Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second
Thread
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
TazeTSchnitzel · · focus · HN ↗
ygjb · · focus · HN ↗
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.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
Scary.
On a related note, annual deaths from extreme cold are estimated at over 4 million per year.
<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519625000543" rel="nofollow">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.)
nrr · · focus · HN ↗
timr · · focus · HN ↗
Not a “thesis”, just a fact.
nrr · · focus · HN ↗
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.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
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.
nrr · · focus · HN ↗
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.