Heat waves are deadly. According to the IPCC, the frequency, intensity and duration of these increase with global warming. However, the mortality they cause continues to decrease thanks to economic growth and technological progress, a fact rarely mentioned when the subject is raised. However, its implications are very important.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
To illustrate the phenomenon, consider the heat wave of the summer of 1936 — the worst since 1895 according to data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
At the height of the Great Depression, this heat wave affected much of the United States and Ontario. Among our American neighbors, 5,000 deaths were directly attributed to the extreme heat.
This represents 39 deaths per million inhabitants, and it is a very conservative estimate since it does not include deaths linked to complications from heat waves. It also does not take into account the lower quality of vital statistics before 1940 in the United States.
So let’s take the number of 39 deaths per million as a conservative estimate. For comparison, the death rate during the five greatest heat waves in the United States since 1979 has fluctuated between 0.86 and 2.87 deaths per million population. However, if these heat waves had been as intense as those of 1936 and the deaths had occurred in equivalent proportion, the rates would have varied between 3.49 and 14.21 deaths per million.
In short, all things considered, the mortality caused by these recent heat waves has fallen by between 64 and 91% since 1936. These are phenomenal gains.
And this trend seems to be confirmed in other countries. Moreover, the gains seem to be particularly large when incomes rise in the poorest countries.
strange paradox
It is important to recognize — according to a study published in Nature Climate Change — that approximately 37% of heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018 are attributable to human effects on the climate.
It must therefore be understood that if global warming is presented as a “front wind”, it actually counterbalances another “wind” that pushes us in the back, that of economic growth and technological progress.
It is here that a strange paradox emerges that few people point out.
Economic growth increases our income and our resilience to the vagaries of nature (tailwinds). It also increases, according to climate models, global warming (front wind). However, in short, the two winds come from the same source.
This paradox says a lot.
Those who point to deaths during heat waves as a motivation to fight global warming often propose measures that reduce economic growth. Seeing this as an absolute quest, they fail to realize that by offering to reduce the costs of growth, they are also unwittingly reducing the benefits. By ignoring this co-determination, it is quite possible that the proposed policies increase deaths.
Less spectacular, but superior
By taking this co-determination into account, however, we realize that we have to find measures that do not slow down economic development while reducing its potential externalities, for example those linked to greenhouse gases.
This may include the removal of barriers to technological innovation, the cessation of subsidies to certain industrial practices or industries, the reintroduction of road tolls, etc. All of these measures have in common that they only address the externalities of economic growth, without reducing its benefits.
Unfortunately, with the alarmist rhetoric that we hear all the time — and which resurface even more strongly during the current heat wave, we tend to forget these less spectacular measures among the set of policies proposed. Nevertheless, this does not detract from their superiority since they are more likely to improve human well-being. and the quality of the environment.
After all, you lose nothing by keeping a cool head, even during a heat wave.