Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t M; Cold is a far greater threat to the health of we hairless tropical apes than warmth – but MSM journalists who admit this obvious truth are few and far between.
Arguable – If you Can’t Take the Heat
Jeff Jacoby
Monday July 25, 2022I hate hot weather. I’ve always hated hot weather. I’m quite sure that I always will hate hot weather. One of my children lives in Texas, and I have been monitoring with horror the heat wave that has sent temperatures in his city above 100 degrees every day for the last two weeks. It has been just as bad in much of Europe , where triple-digit temperatures have scorched England, France, and Spain. Then again, things aren’t much better in Boston, where the thermometer on Sunday afternoon officially reached 100 degrees.
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But there are two silver linings. One is that heat predictions for the United States are somewhat less dire than for other regions of the planet. The federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment points out that while the frequency of intense hot spells experienced by Americans since the 1960s has been increasing, we are still well below the records set nearly a century ago. “Heat wave magnitude reached a maximum in the 1930s,” the report says. “The Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the peak period for extreme heat.”
The other silver lining is considerably more encouraging: The decrease in extreme cold is saving many more lives than the increase in heat waves is costing. Worldwide, cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. A study published last summer in The Lancet found that between 2000 and 2019, there were nearly 5.1 million deaths caused by extreme temperatures. About 500,000 of those deaths were heat-related, while nearly 4.6 million were cold-related.
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Read more (Paywalled): https://www.bostonglobe.com/newsletters/arguable/
Jeff Jacoby at Arguable then goes on to point out how modern air conditioners help people cope with weather extremes, warm or cold.
But air conditioners only help if you can afford to run them.
In a world where energy is becoming increasingly unaffordable, thanks to clumsy green political intervention in our energy markets, large numbers of vulnerable people are being needlessly exposed to conditions which could harm their health.
Air conditioning also fools people into believing that a hot summer day is extreme and many accept the climate emergency evening news weather presentation confirming that deception.
A builder I know well has commented that if people worked outdoors they would quickly discover the truth.
Agreed, as an Aussie I’m well aware most people are fine on hot days providing they drink plenty of water, and how aircon can mess up your perception of heat. But the people who are dying are likely pretty fragile, some people really need a bit of help from aircon.
In my youth I worked outdoors, in Israel, in the summer, with the only AC being whatever breeze was blowing through the tents. I coped just fine with plenty of water to drink. Now, I don’t go outside at all in the desert summer if I can help it. I’ve lost my adaptation and am not so willing to get it back these days.
YEP. I needed to pour a couple of sidewalk panels in Las Vegas before returning to the cool of 8600 ft. in Utah.
Bought the 60 LB bags of Redimix and rented a mixer from Home Depot. Starting early I mixed and poured the first panel, about 11 bags, 2 at a time in the mixer. Took about an hour to mix, pour, scree, float. Waited to trowel, then did that, and took a break.
By the time I started the second panel, it was well over 100 F and since I have not worked at these temperatures since I retired 4 years ago, I was miserable to doing the next panel. Same routine for the second panel but took small breaks in the shade between each mix, while the mixer was running, etc.
I would not have been able to do a third panel.
BTW, I was completely done, including placing a tarp to shade the poured concrete before 11 a.m..
20 years ago, when I worked outdoors regularly in Vegas, I would have had no problem. I wouldn’t have liked it, but would have had no problem.
That still doesn’t discount the fact that I have ALWAYS needed AC to sleep in Vegas during the summer. I could never sleep while covered with sweat.
Dennis,
This is soooo right about acclimating to heat. I spend a lot of time working outside of our house and when my wife is gone, actually turn the AC OFF, even if its 100 and humid outside. Early in the hot season, I notice the heat, then get totally get used to it.
The wife will call 30 minutes before coming home to remind me to turn the AC ON for her.
If she or I forget, she gets home and acts like 80+ degrees in the house is going to kill her. Part of it too, is accepting in addition to acclimating. If you dwell on how hot it is, it will amplify the discomfort.
In the car, she has to have the perfect temperature because her focus is often on whether its slightly too warm or slightly too cold and there is constant adjustments to accommodate any perceived feelings of too hot or too cold.
I’ll bet human beings for thousands of years complained much less about the same heat waves we moan and groan about today, even though many folks are not out in it much and for thousands of years, the Summer outdoor environment was also the indoor environment.
Too many luxuries have caused many of us to take too many things for granted and waste too much unproductive negative mental energy trying to find reasons to not be completely thrilled with everything the way it is at every moment in time.
Please do assert yourself aggressively to change wrongs into rights and be your best. But accept shist that we can’t change and accept minor shist that we can change but is wasting mental/physical energy, when the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Sleeping is another deal. It’s gotta be at 70 deg. F or below because there is no way to sleep as well when its too warm. You can NEVER do it for physical reasons that mostly, can only be addressed using the dial on the thermostat. Your core body temperature is a big determining factor!
Crappy sleep makes you less productive and more sensitive to pain/temperature during the day.
Why is it so difficult to sleep when it’s hot?
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/why-it-so-difficult-sleep-when-its-hot
The Best Temperature for Sleep
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/best-temperature-for-sleep
So, a person with a warm core body temperature can function great and be adjusted to heat from acclimation all day long but at night, they WILL NOT SLEEP AS WELL because of the way our body’s are designed.
It’s about time!!!
Most everyone knows the Boston Globe is full-tilt leftist on the AGW issue, but Jeff Jacoby is still one of the basically good guys there. Ancient history as it is, he’s the reporter who had the audacity back in 1998 to point to Art Robinson’s Oregon Petition Project in his article “Scientists don’t agree on global warming.” This caused enough alarm in the enviro-activist community at the time that Woods Hole Research Center founder George Woodwell knocked himself out to sought the assistance of John Holdren (who later became President Obama’s ‘Science Czar’) and the people at the old Ozone Action group and some lady in the White House in an effort to get a rebuttal op-ed printed at the Globe. I covered a bit more about that particular situation at my GelbspanFiles blog, and I’m honored to have Jeff Jacoby as one of my Facebook Friends. It’s a wonder he has held onto his job at the Globe after all this time.
Indeed. A gold star goes to the journalista from the Mad Media who dares to whisper a climate realism factoid. Hope he isn’t fired for his heretical transgression.
People do not die of extreme heat alone, it is always a result of multiple contributing factors … such as not seeking shade; failure to hydrate oneself; not wearing appropriate clothing; and overexerting oneself in the hot part of the day. Billions of humans and our ancestors survived the hottest weather in the hottest parts of the planet for millions of years before air conditioning became a thing.
It’s called adaptability, which explains the longevity and success of our species throughout dozens of radical climate shifts (from glaciations to interglacials) and across most of the globe from the Arctic to temperate to hot deserts and tropical rain forests.
But somehow the warmunists claim that we modern humans are going to be destroyed by another 0.5 deg C temp increase since the arbitrary base year of 1850.
When someone wines about the “heat”, I just mention they could be laying shingles on roofs or working with hot mix bituminous paving.
I don’t know, I usually prefer my wine chilled.
Though if it isn’t I usually don’t whine about it.
From the article: ““The Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the peak period for extreme heat.””
Yes, it does.
The United States and North America have been in a temperatue downtrend since the 1930’s.
CO2 does not seem to be a factor in determining the temperatures of North America.
That same National Climate Assessment also stated,
“Paleo-temperature evidence shows that recent decades are the warmest of the past 1,500 years.” Meaning, ahem, the Medieval Warm Period was warmer…
Saving lives: can we say a fact? CO2 makes the planet greener.
I’ve seen studies, here, on this website, the Earth has gotten greener.
Because of increased levels of CO2.
Nobody disputes this.
You know the real green deal would be a full on hydrocarbon extravaganza.
And we have it, hydrocarbons in various forms, oil, gas, and bituminous coal.
Let make the planet greener, lets make hydrocarbons work for the betterment of man.
Even the BBC was forced to admit this online. It was a report on the major NASA study a few years ago.
The study did indeed conclude that the primary reason for Earth’s greening was increased CO2. But it gets better.
The secondary reason for the greening was – drum roll please – global warming!
Chris
If atmospheric CO2 went to 1000 ppm, all of us would not even notice it, but the world’s plant life would flourish and crops would be abundant
Actually, we would all notice it. We’d be surrounded by lush greenery everywhere, and lot more life (that depends on carbon dioxide).
I was thinking the same thing. But to underscore Chris’ point, in terms of weather and ‘climate,’ we wouldn’t notice at all.
Humans are relatively tall and skinny, have no fur and sweat all over. We are clearly warm weather animals. We cannot survive cold without clothing, heating and shelter.
It would be valuable if every “journalist”, politician, opinion maker, influencer, etc, would realise that a heat wave is five consecutive days of temperatures 9F (5C) higher than the average (for that place and that day) over the period 1960-1989. I’ve seen no one publish any data showing complianes, anywhere, with this WMO definition. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Actually, any evidence would be valuable.
I wonder what the mortality rate will be like in the winter for all these idiotic countries that have gotten on the Green New Deal train. How many will perish in the cold as a result of the race to “save the planet”?
We are in for bad times but it may be the impetus to rid ourselves of the fools that are trying to kill off our civilization. I certainly hope we will not have to suffer long.
The world has warmed up by less than a 1C over the last 100 years. At most, only a small portion of that warmth could have been caused by CO2.
Worst case is that CO2 has added a few tenths of a degree to these record warm readings. Any one who tells you they can, with their skin, detect a temperature change of a few tenths of a degree, is lying.
(If there is much humidity in the air, then CO2 has added even less to any record temperature readings.)
Homo Sapiens are classified in the Hominidae Family, also known as the Great Apes.
The global distribution of the other seven species of Family Hominidae ranges from 11 degrees north latitude to 9 degrees south latitude.
I am pretty sure that modern humans arose somewhere in that narrow band of latitude. It is only our ability to manipulate our environment that has allowed Homo Sapiens to survive across the entire globe.
We are a tropical species!
I read somewhere that an unclothed human needed an average daily temperature of 84 degrees (F). Don’t have a reference for that, but it always seemed reasonable to me.
Do you have any pictures of those “unclothed humans” BobM?
They could be holiday pictures –
know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink.
Say no more squire . . .
Activists commonly claim that because the ambient temperature has increased by some amount over some times me, then heatwaves should get hotter by similar amounts.
Sadly, when you do the scientific calculations on past data, this does not always happen. You can find it happens here and there occasionally, but mostly it does not hold.
It seems like heatwave maxima can sometimes be capped by competing cooling effects like cloud formation.(I am working up a WUWT on this right now).
But then, it is taking some time for activist oceanographers to accept that ocean surface temperatures are capped at 30 degrees C, probably involving cloud formation, though there are rare exceptions that go a little higher.
Geoff S
Geoff,
Check to see if there is a relationship between temperature maxima and surface atmospheric pressure in these heat domes.
Sadly it is not ‘clumsy’ green energy interventions that are causing harm and potentially deaths, Eric. The policies being advanced by the Green energy lobby are completely deliberate. Nothing clumsy about it.
Yes it was hot for three days, here in England, but it wasn’t warming in the classic sense, it was just a blast of hot air from the Sahara which reached as far north as Northern England. Once the wind changed direction the temps dropped over 20C from 38C to 16C overnight. Today, Wed 26th, it’s cool and wet here in Manchester, in fact I needed two jumpers on, to walk the dog and felt cold on the field, We may hit 17C/62F today….. You have to love Global Warming…… ha
Given the increasing number of record heatwaves, heat deaths are rising… the ‘cold kills more’ thing won’t be true for much longer
We just all need to huddle more on the airport tarmacs where the records are “measured” right ?
Griff,
are you giving up shelter – your house/flat/caravan/tent?
are you giving up your artificial heating/cooling
are you giving up your clothing
All of which you need in order to survive in the Home Counties
“Given the increasing number of record heatwaves”
There is no increasing number of record heatwaves. This is a figment of your imagination.
I’m becoming more & more convinced that Griff posts drive-by comments here to get paid for down votes.
I mean, nobody could be that gormless to be doing it for real.
There are no increasing number of heatwaves.
Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. I don’t see where you have posted any evidence at all. Your claim is denied.
It will remain true until the number of “heat deaths” rises to more than 50% (/ the number of “cold deaths” falls to less than 50%) of the total.
The Lancet study (Zhao et al, 2019) says that so far in the 21st century the ration is (just over) 9 to 1 for cold- versus heat-related deaths.
How “much” longer do you think we will have to wait for the ratio to reach 1:1 ?
Numbers.
You know Griff (and all Guardian readers) don’t do numbers.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the greenies pressure the Boston Globe to fire Jeff Jacoby for publishing such “heresy”, LOL.
Cold kills more but global warming is not going to raise ambient winter temperatures high enough to make the cold kill fewer, so there will be an increase in heat deaths from extreme heat wave events and no change in the number of cold deaths.
It’s important to understand that a very large fraction of wintertime excess mortality is not caused by direct exposure, as is the bulk of heatwave driven spikes in mortality.
The question is will Jeff Jacoby have a job tomorrow or will he be cancelled for speaking against the religion?
I don’t think that thousands of poor elderly pensioners freezing because unaffordable heating will be too concerned about which column the actuaries reported their deaths in.
How many will lose their jobs over this admission?
In the past 10 days or so, at least three times I have heard local and national news covering the “record setting” heatwaves, where the reader follows this script- “heat kills more people than cold.” My wife hates it when I suddenly yell stuff like “that’s a lie.” But some AGW fan has put that meme out there, and local news people are feeding it to the public. Again.
Humans are not apes. Apes have 48 chromosomes. We have 46. We are hominids. The last of the hominids.
Global warming that may or may not be attributable to anthropogenic forcing(s). Do your part for a clean, green, viable planet and carbon-based humanity of variable cuteness.
Which harm, of course, they will instantly blame on “climate change.”
wth you’re not allowed to say that
does Greta know?