Sunday School

[Unseen]

@Robert

And yet, more people die of cold than heat. I’m not sure exactly why. Perhaps people in refugee camps are counted, but it’s generally accepted that cold kills more.

Even in an apartment, if the temperature outside is subzero, sooner or later the apartment temp will equalize and the same is true of clothing. Heavy clothing can put off the equalization but if nutrition is inadequate and there’s no liquid water and no power to thaw it, you’re gonna die of hypothermia.

You seem to want to include the effects of heat in terms of causing hurricanes, droughts, etc. I was referring only to the direct effect of hot and cold weather not epiphenomena.

[_Robert_]

Direct cause of death is useless and almost meaningless when you look at the magnitude of indirect deaths related to hot weather. A Cold wave makes you snuggle by the fireplace and toast marsh-mellows, LOL. If your car breaks down, you may be in trouble. Or you have to burn a couple of chairs.

We are faced with more and more heat and the resulting killer droughts and fires (movie stars homes burning up in Cali) in arid parts, and killer floods and storms everywhere else, and all the resulting crop failures, disease and insect swarms. A Cold wave isn’t shite compared to all that.

Take cold New England:

The two-week heat wave in July 1911 killed nearly 2,000 New Englanders, making it the most devastating New England weather event of all time.

So yeah, you got some lame study based on who-knows what, but if you wanna talk reality.

[Davis]

Unseen it is absolutely exhausting reading your replies and inability to relent on any arguments, this discussion with Robert being yet one more of them. I’ve already started ignoring anything you say about COVID, Ukraine, LGTBQ+ issues but and conspiracies (and increasingly larger and larger amount of them as the weeks go by). I’m at the point where I (and I would be surprised if I am alone here) am just going on full out ignore.

Consider taking a step back and reevaluating your patterns of posting things and engaging with people. Your posts and replies are remarkably different now than they were in the past years, which were, despite numerous disagreements, within the realm of critical analysis and reality.

[Unseen]

@Robert

The idea that cold causes more deaths over time under normal conditions is well established and is backed by solid data and rigorous analysis.

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from an analysis of the largest dataset of temperature-related deaths ever collected, show that the majority of these deaths actually happen on moderately hot and cold days, with most deaths caused by moderately cold temperatures.”

The study analysed over 74 million (74,225,200) deaths between 1985 and 2012 in 13 countries with a wide range of climates, from cold to subtropical. Data on daily average temperature, death rates, and confounding variables (eg, humidity and air pollution) were used to calculate the temperature of minimum mortality (the optimal temperature), and to quantify total deaths due to non-optimal ambient temperature in each location. The researchers then estimated the relative contributions of heat and cold, from moderate to extreme temperatures.

Around 7.71% of all deaths were caused by non-optimal temperatures, with substantial differences between countries, ranging from around 3% in Thailand, Brazil, and Sweden to about 11% in China, Italy, and Japan. Cold was responsible for the majority of these deaths (7.29% of all deaths), while just 0.42% of all deaths were attributable to heat.

The study also found that extreme temperatures were responsible for less than 1% of all deaths, while mildly sub-optimal temperatures accounted for around 7% of all deaths — with most (6.66% of all deaths) related to moderate cold.

According to Dr Gasparrini, “Current public-health policies focus almost exclusively on minimizing the health consequences of heat waves. Our findings suggest that these measures need to be refocused and extended to take account of a whole range of effects associated with temperature.”

Writing in a linked Comment, Keith Dear and Zhan Wang from Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Jiangsu, China say, “Factors such as susceptibility or resilience have not been included in the analysis, including socioeconomic status, age, and confounding air pollutants…Since high or low temperatures affect susceptible groups such as unwell, young, and elderly people the most, attempts to mitigate the risk associated with temperature would benefit from in-depth studies of the interaction between attributable mortality and socioeconomic factors, to avoid adverse policy outcomes and achieve effective adaptation.” (Source: ScienceDaily)

[_Robert_]

Right. I’d say that paper has a major flaw since all they did was temperature correlation, LOL. Without other correlations like famine. When summer crops fail, guess what? People die the next winter. So yeah, moderate cold weather is the big killer, how stupid. That’s the conclusion they reach after stating

 “Factors such as susceptibility or resilience have not been included in the analysis, including socioeconomic status, age, and confounding air pollutants

I’ll tell ya what, academia has slipped these days. So many bad papers get regurgitated by conspiracy nuts before they get trashed, but there are never any retractions.

I suppose we should expect a lot of this with all this “big data”. Correlation is not causation and these “kids” in school need some more training and need to dig deeper before publishing their “analysis”.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

The article I posted on extreme heat does not compare (or contrast) heat vs cold weather. It just deals with heat risks. The reason I posted it was this paragraph:

We also found that people have very limited knowledge of the “heat index”—a measure that factors in relative humidity to estimate how a given day’s temperature actually feels to the human body. This data point is superior to temperature alone for alerting the public to especially dangerous types of heat. It became clear to us that people would additionally benefit from greater awareness of the effects of climate change in general, so they would know to expect heat-related problems to get worse over time.

The article is not disputing that colder weather is a greater danger and kills more people.  I agree that is does but I think we will see that this will change as temperatures rise.  Turning on all that extra air-con is going to burn more fossil energy too. A correlation between further rises in temperature mapped to increases in air-con use would be an interesting study.

In Ireland we are seeing rises in temperature but it is not like it is in Mexico or Texas. A rise of a few degrees here means balmy weather of 75F to 80F will a cooling breeze. But it is dangerous for a lot of Central and Eastern Europe where they are seeing extreme swings in a short period of time with accompanying forest fires. My brother arrived in Ottawa yesterday and there is still a public warning to stay indoors due to the smoke.

[Unseen]

@Robert

Surely, there must be a specific academic refutation of the ScienceDigest research article. Can you find it?

[PopeBeanie]

As for the cold vs heat mortality debate, if I was really interested in it, I’d first just want to see more sources.

---

_Robert_ wrote:

Finding that ChatGPT is not so great. I ask for evidence of god and it gave me a ton of BS apologetics. Also gave me pretty bad excel BASIC code, but I was able to use some of it.

It’s using what it has scanned from the web, as written mostly by humans. It’s parroting the kind of answers that would be commonly fed to most people asking those questions. For example, apologetics has its own, devoted instructors and their devoted followers.

One of the most useful things I’ve been learning is how to ask it the right questions, and once in a while when it fails to provide a reasonable response, I’m usually able to reword the question in a way that prods it into a less BS or more detailed answer, keeping in mind that its flaws come from similar flaws of all the data coming from humans in the first place. With a bit of steering, it still returns paragraphs or pages of good answers that would take dozens of times longer to manually compile from a shitload of google searches.

I haven’t compared version 3.5 to 4 much, I just know of reports about how version 4 is so much. I am an amateur programmer at best. I’m much better at debugging code than building it, and ChatGPT can build tons of code very quickly. It has helped me with building Excel automation that works, and gave me pages of SQL design in minutes that would have taken someone at my level weeks, if not months.

I got excited and came up with two videos demonstrating version 4. Both impress me, but please try one. Note that this developer is aware of the potential flaws, but he’s happy to “babysit” the chat, as he steers it into incredibly time-saving solutions.

1) 13 minutes long but skipping about 1-1/2 minutes into it:

2) 12-1/2 minutes, skipping 1 minute:

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

The Woo story about Number One is both entertaining and timely.

Judging from the talk I keep reading about the proposed Irish “Hate Offenses” legislation, the people of Ireland need to stock up on urine-proof rain gear and get subscriptions to Virtual Private Networks:

Seanad Éireann debate –
Tuesday, 13 Jun 2023
Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022: Second Stage
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2023-06-13/10/?highlight%5B0%5D=pauline&highlight%5B1%5D=o%27reilly

And if they don’t want to have to get second passports, Irish who value freedom of thought and expression need to tell this to their representatives now:

[Unseen]

Davis wrote:

Unseen it is absolutely exhausting reading your replies and inability to relent on any arguments, (blah, blah)

Another standard issue Davis ad hominem. I’m in plenty of company since that seems to be a large part of what you do nowadays. Well, at least there won’t be any more if I am to believe you.

But…should I?

[Author]

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