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| PlainName:
--- Quote --- Same with the extreme temperatures, unprecedented for Londoners but actually pretty common elsewhere without the excess deaths/wailing. --- End quote --- We're just not used to it. Our summers are typically OK-ish but nothing to write home about. Maybe a couple of days of nice sun, but then it will rain. Hell, every time there's an eclipse we don't see it because of cloud cover. It's noticeable that when we hit 18C you get blokes down the shops in T-shirts. At 20C everyone is down to shorts too. That's an indication of what we consider 'hot' 8) |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: Someone on July 20, 2022, 10:26:28 pm --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on July 20, 2022, 09:08:28 pm --- --- Quote from: Someone on July 19, 2022, 11:44:04 pm --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on July 19, 2022, 07:58:05 pm ---Yes, it's not nice being here when during a heatwave. To those who say it's nothing, temperatures today have been 10oC hotter than the usual hottest summer day and over 18oC hotter than average. Overnight lows have been between 20oC and 25oC, 7oC to 13oC above normal. --- End quote --- Its not "nothing" but its not a dire emergency, you can say its blah degrees more than normal but thats only what you are acclimatized to. The overnight minimum is a good measure as thats the best case possible with perfect insulation and no air-con, and often most disruptive (preventing sleep/rest). Australian city highest overnight minimums in the last 10 years (just the south east, no tropics): Melbourne: 28 Adelaide: 34 Canberra: 27 Sydney: 25 All these places see daily maximums over 40 C routinely, yet air-conditioning is not universal: Adelaide 90%, others 70%. Yes, heat is a bigger threat to life than cold, but that seems to have some strong acclimatization or behavioral content that London does poorly with: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/heat-and-health-2/assessment So the rest of the world will rightly point to the UK (London) and say learn to adapt with high and low temperature extremes, everyone else seems to survive better. --- End quote --- I question whether it's true that heat kills more, than cold in the UK. Look at the average temperatures for London and compare them to the graphs in the link. According to those graphs, our winters are consistently below the temperature which results in increased excess deaths, yet much less so in summer. Now look at the extreme heat we had yesterday, compared to normal. A high of 40°C, 17°C above average. A low of 25.8 °C, 11.6°C above average and warmer than Sydney's record low. The hottest night of the year in London is normally around 18°C and there are only 2.5 days on average above 30°C. You're right the hot night was more of a problem, bearing in mind it was only <26°C for a short time before dawn and buildings wouldn't have reached anywhere thermal equilibrium, even with all the windows open. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/record-temperatures-2022-a-review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate --- End quote --- Is Kenley really the normal go-to benchmark location for London weather?? That is a further extreme within an extreme,. Relaxing "Sydney" to any of the weather stations within the greater area would have their maximum overnight temperature at least 29 degrees (cant be bothered to fully export all the data and check further) but only a tiny portion of the population would be exposed to those outliers, a dense city location is more representative. Heat doesn't kill more people than cold, yet heat presents a larger risk/threat to life as humans have a harder time adapting (very easy to put on more clothes when its cold). Few hot days and many cold days of course multiply out to different fatality counts. Is cycling safer than driving a car in London because there are fewer deaths per capita or annually? hell no. Its wildly more dangerous when measured by exposure. But its till more dangerous than cycling in say The Netherlands so people can rightly question why the UK/London isnt doing better and what are they doing wrong to cause these excess deaths? Same with the extreme temperatures, unprecedented for Londoners but actually pretty common elsewhere without the excess deaths/wailing. --- End quote --- London is typically a couple of degrees warmer than the surrounding area. What was unusual is the records set were not in the most urban ares. Kenley is a suburb just inside the London borough and the record high was at 40.3°C in Coningsby, a rural area 110 miles north of London. What makes you so certain deaths from cold are similar to those from heat in the UK? You haven't provided solid evidence to backup your assertions. The figures I posted were for the whole summer/winter. I accept they might not be 100% accurate, but they seem plausible, given our average temperatures. --- Quote from: TimFox on July 20, 2022, 10:17:23 pm ---Another detail about climate in the US, specifically where I live in Chicago, is that the average temperature (averaged over 24 hours) has increased with the overall warming trend, but that the nighttime low temperature has increased more than has the daytime high temperature. This makes it more difficult to cool a house in the summer without A/C. --- End quote --- I agree about overnight lows. The heatwave in 2018 was much longer, making July much warmer on average, but it cooled down at night. This was a short lived heatwave, lasting just a few days. There were probably more deaths in 2003, which lasted much longer. |
| Someone:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 21, 2022, 08:10:00 am ---What makes you so certain deaths from cold are similar to those from heat in the UK? You haven't provided solid evidence to backup your assertions. The figures I posted were for the whole summer/winter. I accept they might not be 100% accurate, but they seem plausible, given our average temperatures. --- End quote --- How much more clearly do I have to say this: extreme hot weather is more of a risk to people than extreme cold weather nothing comparative about the number of deaths/fatalities, the statement is about rate London bends up the risk at both low and high extremes more than other comparable cities, and all the cities have risks that are higher (and steeper increasing) in hot extremes than in cold extremes. Pictured below for people who can't be bothered to read this at the same time as looking at the external site (https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/heat-and-health-2/assessment). We could take your insistence on annualised numbers and from that data with its top and bottom 2.5 percentiles marked out, oh look very similar absolute numbers of deaths occur during the 2.5% hottest days compared to the 2.5% coldest days. but once again all I keep saying is... unusual hot is more dangerous to peoples health than unusual cold even this the most extreme record setting heatwave in the UK, still in the shadow of covid, something we have more control over than the weather but are letting loose anyway. |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: Someone on July 21, 2022, 10:17:24 am --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on July 21, 2022, 08:10:00 am ---What makes you so certain deaths from cold are similar to those from heat in the UK? You haven't provided solid evidence to backup your assertions. The figures I posted were for the whole summer/winter. I accept they might not be 100% accurate, but they seem plausible, given our average temperatures. --- End quote --- How much more clearly do I have to say this: extreme hot weather is more of a risk to people than extreme cold weather nothing comparative about the number of deaths/fatalities, the statement is about rate London bends up the risk at both low and high extremes more than other comparable cities, and all the cities have risks that are higher (and steeper increasing) in hot extremes than in cold extremes. Pictured below for people who can't be bothered to read this at the same time as looking at the external site (https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/heat-and-health-2/assessment). We could take your insistence on annualised numbers and from that data with its top and bottom 2.5 percentiles marked out, oh look very similar absolute numbers of deaths occur during the 2.5% hottest days compared to the 2.5% coldest days. but once again all I keep saying is... unusual hot is more dangerous to peoples health than unusual cold even this the most extreme record setting heatwave in the UK, still in the shadow of covid, something we have more control over than the weather but are letting loose anyway. --- End quote --- Yes, it's true people can warm up more easily in winter, than cool in summer, but you're missing the point: in the UK, it's likely we cumulatively have more cold, than heat related fatalities. The most concerning thing about those graphs is the cold deaths in London, vs Stockholm in Sweden, not the heat related deaths given January and February are 6°C milder. It's true July and August are only a bit higher than Stockholm's but the extremes are much higher and the summer is much longer. This is an effect of Stockholm being further away from the Atlantic ocean and further north. London gets more of a breeze from the Atlantic, but the sun is stronger and a southerly can push temperatures very high for the latitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate We do need to do better insulating, heating and cooling ours homes in the UK. Insulation will help with both extremes, but ultimately we need better heating, especially for the vulnerable. Heat pumps are touted as the solution, but are expensive. I suppose the main advantage is a heat pump can cool as well as heat. Unfortunately I can't see many people replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps, because it won't pay off. Hopefully electricity will become cheaper than gas at some point, due to market forces. Oh and the last two years has shown we can't control a virus, any more than the weather. |
| Someone:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 21, 2022, 11:08:06 am --- but you're missing the point: in the UK, it's likely we cumulatively have more cold, than heat related fatalities. --- End quote --- The graphs and study I linked to disagree with that. The number of deaths from the outlier days of cold or heat are similar in quantity. Or you want to argue some 10-20% difference as if its significant??? Look at it anyway you like from your local perspective/optics, but to people outside the UK, Londoners (and the UK in general) do poorly with protecting themselves from hot and cold when compared to other cities. Be that on absolute temperature, or percentile outliers, its a higher risk in all examples. Something is odd about the London (UK) populations ability to withstand temperature extremes, they're bad at it, unexplainably.... --- Quote from: Zero999 on July 21, 2022, 11:08:06 am ---I can't see many people replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps, because it won't pay off. Hopefully electricity will become cheaper than gas at some point, due to market forces. --- End quote --- Lol, still blinkered with the local stance desperately looking away from solutions rather than to them. Even with the broken UK energy market forcing gas to 1/4 the price of electricity, gas heating is still not an obvious solution over heat pumps (for a greenfield install). --- Quote from: Zero999 on July 21, 2022, 11:08:06 am ---Oh and the last two years has shown we can't control a virus, any more than the weather. --- End quote --- No, plenty of places have shown how it is possible to control covid with reducing human contact, just like its possible to wear more clothes and not die of cold. Controlling the weather isn't required. |
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