Edit to reply to ninja edit:
|
| > There's a reason why we already have universal
| colloquial language to describe a room with too much CO2,
| "stuffy" "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We
| all know this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it
| directly our whole lives.
|
| First off, you're going back to the perception of minor
| discomfort to defend the claim that CO2 levels that
| aren't even high enough to cause minor discomfort are
| high enough to cause "detectable society wide problems".
| This strikes me as incoherent and evasive. Secondly,
| you're assuming that the minor discomfort of being in a
| "stuffy" room is entirely caused by CO2 concentration.
| (In my personal experience, body and food odors are the
| main sources of discomfort when I'm in a poorly
| ventilated space.) And thirdly, you're assuming that this
| discomfort necessarily causes poor cognitive performance.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Even doubling would already have an impact. The fact that
| astronauts can operate a few weeks in extreme conditions
| doesn't prove anything. I'm not talking about top of the line
| engineers/scientists working at 70% capacity for a few weeks,
| I'm talking about long term human scale average decline of
| cognitive capacity which would get worse over generations
|
| We see no slowing down in the rate of co2 production and
| according to many studies we might reach 1000ppm or more by
| the end of the century.
|
| Anyways, I'm not saying each of these are the end of
| humanity, I'm just saying that "it's going to be 2c more so
| whatever" isn't the whole picture
| philwelch wrote:
| > The fact that astronauts can operate a few weeks in
| extreme conditions doesn't prove anything.
|
| Astronauts stay on the ISS for six months at a time, not "a
| few weeks".
| mcculley wrote:
| I am very interested in this because there appear to be
| studies with conflicting conclusions (e.g.,
| https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1510037 says 1,000
| ppm causes cognitive decline). This has made me want to run
| some experiments.
| mrandish wrote:
| > there appear to be studies with conflicting conclusions
|
| So far, conflicting conclusions are more common throughout
| much of recent climate science than any of us like. The
| basic lab bench physics behind CO2 is obviously very well-
| understood but long-term global climate (as opposed to
| regional, seasonal weather) is a 'wickedly' hard problem.
|
| Modeling future global climate shifts over years and
| decades is hard because Earth's climate is a highly-
| complex, dynamically coupled system with thousands of
| interacting variables and possible feedbacks. Then
| extrapolating the output of those models to estimate
| significant changes to health, agriculture and extreme
| weather event severity and frequency requires making
| assumptions which are not nearly as well-understood. Then
| trying to adapt those estimates to further estimate the
| relative benefits, costs and impacts of myriad regulatory,
| economic and behavioral policy proposals is the kind of
| thing which would cause my favorite stats prof to say "It's
| fine... that's why god made error bars".
| nanis wrote:
| Temperature station locations in the GHCN ... Notice how most of
| Africa is blank.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg
| georgewsinger wrote:
| People continue to point out the (widely known) negative effects
| of global warming, but how are we so confident that the _net
| effects_ will be long-term negative?[1] It seems to me an
| extremely complicated calculation which doesn 't merit extreme
| certainty in either direction. Here are some of the positives of
| global warming:
|
| - Statistically, an order of magnitude more humans die from
| colder temperatures than from hotter ones (as discussed in this
| article).
|
| - Hotter temperatures and higher CO2 in northern/arctic areas
| will increase (net) crop yields substantially. Many areas which
| formerly weren't hospitable for certain types of crops will
| suddenly become so. This isn't so surprising since CO2 is an
| input to photosynthesis.
|
| - Global warming will free up northern trade routes and make
| potentially millions of square miles of land more habitable for
| humans.
|
| - The distribution of global temperature increases is expected to
| be tilted towards colder areas (that is: higher temperature
| increases in colder regions than in hotter regions). This means
| we get to experience the positive effects of global warming
| disproportionately to the negative effects.
|
| - Slight temperature increases might even hedge against long-term
| climate risk: we are technically still in an ice age, and there
| is long-term tail risk that we will recede back into a deeper one
| within a few millennia. So how do we _know_ that stopping CO2
| emissions won 't make human climate long-term worse?
|
| - Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will
| positively impact some species (including species which don't
| even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others. It seems to
| me a general rule of thumb that more life flourishes in hotter
| climates than colder ones. So why be so confident that the net
| effects of global warming will be long-term negative to animals,
| _en totale_?
|
| Of course, the _negative_ effects of global warming (flooding,
| rising sea levels, etc) are well-known, so I omit them. My point
| is not that global warming is definitely a net positive; it 's
| that it's not clear why there is so much confidence it's
| "definitely" a net negative.
|
| [1] Credit to David Friedman for helping point out many of these
| things.
| jrlocke wrote:
| > Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will
| positively impact some species (including species which don't
| even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others.
|
| The worry isn't that global warming will be bad for animals,
| you're right, there will be winners and losers, likely in
| comparable amounts. The worry is that it will be bad for
| biodiversity, a resource that is extremely slow to replenish
| (even taking into account these new opportunities). On the
| edges of the curve, some animals will be huge winners, and some
| will be huge losers. 10xing the populations of some species
| while others go extinct is only a net null on the very surface,
| it's still a huge loss diversity wise.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| I agree with your point, but perhaps only when the timeline
| is short. From Nature:[1]
|
| > Researchers examined the number of known families of marine
| invertebrates, as well as sea-surface temperatures, over the
| course of 540 million years of Earth's history. They found
| that when temperatures were high, so was biodiversity. When
| temperatures fell, biodiversity also declined.
|
| This happens because global warming causes a marginal
| increase in tropical areas:
|
| > Tropical ecosystems are known to be Earth's most diverse,
| and the tropics would be expected to expand during warm eras.
|
| Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the
| rate of species extinction from global warming will surely
| outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no
| time to act.
|
| [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11350
| kzrdude wrote:
| Changing equilibria is enormously stressful for the biosphere
| and for our "civosphere". Everything in the world would run
| along more smoothly if things didn't change so much(!).
|
| You could claim that we humans on earth are all equal and
| reasonable and it shouldn't be so hard to get along.. Except
| this breaks down in practice as soon as people want to move
| from where the climate got tougher and into the places where
| you said the crop yields will only get bigger. It gets ugly.
| Migration and turmoil.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| It seems to me changing equilibria is precisely what allows
| the world to run more smoothly! Businesses coming and going,
| migrants moving from static societies to more prosperous
| ones, scientific revolutions overturning old ones, etc.
|
| I'm not saying that change doesn't cause _any_ local
| instability, but the world very frequently _net_ improves
| from change when its long-term benefits outweigh its short-
| term costs.
|
| It's not clear to me that several million square miles of
| land suddenly becoming more habitable wouldn't provide a
| better economic arrangement for the world 100 years from now,
| even when you net out the costs of people having to migrate
| to new areas.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean the immediate effects on you civilization, that is
| extremely optimized for the current climate? Or the long term
| effects?
|
| Because the immediate (up to decades or even a couple of
| centuries long) effects will be overwhelming bad. There's just
| no chance we will end with a climate that is better than the
| one we optimized the hell for. There will be almost no positive
| effect on that horizon, that's how extreme optimization works.
|
| About the long (after a century or so) effects for humanity, I
| really doubt anybody knows them. Humanity will optimize itself
| for them, and make lemonades out of lemons anyway it can. For
| nature, it's still too short a timeframe for it to adapt, and
| global warming means a loss on diversity on a several millenia
| horizon; the same happens every time there is a large climate
| change.
|
| (About that new land for agriculture, plants need solar
| radiation, and that area has little of it. That's why it's
| frozen.)
| didibus wrote:
| As with most data problems, the quality of the data is always the
| weakling.
|
| I think the quality of the data for this analysis is just poor
| (the analysis is good, but the data is really questionable),
| there's no way we're going to figure this one out using the data
| we have for it in my opinion.
|
| As an aside, I wish that absolute numbers were also presented.
| Comparing things in relative ratios gets very confusing to reason
| about.
| P4u1 wrote:
| Isn't a global warming usually what precedes an ice age? Just
| saying...
| baybal2 wrote:
| The number of people dying of exposure in Russia every years is
| quite a lot, and you can't call Russians not culturally adapted
| to cold.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The combination of a high average alcohol consumption rate and
| cold temperatures in particular is dangerous.
| jahewson wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in
| Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The weather you have every day tends to not kill many people.
| It's surprises that are the real killer.
|
| What interestingly means that warming Siberia may increase
| the number of people dying due to the cold.
| nradov wrote:
| The Siberians who couldn't figure out how to survive cold
| weather were killed off by cold centuries ago. If climate
| change caused sudden cold snaps in normally warmer regions
| there would likely be many deaths.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I used to work with some Russian insurance companies. They
| had 0 faith in government population data, in particular
| mortality.
|
| At one point, in the 00's, they were using late USSR data,
| which they thought was doctored too, but that was cancelled
| off by the improvement in health standards.
| wittycardio wrote:
| I think the cultural adaptation is severely undervalued here. I
| grew up in a hot/humid climate and I would be freezing at 25
| degrees C . Go to coastal India in the winter if you don't
| believe me. Conversely I now live in a very cold place and walk
| around in shorts at 15 and am comfortable with just a sweater all
| the way to 5 degrees or so.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| I think the author lacks domain knowledge to draw conclusions
| about deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and this article reads as
| though the author didn't talk to any experts on public health in
| these regions.
|
| Uganda has seasons - rainy seasons and dry seasons. If you are
| trying to understand seasonal mortality trends, you should be
| considering the seasons that exist in that part of the world. I
| would imagine that monsoons and flooding bring public health risk
| - from hypothermia to compromised access to clean water to
| stagnant water for mosquitos to breed.
|
| Discussing the temperature-dependence of African mortality
| without discussing other known-to-be-seasonal mortality factors
| is is bewildering to me. Mosquitoes thrive in certain
| temperatures. Child and maternal health in Africa remains a
| serious issue and birth rates are seasonal in many part of
| Africa. This article asked a question with an incredibly
| complicated set of answers and tried to come up with a one
| sentence explanation.
|
| I would suggest that the author spend less time analyzing bad
| data and more time talking to domain experts. Without sufficient
| domain knowledge, this analysis has no hope of being accurate.
| dekhn wrote:
| people outside the field are unqualified to parse the data.
| please go back and get a degree in the field before commenting.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| What a nice illustration of the limitations of pure empiricism.
| naasking wrote:
| Is it though? Because it seems like the questions can only be
| answered with better empirical data. As the author said, the
| studies of this are unimpressive and the data insufficient.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I am not sure there is an amount of data where these problems
| truely go away -- too little, this, too much, other issues. I
| guess I am a "theory-ladenist"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
| redisman wrote:
| Astral codex is now the new Freakonomics
| yboris wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I don't know if you mean "Freakonomics =
| bad" or "Freakonomics = good", and if so, why?
| smegcicle wrote:
| or maybe something more subtle like, freakonomics provided a
| fresh angle that became a meme and therefore ceased being
| fresh
| jonas21 wrote:
| Does everything have to be good or bad?
| novalis78 wrote:
| Precisely. As long as the planet does not overheat, a
| warmer planet is a better planet.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| It isn't just the amount of heat, but how fast it is
| being introduced.
| novalis78 wrote:
| Well, let's take a look. In 1978 we were going to be
| iceball Earth according to the sensationalist media.
| Let's take a look in 40 years from now and see if it all
| wasn't just a big scam to scare people into political
| policies they otherwise would not support.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Since we are commenting on an article that, whatever its
| other virtues and vices, is extremely well-researched,
| you might want to take a few minutes to look up the
| "fact" that you're claiming in your second sentence. The
| tl;dr is that "The Cooling Earth" was always a minority
| view among climate scientists; it was actually a
| competing theory to the anthropogenic global warming
| theory, as they both started in the 1970s; that one of
| the theories (global warming) persisted while the other
| (global cooling) faded quickly can be plausibly explained
| by both theories offering testable and mutually exclusive
| predictions, one set of which turned out to roughly match
| the data and the other of which didn't match it at all.
| That we are talking about global warming now and stopped
| talking about global cooling is not a sign of a "scam to
| scare people," it is a sign of _science working the way
| it is supposed to._
| AgentME wrote:
| Did you only read the very beginning of the article? Most
| of the article is skeptical of the idea that there are a
| lot of deaths caused by cold that would be solved by
| rising temperatures. (And that's without even getting
| into that climate change would likely cause more
| temperature extremes in both directions rather than
| uniformly increasing the temperature.)
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Except for the fact that most systems on the planet are
| adapted for the current temperature.
|
| In theory a rising sea level isn't a big deal in the
| abstract, but we have already built a ton of property
| along the coast ...
| novalis78 wrote:
| Adaptations change. They will and must. Live is change. I
| think too many folks on here are too young to remember
| the very same green doomsday scenarios which we were
| mentally tormented with and NONE of them panned out. Not
| buying it. The planet will warm. Faster. Live will go on.
| The real focus should be on making life multi-planetary
| asap. That's more important in the long run than anything
| else.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| I think you vastly underestimate the cost of redesigning
| / rebuilding all of our coastal cities to adapt to the
| fact that they are now below sea level.
| tdeck wrote:
| Define "overheat". The crust makes up less than 1% of the
| planet's mass, so theoretically everything on the surface
| could burn / boil off and 99% of the planet would still
| be fine.
| yboris wrote:
| No, but it would be good to understand the intentions of
| the original comment. It feels like the author meant to
| communicate _something_ but because of how vague it is, it
| feels like it was worse than having no comment. It makes me
| think "what am I missing about Freakonomics other than the
| book I read and the numerous episodes I listened to and
| enjoyed?"
| renewiltord wrote:
| Going to choose to interpret this as "seeks counterintuitive
| results without heed to science". If this interpretation is
| wrong, kindly supply clarification and ignore remainder.
|
| Posting level of epistemic certainty makes this not so. This is
| just a hypothesis and summary post.
|
| But also in a UI question, it appears that people are unable to
| read content without updating their priors significantly, even
| with a low proposed information gain multiplier.
|
| This helps understand comments like this.
| superjan wrote:
| We can all read it how we like it: "Climate researchers ignore
| undesired effects", or "contrarian outsider is cherry-picking
| results". Intention or not, this serves only as flamebait and it
| will get us nowhere.
| jnmandal wrote:
| I think this whole question is naive and simplistic. Its unlikely
| we'll see straightforward trends like "less deaths from cold"
| (ignoring that such a concept is ill-defined and inconsistent in
| the literature the author reviewed); climate is a complex system
| and heat should really be thought of as energy -- not so much
| ambient temperature -- in this context.
|
| To boot, "excess deaths" is a pretty nebulous topic and once you
| start analyzing differences between regions using their political
| borders (comparative politics), you're only making the concept
| more abstract. Just as an example of what I mean by this:
| something not analyzed herein was demographic differences between
| regions. What is the median age of populace in Nigeria vs.
| Greenland? Just citing this as an example -- my point is really
| that the variations between a Scandinavian region and equatorial
| one could really exceed the scope of any topical research.
| firebaze wrote:
| I'm not sure if you've read TFA, but calling it simplistic is a
| bit ... simplistic. The question raised is valid: do we suffer
| more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the
| boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach.
|
| Also, there are no answers, just (intellectually challenging)
| questions.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you're wet and in 54 degree F weather, you can get hypothermia
| and die after ~6 hours if you can't seek shelter or adequate
| apparel. People die in the wilderness like this often, as do
| people without homes. Rain and wind are sufficient killers.
| wk_end wrote:
| Global warming is going to increase both cold and heat related
| deaths, given that it's likely to (and has already started to)
| produce more extreme temperatures at both ends of the spectrum.
| ars wrote:
| That wouldn't be global warming then, given that temperature is
| measured by averaging over an entire year. If it's both hotter
| and colder the average wouldn't change.
| lamontcg wrote:
| That's why its now usually called "climate change" since if
| you dump more energy into the system that can lead to more
| evaporation, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger
| storms both from the moisture and energy. The greater warming
| at higher latitudes is also changing the climate in ways that
| increase both cold and heat waves.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| At this point, "global warming" is shorthand for "climate
| change"
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Extra energy in the atmosphere and sea, will lead to more
| energetic weather - higher highs and lower lows, bigger
| droughts, heavier intense rainfall events, fewer hurricanes,
| but the ones that do form will be more powerful, etc. etc.
|
| The term "global warming", while scientifically correct, was
| dropped for "climate change" to remove this type of
| confusion, you know the kind - "if the whole world is
| warming, why did we just have a huge ice storm in Texas?"
| fragmede wrote:
| Can scientists start giving the warming in approximate
| extra joules in the atmosphere instead of saying 1degC? It
| would be a rough measure, but like giving volume as "number
| of VW beetles" or data as "number of libraries of
| Congress", a large number of joules is something more
| easily compared than a single degree C.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It can be both colder and warmer at different rates, the
| average would change
| [deleted]
| theptip wrote:
| The prediction for decades has been:
|
| 1. Average global temperature increases. 2. Winters get
| colder on average 3. Summers get hotter on average, more
| strongly than 2.
|
| Or if you prefer simple arithmetic, the average of -1 and 1
| is 0. The average of -2 and 4 is 1. The second one has a
| colder "winter" but it's still warmer on average.
| haberman wrote:
| > 2. Winters get colder on average
|
| I have never heard this. Do you have a reference?
|
| I am no expert, but I looked for any statement about winter
| temperatures from the latest IPCC report. I found this in
| TS.2.6: > Warming of the land surface
| during the period 1971-2018 > contributed about 5%
| of the increase in the global energy > inventory
| (TS.3.1), nearly twice the estimate in AR5 (high >
| confidence). It is virtually certain that the average
| > surface warming over land will continue to be higher than
| > over the ocean throughout the 21st century. The warming
| > pattern will likely vary seasonally, with northern high
| > latitudes warming more during winter than summer (medium
| > confidence). {2.3.1, 4.3.1, 4.5.1, Box 7.2, 7.2.2,
| > Cross-Chapter Box 9.1, 11.3, Atlas 11.2} >
| The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (warm days and
| > nights) and the intensity and duration of heatwaves have
| > increased globally and in most regions since 1950, while
| the > frequency and intensity of cold extremes have
| decreased > (virtually certain). There is high
| confidence that the > increases in frequency and
| severity of hot extremes are due > to human-induced
| climate change. Some recent extreme events > would
| have been extremely unlikely to occur without human
| > influence on the climate system. It is virtually certain
| > that the further changes in hot and cold extremes will
| > occur throughout the 21st century in nearly all inhabited
| > regions, even if global warming is stabilized at 1.5degC
| > (Table TS.2, Figure TS.12a).
|
| This seems to contradict your claim.
|
| Also the most recent National Climate Assessment says this
| in its summary finding (https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/):
| > Declines in snow and ice cover caused by warmer winter
| > temperatures are expected to negatively impact the winter
| > recreation industry in the Northwest, Northern Great
| Plains, > and the Northeast.
| didibus wrote:
| average(20, 20, 20, 20) => 20
| average(40, 23, 23, 5) => 22
|
| As you can see, the average can increase while also having
| the extremes get worse.
| csee wrote:
| Where can I read that global warming is likely to increase the
| number of extreme cold events? Is it mentioned by IPCC?
| wk_end wrote:
| You can Google "does global warming cause extreme cold". Here
| are my first results:
|
| "This Is Why Global Warming Is Responsible For Freezing
| Temperatures Across The U.S." (Forbes): https://www.forbes.co
| m/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this...
|
| "Climate change: Arctic warming linked to colder winters"
| (BBC): https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58425526
|
| "How global warming can cause Europe's harsh winter weather"
| (DW) https://www.dw.com/en/cold-winter-global-warming-polar-
| vorte...
|
| "Record cold, intense storms and tornadoes amid global
| warming: Could there be a connection?" (USA Today): https://w
| ww.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/17/global...
| haberman wrote:
| I searched the latest IPCC report with non-expert eyes and it
| seems to say the opposite:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963266
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Subsaharan African desert heat cold deaths make perfect sense if
| you are aware of the side effects of the lack of moisture and
| vegetation - low thermal mass. There is a reason desert mammals
| have fur and desert reptiles burrow - it drops fast and low in
| the night. If you go from minimally dressed in the day for heat
| from inexperience or poverty and are ill-prepared you die a death
| that sounds utterly absurd to pop cultural assumptions about the
| desert.
|
| Combine that with jungle-savvanah-desert "exotic foreign
| wilderness" conflation. The jungle you really do dress scantily
| for given humidity, temperature, and most importantly the exact
| opposite thermal mass situation. There is a reason desert
| dwellers prefer covering garments beyond just sun reflection.
|
| Greenland I can only guess as possibly related to volcanic warmth
| and being used to dressing for warmth combined with familarity
| with hypothermia's symptoms including feeling hot. If you are
| used to dealing with getting so cold you feel an urge to strip
| naked and dive in the snow you may double down on heat because it
| is usually cold. But if it is actually heat this time you die an
| absurd seeming death. I also assume heat deaths exclude fire
| related deaths.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I assume a lot of heat related deaths are mostly due to heat
| stroke and cardiac stress caused by it. People can easily live
| in high heat conditions (see deserts, for example), but if
| they're not used to it, it quickly becomes problematic. You can
| see the effects any time a heat wave hits a usually mild
| climate.
|
| Cold can kill, too, but it usually hits the very poor and those
| caught in a bad situation ; heat stroke, on the other hand, can
| be pretty subtle. I can imagine someone who thinks of 20degC as
| hot is rather vulnerable to it.
| ehnto wrote:
| I think for the cold extreme it's less likely confusing too-
| cold with too-hot, and just the same as your African desert
| example. People without experience in the heat won't be able to
| tell when it goes from uncomfortable to dangerous due to
| inexperience. We're more than capable of bearing deadly heat
| emotionally, and so if you don't know what that feels like
| you'll just keep going until you get heatstroke, which will
| also be a new experience for an Icelander I assume. For those
| new to extreme heat, the sheer amount of water required to stay
| safe is usually underestimated.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| > jungle-savvanah-desert "exotic foreign wilderness" conflation
|
| What?
| Brassens100 wrote:
| Naive post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely
| confused! Low confidence in all of this]", so I'm commenting in
| the same manner :
|
| Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself,
| but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important
| point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are
| living things too, they have their preferences !
|
| Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're
| most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid
| weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or
| Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ?
| Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle
| ?
|
| I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But
| somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be
| very interested if anybody else does the same, share your
| findings !
| anp wrote:
| What about biological or habitual adaptation, maybe call it
| acclimation? People in different climates will have different
| ways of maintaining homeostasis relative to the weather and
| technological adaptations they have available for it. If you live
| your life in high heat environments, your habits and to some
| degree your body will adapt to keep you cool.
|
| If heart attacks are a significant component, then maybe some of
| these deaths can be explained by what amounts to shock from one's
| baseline?
| Brassens100 wrote:
| Naive post here, I did read the "[Epistemic status: Extremely
| confused! Low confidence in all of this]", and I'm commenting in
| the same manner :
|
| Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself,
| but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important
| point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are
| living things too, they have their preferences !
|
| Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're
| most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid
| weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or
| Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ?
| Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle
| ?
|
| I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But
| somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be
| very interested if anybody else does the same, share your
| findings !
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Why would cold places adapt so hard that they did _better_ than
| warm places?
|
| It's plausible that many of the adaptations are trade offs. You
| do better in the cold by not doing as well when it's hot. Then if
| it gets warmer in the place it's usually cold, your adaptations
| to the cold are impediments and make things worse.
|
| And the same thing the other way around. In the place where
| people have adapted to the heat, if it gets even a little bit
| cold, they're in trouble.
|
| This implies that climate change could still be making everything
| worse for everyone. You make it warmer for people adapted to the
| cold and that's bad. You make it warmer for people adapted to the
| heat and that's still bad, because they're still where they are.
| Now it's 145 F there instead of 135 F and their adaptations are
| insufficient.
| ehnto wrote:
| We built homes in Australia for mostly clement weather, and so
| when it gets cold or hot, many homes fail to cope for long. If
| the swings get worse and longer in duration in either
| direction, we're going to find it really hard to keep houses
| livable without blasting air conditioning 24/7.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if
| this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That
| sounds...extremely untrue, right?
|
| > Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500.
| So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season.
|
| This second point isn't confirming the first. A ~10% increase in
| deaths during the cold season isn't enough to attribute ~10% of
| all deaths to cold, unless the cold season lasts all year.
|
| > But [minimum mortality temperature] is very different in
| different regions. In Sweden, it's 18C (64F). In Florida, it's
| 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of
| the way through the temperature distribution of a region
|
| > You could argue that this is at least partly because of
| cultural adaptation. The "effective temperature", the one that's
| reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things
| like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go
| outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for
| example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn't get any increased
| mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly
| that's because they've organized their lives and built
| environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to
| find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at
| temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
|
| But the chart shows lots of excess cold mortality in Beijing,
| with its frigid winters. You can't live in Beijing at all without
| being able to deal with lethally low temperatures. The cultural
| adaptation story must be partially true, but it has some serious
| problems.
| seanc wrote:
| Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top:
|
| "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of
| this]"
|
| This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not
| asserting a Bold New Idea.
| [deleted]
| gnicholas wrote:
| Wish this were more common.
|
| This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart
| people with access to diverse sets of information -- and
| crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the
| data points to.
| Aachen wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking while reading the article.
| Particularly at
|
| > I realize it's awkward to propose two different mechanisms
| for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African
| extreme, but I don't have any better ideas.
|
| When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a
| podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they
| mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and
| that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but
| rather that questioning things and being open minded to
| whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then
| you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible,
| describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims
| the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language
| stating things as they are.
|
| I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get
| useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging
| conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also,
| the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try
| clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to
| DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation
| mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of
| a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part
| of said citation.
| ehnto wrote:
| One of my pet peeves about the internet and modern rhetoric
| in general is how people are forced to write defensively, for
| fear of any omissions being construed as something you
| explicitly said, or a not fully finished thought as a binding
| contract. There's very little wiggle room to be wrong, and I
| don't mind being wrong, but you don't really get the chance
| to be constructively wrong in that format.
|
| I've found a conversational trick in saying "But I haven't
| finished thinking about this yet.". It can sometimes be a bit
| of a thought terminating cliche, but I find it stops people
| jumping to contest obvious details in order to get started
| proving me wrong. People seem to acknowledge that I know I
| could be wrong, so they're more helpful in the conversation
| rather than antagonistic or dismissive.
| evan54 wrote:
| how long does an article like this take to write? Felt very well
| written!?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| That's Scott Alexander. He's an amazing writer - possibly one
| of the best of the 21st century. All the more amazing that he
| just posts this stuff for free.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| He's getting paid subs from substack now (and they gave him a
| good first-year deal), but it's mostly people who pay out of
| goodwill (there are a few sub-only posts and comment boards,
| but it's 90% free conent).
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I would guess it still takes a while, if only to find the
| relevant information.
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