We hear a lot about how European heat waves are caused by climate change and that people will die! Apparently because they can’t handle air conditioning…or something. This new study puts the kibosh on those claims. Via Friends of Science:
Outpacing Climate Change: Adaptation to Heatwaves in Europe
A new paper analyzed mortality, temperatures and electricity use to investigate the adaptation to heatwaves in Europe over the period 2000 to 2022. The paper found that Europeans can tolerate an additional 1°C of temperature rise every 18 years without an increase in mortality.
Increasing economic output enabled tolerating each additional 1 °C due to a per capita GDP increase of 20 thousand euros, most likely due to greater air conditioning affordability. The study emphasizes the importance of economic growth and reducing energy poverty for reducing heat-related mortality. The analysis included 85 regions across 25 countries that had complete data across all required variables.
Long-term studies have shown a significant decline in heat-related deaths despite increasing temperatures. Unfortunately, current predictions of climate change impacts assume little or no adaptation to climate change, falsely projecting significantly increased heatwave mortality.
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Can it be that we are approaching an optimum temperature rather having already passed the optimum?
This is wonderful.
According to the best-preserved records, it is a very long trip back to the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO), centred on 5,500 B.C. (spanning a few millennia).
A bit later, on one fine European Summer day of ca. 5,2-kyr-BP (~ 3,200 B.C.*), an ill-fated Copper-Age Nobleman — known to us only as Ötzi-the-Iceman — turned fugitive. He fled from the law, from the site of present-day Verona to the high alpine pass where he was executed — a single arrowhead that severed his axillary artery was found lodged deep within his shoulder.
If this Desperado had heeded his Climatologist’s warnings that the HCO was practically ended, he might have anticipated that his mummified corpse would be entombed for 5+ millennia, by the neo-glaciation of a Little-Ice-Age … only to be found in the glacier retreat in 1991 A.D.
—————————
*Re ‘3,200-B.C.’, that makes him a contemporary of Enoch-the-Prophet (‘7th from Adam’, 3382 BC to 3017 BC), whose people were then busy building the legendary city (known as ‘Zion’-the-original) that would be levitated like one of Fuller’s buoyant bubble cities thanks to ‘the [real] greenhouse effect’, just a couple centuries after his cousin (Ötzi) had perished.
We’re definitely still approaching optimum and probably a long way off – deaths from extreme cold out way deaths from excessive heat by a factor of ~10 to 1 in most places, even those used to hotter temperatures.
And as carbon based fuels continue to improve the quality of life of the whole planet – especially by powering refrigeration and also air conditioning – we might never reach the peak, since temperatures will probably level off anyway like they did in all the other previous warm periods.
I have trouble with the term optimum as applied to all Earth.
Optimum in Moscow might look different than optimum in Maldives.
Keep in mind it is a “global” figure, not local. For instance, if we are already at 16°C and if the optimum is 20°C, then we have 4 more degrees to go.
I like it, just right for me.
I survived a 28 degrees F increase today, from 74 F to 102 F didn’t need to attend the Urgent Care center.
Yet I may need to visit the Emergency room over a 1 F increase in a few decades.
Suuure!!!
…most of which will be AT NIGHT when the humidity is low at high latitudes.
The horror! 😄😅
WUWT promoted that Walkowiak family paper just a week ago. It starts out:
“Given Europe’s particularly rapid warming rate (European Environment Agency 2024) and the dominance of heatwaves as a source of extreme weather mortality (Jones et al. 2021),”
Hmmm. But Europe is not the place most vulnerable to rising heat. As they said:
“The sample primarily included regions located in continental and temperate climates, which were, at the onset of the analyzed period, at least of lower medium-income (World Bank 2024). Our study focused on European, relatively cold countries where adaptation to warming may be more achievable, thus physiological limits to human adaptation had not been detectable in that range. They would be likely a limiting factor in case of much warmer climates, though decreases in heat-related mortality despite warming have been observed even in humid subtropical climates like Hong Kong|”
Warming at urban sites, which is what most surface warming is based on,..
… is easily combatted by air-conditioning driven by reliable power supply.
The assumption that warming will continue, when most urban sites are over-run by the UHI effect already, is basically just supposition and conjecture.
Far more people die from cold related weather than warm, also easily countered with solid reliable electricity supplies.
The assumption that people in warming environments have air conditioning is questionable. My wife and I were recently in England during a “heatwave” (85F in Central London, 80’s in Kent and Somerset). One must be careful of declarations of heatwaves – they aren’t necessarily that hot. But by local standards, they are scorching temperatures.
Indeed, A high percentage of housing in North America is relatively new and uses forced air heating and cooling because, given the continent’s dreadful climates, it needs both. There are drawbacks to that like two inch sparks when you walk across a rug on Winter days then touch anything grounded. But those houses are easy to air condition. I’d guess that a lot higher percentage of Northern European housing is built taking into account only heating needs. Heat distributed by hot water. No or limited air conditioning because A/C would be single room only window units. Assuming that the rooms have windows and that the windows will accommodate an A/C unit.
That said, anyone who has experienced a US SouthEast, or Texas, or California Central Valley Summer can tell you that European “heatwave” temperatures are readily survivable even if not all that much fun.
“… the dominance [my emphasis] of heatwaves as a source of extreme weather mortality (Jones et al. 2021),””
How does this jibe with the well-established fact that cold weather kills 9-to-10 times as many people as does hot weather globally? Maybe we need a Leftist activist academic to explain what “extreme weather mortality” is, is.
I assume researchers are using hot-running CliSciFi models flogged with outrageous predictions of massive increases in CO2 levels.
Typically WUWT. An article goes up saying
“This new study puts the kibosh on those claims.”
Then people start putting the kibosh on the new study.
Any claim of CO2 warming is scientific nonsense anyway. !
Completely avoiding the question, as usual.
Yeah, fancy relying on European Environment Agency and Jones et al, where it is models all the way down.
Nick, Nick, Nick.
Please show us somewhere where the heat is more dangerous than the cold.
We’ll wait…
Everything I read is that the highest rates of warming will occur at the highest latitudes. Why would 1 degree at locations with the lowest temperature be a problem.
The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979 | Communications Earth & Environment
The permafrost will melt. Oh, the horror.
“Well if they use it to plant crops, I’m leaving!”
(feels like a Gary Larson cartoon panel with two Rhinos discussing humans on melted permafrost)
“Given Europe’s particularly rapid warming rate …” nothing that follows that assumption could possibly be relevant, but lets see: “and the dominance of heatwaves as a source of extreme weather mortality”. It seems like you can’t throw a rock around here without hitting someone saying 10x more people die in cold than hot. C’mon man.
The last time I checked, most Australians were of Northern European ancestry, with the only failure in acclimation being a high skin cancer rate.
I be one of those, English decent… 🙂
A nice dent in my scalp from the removal of a basal cell carcinoma.
“Increasing economic output enabled tolerating each additional 1 °C due to a per capita GDP increase of 20 thousand euros, most likely due to greater air conditioning affordability. ”
Sooooo…. Increasing temperatures supposedly caused by CO2 emissions led to a huge increases in GDP???
Why haven’t our Socialist Fascistic Green overloads mentioned that important tidbit?!?
Oil and gas development have been the most beneficial advance in human society since Flintstone accidentally dropped his namesake on top of another stone, cracking it and thereby discovering a way to make knives. Might have also discovered fire the same way, but I digress.
The solution to whatever the climate, or more importantly,the weather throws at us humans is wealth. It is by raising living standards, not lowering them the way that the Warmunists want to do, and have been doing. And the key to raising living standards is – you guessed it, low-cost, reliable energy, which again, is the exact opposite of what the Warmunists have been shoving down our throats. The planet is fine, it certainly doesn’t need “saving”. We humans on the other hand…
The strategy understood by all suburban American boys who grew up playing Sid Meier’s Civilization games with VGA graphics…
I’ve seen European tourists here in Texas in August (don’t ask me why). They look uncomfortable but haven’t seen any die.
Similar thought, all those millions of scandinavian, british and german tourists that flock every summer southwards truely must be looking for a quick death and not having a good time at the beach eh?
Data shows very little warming, global temperatures are almost impossible to measure, certainly not in decimal points, that is just a fantasy.
Bill Gates is now in the business of making laboratory butter, to save the planet. It’s his new venture, what a hero this man is, saving the planet all on his own. I bet he doesn’t even do it for money.
Indeed. The concept of a Global Average Temperature alone is ridiculous. If you consider the completely different amount of energy to raise the temperature of a cubic metre of dry air, and a cubic metre of air at 90% humidity, the problem becomes obvious.
What is actually required if this is important, is the total amount of energy, in Joules. Nobody seems to care about that, however.
Since I have made similar comments over time, I get credit for caring about Joules.
I suspect that the majority of deaths in hot weather is due to dehydration. Also, how do indigenous peoples in various tropical, Equatorial and desert regions cope?
Not by wasting millions of gallons of potable water to wash and cool solar panels.
Then there’s the “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity” factor.
Dusty Slay, “Wet Heat”, Netflix
Ironically, the only thing that will undermine the ability to adapt is precisely the stupid policies Europe has been implementing to “save the planet” from…an IMPROVING climate.
Which policies destroy their energy affordability and reliability and torpedo their economic growth.
“Europeans can tolerate an additional 1°C of temperature rise every 18 years without an increase in mortality.”
Seem like a way to avoid the actual number. Since they are not evolving wings, gills or heat-radiating elephant ears, I think any time span greater than a few months is gratuitous. On a partly cloudy day in spring or fall I’ve seen temperature shift 20C in hours.
I don’t live in Erope, but hundreds of generations of my ancestors did. I think most of them could have handled 1C changes in temperature between breakfast and lunch… if they had either that day.
The irony of Europe’s recent high temperatures and the ones during the past couple of decades shouldn’t be overlooked by climate alarmists. Isn’t the rest of the world often being reminded of the great strides that Europeans have made with renewable initiatives. After all, we’re always being told that the continent is one of the global leaders in the adoption of EVs, solar and wind energy generation, heat pumps, energy-saving building construction and retrofitting, public transit, walkable cities, inter-city rail links, and anything else that ostensibly will keep whatever climate change is occurring under control. So why is Europe still being affected by heats waves? Shouldn’t it have the the threat under control by now?