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Today's Topics:
1. O/t: Climate change temperature related deaths (Stephen Loosley)
2. Re: The Naivete of Cloud-Using Organisations (David)
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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2024 13:37:57 +1100
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [LINK] O/t: Climate change temperature related deaths
Message-ID:
<sy5p282mb440974b3f42f8f5ff1828594c2...@sy5p282mb4409.ausp282.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Heat disproportionately kills young people:
Evidence from wet-bulb temperature in Mexico
By Andrew J. Wilson
Science Advances 6 Dec 2024 Vol 10, Issue 49
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq3367
Abstract
Recent studies project that temperature-related mortality will be the
largest source of damage from climate change, with particular concern
for the elderly whom it is believed bear the largest heat-related
mortality risk.
We study heat and mortality in Mexico, a country that exhibits a unique
combination of universal mortality microdata and among the most extreme
levels of humid heat.
Combining detailed measurements of wet-bulb temperature with
age-specific mortality data, we find that younger people who are
particularly vulnerable to heat:
People under 35 years old account for 75% of recent heat-related deaths
and 87% of heat-related lost life years, while those 50 and older
account for 96% of cold-related deaths and 80% of cold-related lost life
years.
We develop high-resolution projections of humid heat and associated
mortality and find that under the end-of-century emissions scenario,
temperature-related deaths shift from older to younger people.
Deaths among under-35-year-olds increase 32% while decreasing by 33%
among other age groups.
INTRODUCTION
Historically, temperature exposure has caused a large number of
premature deaths.
Heat-related mortality is expected to increase under climate change.
As the evidence base has grown, multiple studies have found that the
elderly are especially vulnerable to heat. Furthermore, many other
studies have expressed particular concern for joint heat and humidity
extremes, given the importance of perspiration for human thermoregulation.
In this study, we explore the relationship between humid heat and
mortality in Mexico, a country that exhibits a unique combination of
rich, age-specific, universal mortality microdata and among the most
extreme historical humid heat exposures.
We find that historically, the majority of heat-related mortality in
Mexico has been concentrated among younger people: 75% of heat-related
deaths and 87% of heat-related lost life years occur among those under
35 years old.
By contrast, the vast majority of cold-related mortality is concentrated
among older people: 98% of cold-related deaths and 90% of cold-related
lost life years occur among those over 35, with the majority of
cold-related deaths occurring among individuals older than 70 years.
We then develop projections of humid heat and associated outcomes to
assess the future implications of these findings. As in other studies,
we find that climate change is expected to increase heat-related
mortality while decreasing cold-related mortality.
However, we uncover an important source of future climate-driven
inequality: The disproportionate impact of heat and cold across age
groups reallocates the temperature-related mortality burden from the
elderly (who are more affected by cold) to the young (who are more
affected by heat).
This has important implications for understanding the distributional
impacts of climate change and for developing effective policies to adapt
to these impacts. (snip)
Discussion (snip)
.. Last, our conclusions further underscore the importance of ethical
choices around monetizing the cost of premature deaths. We find that
climate change is expected to shift the mortality burden away from older
individuals (more affected by cold) to younger individuals (more
affected by heat).
Thus, the choice of whether to value life years, where premature deaths
among younger individuals are considered more costly than premature
deaths among old individuals, or to value all premature deaths the same
becomes especially important.
Although we do not take a stance on this difficult ethical choice, our
findings further emphasize the importance of this debate for evaluations
of the impact of climate change, given that we are finding that climate
change is expected to shift the temperature-related mortality burden
toward the young.
--
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2024 11:43:05 +1100
From: David <[email protected]>
To: link <[email protected]>, Roger Clarke <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [LINK] The Naivete of Cloud-Using Organisations
Message-ID: <3333187.44csPzL39Z@ulysses>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
On Friday, 13 December 2024 7:52:13 AM AEDT Roger Clarke wrote:
>> Organisations that choose to be dependent on remote services could be
>> expected to have fallback arrangements designed, trialled and at the ready.
>> These might take the form of alternative cloud suppliers.
And those organisations should also take care to ensure there's no common
factor in their choice of suppliers. It could be embarrassing if, having paid
lots to keep the alternative going for years on end, it turned out that both
cloud suppliers failed because they shared the same comms outage, database bug,
malware intrusion, political upheaval, or whatever. And that's a level of
detail which is almost impossible to identify.
I don't think there's any answer to that conundrum, even in principle.
Organisational size & complexity is the issue. The bigger they are, the harder
they fall. So to speak...
_David Lochrin_
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Subject: Digest Footer
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End of Link Digest, Vol 385, Issue 17
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