Very well presented; Andrew. We are in really deep s. Also, the one thing that is not conveyed about the heatwaves and high temps is the loss of surface water, healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy livestock. All those are in the lifecycle and are getting diminished and the deaths show up in the tomorrows. As Earth 🔥 we gotta wake up the people.
Also, I wonder how many other deaths can be attributed to heatwaves giving a time frame after the heatwave dissipated. Chronic illness excacterbations or becoming ill from the 🥵 am sure has death outcomes that are remarkable. Heat wave might cause a stroke. A person may succumb 2 months after. I wonder if there is total attribution of heatwave mortalities especially POST heatwave.
There has been recent research published that calculates the number of increased deaths due to the not-directly-fatal destruction wrought by strong hurricanes. After the news media withdraws those regions still suffer from increased homelessness, unemployment, stress, and poverty.
That is for sure. Throw a wrench in a machine and bad s will happen. Every climate "immediate" tragedy has ensuing maladies. I was referring to the overall lingering effect on the body that severe 🥵 can produce ( in regards to reported immediate deaths ).
AIUI, ·polio· survivors were crippled later in life when the extra compensatory dendrite growth on remaining neurons died off.
Shingles comes from ·chickenpox· virus (varicella) that can hide for decades in the ganglia along the spine.
·Measles· has been shown to suppress immune response for years after having it.
·Mumps· can lead to varying degrees of hearing loss, but sterilization of gametes might not be noticed until much later in life (if you want to make bebbies).
·Rubella· in pregnant women can cause particularly nasty birth defects.
·Ebola· virus can linger in testes and eyeball vitreous humour.
·COVID-19 from the SARS-CoV-2· virus has a variety of potential sequelae, including: (1) Direct permanent damage to lungs from the infection response trashing the alveoli. (2) Damage to other organs (brain, heart, kidneys) and limbs* from micro-clots thrown from the lungs. (3) Direct infection of heart and other cells.
____
*One of the first infected in the US had to have all fingers amputated. Broadway performer Nick Cordero had his leg amputated and needed a pacemaker before finally succumbing.
Good point Jeff ......the same question probably applies to the official death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic ......ie many people with underlying health issues were ticking along reasonably well until they were hit with Covid .....some died at the time , most survived, .....but was the life time of the survivors curtailed ? .....did the issues they already have change from Chronic to Critical ?
Dave, perfect analogy! Heat, like Covid could really harm the body's systems dramatically. Floods, hurricanes, and such produce fatalities and harm but not of the internal organs generally...and don't produce post incident fatalities. Wildfires and smoke of course cause lung/heart damage/deaths but they are generally accounted for on consensus data.
i tend to fluctuate between optimism and pessimism ......but recently the hope indicator has been boosted by the reported advances in battery technology , particularly possible progress with sodium ion tech as is apparently being rolled out in China by CATL and BYD .
Also it is only 4 months to the US midterm elections .
On the other hand .....both this year and 2027 are likely to be challenging for both Homo Sapiens and many of our little rock's other species......looking at you , Coral Reefs .
I wrote a paper for a conference on potential land use changes that might result from climate change, including changes in agriculture. The paper included what might happen to rainfall patterns in two specific locations with (then) identical rainfall amounts - 34.5 inches in a year. These were Maryland and Oregon. In Maryland, sporadic, irregular heavy rainfall was enough to support corn and soybean and tobacco crops in heavy clay soil. Flooding resulted from tropical storms. Oregon had the same rainfall, but steady from month to month. The gentler rain could be absorbed by the thinner topsoil in Oregon. Now the manner and frequency of the rain has changed, causing mud slides and flooding in Oregon during atmospheric river events. In Maryland, drought years are more frequent. These sorts of changes affect insects, birds, and the viability of crops if they persist.
From Peter Sinclair's coverage of renewable energy fights, I get the impression that the majority of solar farms (in farm country) represent ·improvement· in soil health and smaller-animal* ecosystems.
A desert solar farm in California has provided a protected habitat for endangered kit foxes (who enjoy the absence of humans, the shade, and the better protection from raptors). Likewise a solar farm in Colombia has provided protection for endangered tigrillos (small wildcats).
_____________
*We really need a term for the size range of creatures just below "megafauna".
Be personally? I already support collective action. My comment was about governments and citizens generally being motivated enough to stand up to the vested interests who are blocking progress and to demand and even force a rapid and comprehensive response
This is a situation where even France's once-reliable fleet of nuclear power plants fails. By the old designs relying on external sources of cooling water, many plants have hit regulatory limits on how much heated cooling water they can release into over-heated streams, meaning some reactors are shut off when A/C demand is the highest.
And any new NPPs are carbon-intensive major construction projects, meaning it takes much longer to hit their carbon payback periods (after they are eventually brought online) than solar, wind and battery farms.
American media reports 30 deaths from the recent heat wave. Terrible of course, but it is x4 less than the number of people dying in traffic accidents every day, so this is really not a lot. 30 deaths is two orders of magnitude less than in France. We all know why. This is because the criminal French government doesn't allow them to install A/C. The government caused the deaths of 2,700 people much more than the heat wave or climate change. You said is yourself: Almost all heat-related deaths are preventable.
And, let's not forget that an order of magnitude more people die from cold than from heat. I hope you care about them as well, no? Surely, you would agree that in the warmer climate less people would die from cold. Right? Since more people would be saved from exposure to cold then killed by heat (even disregarding the A/C issue), it would turn out that warming saves more people than it kills.
The total mortality burden attributable to excessively hot or cold temperatures currently (baseline period 1991-2020) amounts to 407,000 deaths per year across Europe. Some 363,500 people die annually from cold, while 43,700 die from excessive heat.
NO, I'M NOT SAYING THAT GW IS A GOOD THING.
But if you want to show how bad it is, this kind of lazy argumentation won't work unless you are preaching to the quire.
Lara: "And, let's not forget that an order of magnitude more people die from cold than from heat. I hope you care about them as well, no? ...Since more people would be saved from exposure to cold then killed by heat (even disregarding the A/C issue), it would turn out that warming saves more people than it kills."
Mal: Oh, the humanity! If you think the families of those who died in this summer's heatwaves are comforted to know fewer cold deaths are occurring, you clearly lack empathy yourself. And that particular red herring has been popular with 'lukewarmers', a species of decarbonization obstructionist, for years! Thus, your comment raised my suspicions about your purpose here. FWIW, Google Gemini supports my skepticism:
Gemini: "Yes, that specific phrasing is implicitly obstructionist on Andrew Dessler's Substack, and it serves as a textbook example of what climate communication researchers call a 'climate delay' discourse. Even if the commenter frames it as a dispassionate, 'just looking at the numbers' logical deduction, the underlying structure of the argument relies on a flawed, static view of human systems to arrive at a false sense of security."
Lara: "30 deaths is two orders of magnitude less than in France. We all know why. This is because the criminal French government doesn't allow them to install A/C."
Mal: Is the French government criminal? Only if it's illegally influenced by carbon capital. The real criminals in global warming are the petro-plutocrats who wield the power of their 100s of billions of dollars in annual profits, wealth beyond all historical dreams of avarice, to forestall collective interference in those very profits, by deceiving the public en masse and suborning governments at every scale. You may very well be working for them!
The truth is that French citizens collectively support historic preservation, with protected districts in multiple cities (Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon"). Those of who want to install air conditioning that modifies the external appearance of their apartment building must get approval from their building Co-ownership Board and local municipality, and a national Historic Preservation Board if in a protected district, where approval is highly unlikely. That leaves internal cooling options open, including fixed monoblock air conditioners, small duct high velocity systems, concealed dual-hose portable ACs, and other zero-external-visibility solutions.
That being said, the French government’s climate adaptation plans heavily emphasize retrofitting buildings for extreme heat. And throughout the EU, the right to cooling is increasingly recognized as a public health necessity rather than a luxury. Global warming requires collective intervention to decarbonize the global economy, by taking the profit out of selling fossil carbon for all the traffic will bear while socializing the climate-change cost. That's proceeding, nation by nation. Yet more lethal heatwaves are ahead before anthropogenic GHG emissions fall below the rate of natural drawdown. Adaptation is proceeding at all scales as well, privately and publicly, with all-too-predictable inequity. It depends on who has the resources. We can be certain the rich will get richer, and the poor, poorer, everywhere!
You can continue calling it red herring until you turn blue, but it will remain the fact all the same. Facts are very stubborn.
I'm sure they support historic preservation, just not at the cost of their lives. I hope they'll start another revolution to repeal this crap.
Fairy tails about the power of fossil fuels lobby are too old. The weight of energy sector in S&P 500 is about 4.5%.
Adaption is what we have here. Almost everyone has AC and that's how it should be. In every country. People who make AC and supply energy to run are saving lives. People who are trying to prevent it are criminals.
Unfortunately, nobody is prosecuting them just yet. But I hope they will.
"Fairy tails about the power of fossil fuels lobby are too old. The weight of energy sector in S&P 500 is about 4.5%."
Not probative. Weak, frankly. The evidence published by multiple investigative journalists and peer-reviewed social scientists in the last 30 years is verifiable. The power of hundreds of billions in annual profits to carbon capital, is self-evident. What are you really here for, Lara?
The evidence of what? You have nothing concrete to say. "Red herring", "lukewarmers", evil fossil fuels companies, blah blah blah.
I am hear for people who needlessly suffer and die from cold and heat while hypocrites like you sit in their comfortable air-conditioned homes and signal their virtues.
Life is too short to spend it on brain-washed low IQ quire boys with no intellectual integrity. Have a nice rest of your life.
Tsk. So you think the Koch network's historic subornation of America's constitutional government is "nothing concrete." What a genius! You don't believe the investigative reporting by the New Yorker, the Guardian, the New York Times? Who do you get your verifiable documentation of global reality from?
"I am hear [sic] for people who needlessly suffer and die from cold and heat while hypocrites like you sit in their comfortable air-conditioned homes and signal their virtues."
Well, isn't that an unambiguous virtue signal! Congratulations! Do you not believe the globe is warming, it's anthropogenic, and needless deaths from heat are rising as a consequence? Do you really think the victim's families are comforted by your proud dismissal of the underlying, systemic reason they died?
"Life is too short to spend it on brain-washed low IQ quire [sic] boys with no intellectual integrity. "
I don't actually know what my IQ is. Do you know yours? At least I know how to spell 'choir' - what, you couldn't look it up? Have a mediocre life at best!
Which part of "I'm not interested in talking to you" you don't understand? I haven't read your reply and will not read anything you write going forward.
Unfortunately, there is no "block" feature in this substack but I'll report you for harassing me if you reply again.
That said, it has to be pointed out that wedging in RCP8.5 like this does the cause no service whatsoever.
The handling of RCP8.5 - how it was selected and ultimately presented and used - deserved all the criticism it has received. It should not have been framed the way it was often framed.
Any attempt to imply that maybe it wasn't all that bad anyway just makes it easier for those who don't believe that mitigation is warranted to question the credibility of those who do.
Even if one wants to place all the blame on media, the scientific community should have pushed back harder.
Mistakes were made. Admit. Accept. Cede ground. Move on.
"The handling of RCP8.5 - how it was selected and ultimately presented and used - deserved all the criticism it has received. It should not have been framed the way it was often framed."
Who often framed RCP8.5 the way it should not have been framed? Who says it shouldn't have been framed that way? Who is criticising it? Why do they get to decide?
Name names, or you're merely erecting a strawman RCP8.5!
RCP8.5, as an emissions scenario, is what has been deemed as no longer plausible (and never really was, as outlined by Zeke in an earlier post). This is not to be confused with the plausibility of achieving 8.5-like levels of warming (implied in this post), it is simply too early to tell as the range of possible temperatures resulting from high and medium emission scenarios continue to largely overlap. That said, studies on the earth energy imbalance (the primary driver of temperature change) indicate, in the words of one research team, that a "...strong upward trend in the imbalance is difficult to reconcile with climate models...state-of-the-art global climate models can only barely reproduce the rate of change up to 2020 within the observational uncertainty (Raghuraman et al., 2021). The continued rise in the energy imbalance since 2020 leaves us with little doubt that the real world signal has left the envelope of model internal variability" (Myhre, G. et al. 2025).
The implication is the problem. It reads as an attempt to rescue something that was nonetheless wrong. It's perfecty viable to tallk about "8.5-like levels of warming" without referencing a scenario that got to that level of warning through some rather wild assumptions (to put it mildly) and was used in contexts it did not belong.
I don't see what is gained by referencing it but I know what is lost by doing so. It's such an easy thing to spin.
To be clear, estimates of future anthropogenic emissions makes those of SSP5-8.5 no longer plausible (as of 2019), the earth energy imbalance since 2020 exceeds those expected from SSP5-8.5 (being just equal to it previously), while temperatures are within the bounds of those possible from SSP5-8.5. If the topic is future emission pathways, then reference to SSP5-8.5 as our current trajectory would be inaccurate. If the discussion is energy imbalance and warming, then SSP5-8.5 is (more or less) where we are, and reference to SSP2-4.5 as our trajectory are equally inaccurate. All of this is to say that the inability to connect emission estimates, with the measurements of energy imbalance and temperature calls into question whether current modeling efforts accurately reflect reality.
If revised physics means we reach similar warming with lower emissions than SSP5-8.5 assumed, that doesn't vindicate SSP5-8.5. It means the climate response has changed relative to expectations. The scenario's defining assumptions about emissions and socioeconomic development would still be wrong, even if some of its predicted forcing outcomes turned out to be on track anyway.
I look at all this from a communicator's perspective. And the credibility of any claims related to 8.5 levels of forcing will just be weakened if it's tied to something that was fundamentally wrong/mishandled.
The RCPs, and SSPs since and SRES before, come out of the work of the IPCC. Looking only at emissions, up until the last Assessment Report (AR6), we were on the emission pathway of RCP 8.5 (go back and look at the first figure in On the Death of RCP 8.5 post). Since the pandemic emissions have fallen away as the deployment of alternative energy has bloomed. Looking at warming, RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, is not wrong, whereas use of RCP4.5 to describe our EEI and temperature trajectory would be. The first paper on the new emission scenarios to be used in AR7 has just been published. Hopefully, the problems with the emissions-warming modeling will also be revised. Until then anyone writing about the energy imbalance or temperature change either makes reference to those modeled based on 8.5, or a nuanced derivative (8.5-like). You seem to prefer the later. Fair enough, we live in a messy world. Communication is complicated.
we may not burn the fossil fuels that were modeled as necessary to hit RCP8.5 .....but the positive feedbacks could take us significantly in that direction....
The previous record of the Météo‑France “national thermal indicator” was 29.4°C, which was reached in 1947. The national thermal indicator is based on day-night averages of 30 city stations, not rural stations. The recent heatwave got to a stunning half-degree C higher than it was in 1947.
French temperature records are not adjusted for the Urban Heat Island effect.
Typical nighttime UHI intensity (urban–rural air temperature difference) in French cities is around 2–6 °C on average, with peaks around 10 °C in certain extreme conditions in dense cores, especially during multi‑day heatwaves.
Recent examples (e.g. Reims, Aix‑Marseille, other case studies) report urban–rural differences up to 7–10 °C in heatwave situations, and these are expected to increase in frequency as the regional climate warms.
Given that, we're supposed to be surprised that a 2026 French record is half a degree warmer than a record set over three-quarters of a century ago? This is supposed to show terrifying global warming?
There is a silver lining. Per AI, the CO2 footprint of the average EU citizen is 9 tonnes per year. If 10,000 die this is a reduction of 90,000 tonnes per year CO2. Since global temperature is an almost linear single variable function of CO2 concentration we can determine this relationship: dT=2.04*10e-16*X where X is pounds CO2. The temperature increase avoidance due to the deaths is therefore 0.00000004 degrees C. per year.
While small it should be included as a negative feedback input to ensure we’re being as transparent as possible and not give deniers any fuel for dissension. And since we’re capable of determining the number of deaths attributed to any weather event we can also let the survivors know that those who died did not die in vain.
Heh. Looks like Lara made good her threat to report me for harrassment. She managed to get herself deleted too! A useful update for me. Otherwise, just as well for both of us, and the thread I guess.
Maybe I'll plan on reporting her next comment for silliness 8^D! Would that work with Willis, I wonder? Meh. Ima leave him to Prof. Dessler.
[Late edit: This is definitely a win for the thread. If all doomers or deniers would simply delete their own comments, I for one would feel no need to respond: mission accomplished 8^D! MA]
Super informative. I'm curious about the comparison to modeled 2070s weather though. On your chart it looks like one model (blue line) spits out a heatwave nearly as severe in the 2020s. There are also some that exceed today's conditions by around 2050. What is the basis for saying 2070s are the right comparison?
Very well presented; Andrew. We are in really deep s. Also, the one thing that is not conveyed about the heatwaves and high temps is the loss of surface water, healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy livestock. All those are in the lifecycle and are getting diminished and the deaths show up in the tomorrows. As Earth 🔥 we gotta wake up the people.
Also, I wonder how many other deaths can be attributed to heatwaves giving a time frame after the heatwave dissipated. Chronic illness excacterbations or becoming ill from the 🥵 am sure has death outcomes that are remarkable. Heat wave might cause a stroke. A person may succumb 2 months after. I wonder if there is total attribution of heatwave mortalities especially POST heatwave.
There has been recent research published that calculates the number of increased deaths due to the not-directly-fatal destruction wrought by strong hurricanes. After the news media withdraws those regions still suffer from increased homelessness, unemployment, stress, and poverty.
That is for sure. Throw a wrench in a machine and bad s will happen. Every climate "immediate" tragedy has ensuing maladies. I was referring to the overall lingering effect on the body that severe 🥵 can produce ( in regards to reported immediate deaths ).
Maybe going mangos in Siberia is a plus.
[An old post of mine.]
Word for the day: sequela (pl. sequelae)
AIUI, ·polio· survivors were crippled later in life when the extra compensatory dendrite growth on remaining neurons died off.
Shingles comes from ·chickenpox· virus (varicella) that can hide for decades in the ganglia along the spine.
·Measles· has been shown to suppress immune response for years after having it.
·Mumps· can lead to varying degrees of hearing loss, but sterilization of gametes might not be noticed until much later in life (if you want to make bebbies).
·Rubella· in pregnant women can cause particularly nasty birth defects.
·Ebola· virus can linger in testes and eyeball vitreous humour.
·COVID-19 from the SARS-CoV-2· virus has a variety of potential sequelae, including: (1) Direct permanent damage to lungs from the infection response trashing the alveoli. (2) Damage to other organs (brain, heart, kidneys) and limbs* from micro-clots thrown from the lungs. (3) Direct infection of heart and other cells.
____
*One of the first infected in the US had to have all fingers amputated. Broadway performer Nick Cordero had his leg amputated and needed a pacemaker before finally succumbing.
Thanks for the great info! Never heard of the word but it makes perfect sense with the same root of sequence ( I assume ).
Climate sequelae should be better understood/reported so we have a better view of the total damage/suffering this heating planet has in store.
"Maybe going mangos in Siberia is a plus."
LOL! Funny mental image. "Going mangos" is my new favorite slang for "decompensating"!
Mal, that was another sick "sic" 😫 I typed. Meant growing mangos. 🥭 . But RassPutin goes mangos so I guess it was a typing poetic justice.
Good point Jeff ......the same question probably applies to the official death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic ......ie many people with underlying health issues were ticking along reasonably well until they were hit with Covid .....some died at the time , most survived, .....but was the life time of the survivors curtailed ? .....did the issues they already have change from Chronic to Critical ?
Dave, perfect analogy! Heat, like Covid could really harm the body's systems dramatically. Floods, hurricanes, and such produce fatalities and harm but not of the internal organs generally...and don't produce post incident fatalities. Wildfires and smoke of course cause lung/heart damage/deaths but they are generally accounted for on consensus data.
i tend to fluctuate between optimism and pessimism ......but recently the hope indicator has been boosted by the reported advances in battery technology , particularly possible progress with sodium ion tech as is apparently being rolled out in China by CATL and BYD .
Also it is only 4 months to the US midterm elections .
On the other hand .....both this year and 2027 are likely to be challenging for both Homo Sapiens and many of our little rock's other species......looking at you , Coral Reefs .
I wrote a paper for a conference on potential land use changes that might result from climate change, including changes in agriculture. The paper included what might happen to rainfall patterns in two specific locations with (then) identical rainfall amounts - 34.5 inches in a year. These were Maryland and Oregon. In Maryland, sporadic, irregular heavy rainfall was enough to support corn and soybean and tobacco crops in heavy clay soil. Flooding resulted from tropical storms. Oregon had the same rainfall, but steady from month to month. The gentler rain could be absorbed by the thinner topsoil in Oregon. Now the manner and frequency of the rain has changed, causing mud slides and flooding in Oregon during atmospheric river events. In Maryland, drought years are more frequent. These sorts of changes affect insects, birds, and the viability of crops if they persist.
From Peter Sinclair's coverage of renewable energy fights, I get the impression that the majority of solar farms (in farm country) represent ·improvement· in soil health and smaller-animal* ecosystems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-FWZ-OOfE
A desert solar farm in California has provided a protected habitat for endangered kit foxes (who enjoy the absence of humans, the shade, and the better protection from raptors). Likewise a solar farm in Colombia has provided protection for endangered tigrillos (small wildcats).
_____________
*We really need a term for the size range of creatures just below "megafauna".
Yes, I’ve read similar articles regarding sheep ranches. The soil retains moisture better and the sheep appreciate the shade.
*How about “mid-scale fauna”?
As long as the biologists/ecologists/whatevers can agree on something, I'm in.
"Macrofauna".
I very much appreciate the subtitle because I feel the same thing myself: "Perhaps the victory lap for getting rid of RCP8.5 was premature"
It's like the old joke about an announcement to the galley slaves:
"...and the bad news is that the captain wants to go water-skiing after lunch."
Watch out, Herr Dr. Dessler, you might be accused of being...a DOOMER!
(Duhnt-duhnt duhhhhh!)
During Covid excess deaths in France reached 50,000 per year. A serious policy response requires impacts on this scale.
The excess heat wave deaths are about 5% of that. Like Covid, they are mostly the elderly and otherwise vulnerable.
Climate change is an insidious problem, but the impact is not great enough to provoke the global response required to address the problem.
How great an impact would provoke you to support collective intervention to cap the warming?
Be personally? I already support collective action. My comment was about governments and citizens generally being motivated enough to stand up to the vested interests who are blocking progress and to demand and even force a rapid and comprehensive response
I've grown cynical after decades of inaction.
Oh. Sorry, I reacted by thinking 'fast', i.e. without deliberation. Thanks for your patient reply. I'll try to think slower 8^D!
This is a situation where even France's once-reliable fleet of nuclear power plants fails. By the old designs relying on external sources of cooling water, many plants have hit regulatory limits on how much heated cooling water they can release into over-heated streams, meaning some reactors are shut off when A/C demand is the highest.
And any new NPPs are carbon-intensive major construction projects, meaning it takes much longer to hit their carbon payback periods (after they are eventually brought online) than solar, wind and battery farms.
American media reports 30 deaths from the recent heat wave. Terrible of course, but it is x4 less than the number of people dying in traffic accidents every day, so this is really not a lot. 30 deaths is two orders of magnitude less than in France. We all know why. This is because the criminal French government doesn't allow them to install A/C. The government caused the deaths of 2,700 people much more than the heat wave or climate change. You said is yourself: Almost all heat-related deaths are preventable.
And, let's not forget that an order of magnitude more people die from cold than from heat. I hope you care about them as well, no? Surely, you would agree that in the warmer climate less people would die from cold. Right? Since more people would be saved from exposure to cold then killed by heat (even disregarding the A/C issue), it would turn out that warming saves more people than it kills.
European commission reports the numbers here:
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/temperature-related-mortality-burden-worsen-europe-2024-08-22_en
The total mortality burden attributable to excessively hot or cold temperatures currently (baseline period 1991-2020) amounts to 407,000 deaths per year across Europe. Some 363,500 people die annually from cold, while 43,700 die from excessive heat.
NO, I'M NOT SAYING THAT GW IS A GOOD THING.
But if you want to show how bad it is, this kind of lazy argumentation won't work unless you are preaching to the quire.
Lara: "And, let's not forget that an order of magnitude more people die from cold than from heat. I hope you care about them as well, no? ...Since more people would be saved from exposure to cold then killed by heat (even disregarding the A/C issue), it would turn out that warming saves more people than it kills."
Mal: Oh, the humanity! If you think the families of those who died in this summer's heatwaves are comforted to know fewer cold deaths are occurring, you clearly lack empathy yourself. And that particular red herring has been popular with 'lukewarmers', a species of decarbonization obstructionist, for years! Thus, your comment raised my suspicions about your purpose here. FWIW, Google Gemini supports my skepticism:
Gemini: "Yes, that specific phrasing is implicitly obstructionist on Andrew Dessler's Substack, and it serves as a textbook example of what climate communication researchers call a 'climate delay' discourse. Even if the commenter frames it as a dispassionate, 'just looking at the numbers' logical deduction, the underlying structure of the argument relies on a flawed, static view of human systems to arrive at a false sense of security."
Lara: "30 deaths is two orders of magnitude less than in France. We all know why. This is because the criminal French government doesn't allow them to install A/C."
Mal: Is the French government criminal? Only if it's illegally influenced by carbon capital. The real criminals in global warming are the petro-plutocrats who wield the power of their 100s of billions of dollars in annual profits, wealth beyond all historical dreams of avarice, to forestall collective interference in those very profits, by deceiving the public en masse and suborning governments at every scale. You may very well be working for them!
The truth is that French citizens collectively support historic preservation, with protected districts in multiple cities (Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon"). Those of who want to install air conditioning that modifies the external appearance of their apartment building must get approval from their building Co-ownership Board and local municipality, and a national Historic Preservation Board if in a protected district, where approval is highly unlikely. That leaves internal cooling options open, including fixed monoblock air conditioners, small duct high velocity systems, concealed dual-hose portable ACs, and other zero-external-visibility solutions.
That being said, the French government’s climate adaptation plans heavily emphasize retrofitting buildings for extreme heat. And throughout the EU, the right to cooling is increasingly recognized as a public health necessity rather than a luxury. Global warming requires collective intervention to decarbonize the global economy, by taking the profit out of selling fossil carbon for all the traffic will bear while socializing the climate-change cost. That's proceeding, nation by nation. Yet more lethal heatwaves are ahead before anthropogenic GHG emissions fall below the rate of natural drawdown. Adaptation is proceeding at all scales as well, privately and publicly, with all-too-predictable inequity. It depends on who has the resources. We can be certain the rich will get richer, and the poor, poorer, everywhere!
You can continue calling it red herring until you turn blue, but it will remain the fact all the same. Facts are very stubborn.
I'm sure they support historic preservation, just not at the cost of their lives. I hope they'll start another revolution to repeal this crap.
Fairy tails about the power of fossil fuels lobby are too old. The weight of energy sector in S&P 500 is about 4.5%.
Adaption is what we have here. Almost everyone has AC and that's how it should be. In every country. People who make AC and supply energy to run are saving lives. People who are trying to prevent it are criminals.
Unfortunately, nobody is prosecuting them just yet. But I hope they will.
"Fairy tails about the power of fossil fuels lobby are too old. The weight of energy sector in S&P 500 is about 4.5%."
Not probative. Weak, frankly. The evidence published by multiple investigative journalists and peer-reviewed social scientists in the last 30 years is verifiable. The power of hundreds of billions in annual profits to carbon capital, is self-evident. What are you really here for, Lara?
The evidence of what? You have nothing concrete to say. "Red herring", "lukewarmers", evil fossil fuels companies, blah blah blah.
I am hear for people who needlessly suffer and die from cold and heat while hypocrites like you sit in their comfortable air-conditioned homes and signal their virtues.
Life is too short to spend it on brain-washed low IQ quire boys with no intellectual integrity. Have a nice rest of your life.
Tsk. So you think the Koch network's historic subornation of America's constitutional government is "nothing concrete." What a genius! You don't believe the investigative reporting by the New Yorker, the Guardian, the New York Times? Who do you get your verifiable documentation of global reality from?
"I am hear [sic] for people who needlessly suffer and die from cold and heat while hypocrites like you sit in their comfortable air-conditioned homes and signal their virtues."
Well, isn't that an unambiguous virtue signal! Congratulations! Do you not believe the globe is warming, it's anthropogenic, and needless deaths from heat are rising as a consequence? Do you really think the victim's families are comforted by your proud dismissal of the underlying, systemic reason they died?
"Life is too short to spend it on brain-washed low IQ quire [sic] boys with no intellectual integrity. "
I don't actually know what my IQ is. Do you know yours? At least I know how to spell 'choir' - what, you couldn't look it up? Have a mediocre life at best!
Which part of "I'm not interested in talking to you" you don't understand? I haven't read your reply and will not read anything you write going forward.
Unfortunately, there is no "block" feature in this substack but I'll report you for harassing me if you reply again.
Clear enough?
Solid summary.
That said, it has to be pointed out that wedging in RCP8.5 like this does the cause no service whatsoever.
The handling of RCP8.5 - how it was selected and ultimately presented and used - deserved all the criticism it has received. It should not have been framed the way it was often framed.
Any attempt to imply that maybe it wasn't all that bad anyway just makes it easier for those who don't believe that mitigation is warranted to question the credibility of those who do.
Even if one wants to place all the blame on media, the scientific community should have pushed back harder.
Mistakes were made. Admit. Accept. Cede ground. Move on.
"The handling of RCP8.5 - how it was selected and ultimately presented and used - deserved all the criticism it has received. It should not have been framed the way it was often framed."
Who often framed RCP8.5 the way it should not have been framed? Who says it shouldn't have been framed that way? Who is criticising it? Why do they get to decide?
Name names, or you're merely erecting a strawman RCP8.5!
RCP8.5, as an emissions scenario, is what has been deemed as no longer plausible (and never really was, as outlined by Zeke in an earlier post). This is not to be confused with the plausibility of achieving 8.5-like levels of warming (implied in this post), it is simply too early to tell as the range of possible temperatures resulting from high and medium emission scenarios continue to largely overlap. That said, studies on the earth energy imbalance (the primary driver of temperature change) indicate, in the words of one research team, that a "...strong upward trend in the imbalance is difficult to reconcile with climate models...state-of-the-art global climate models can only barely reproduce the rate of change up to 2020 within the observational uncertainty (Raghuraman et al., 2021). The continued rise in the energy imbalance since 2020 leaves us with little doubt that the real world signal has left the envelope of model internal variability" (Myhre, G. et al. 2025).
The implication is the problem. It reads as an attempt to rescue something that was nonetheless wrong. It's perfecty viable to tallk about "8.5-like levels of warming" without referencing a scenario that got to that level of warning through some rather wild assumptions (to put it mildly) and was used in contexts it did not belong.
I don't see what is gained by referencing it but I know what is lost by doing so. It's such an easy thing to spin.
To be clear, estimates of future anthropogenic emissions makes those of SSP5-8.5 no longer plausible (as of 2019), the earth energy imbalance since 2020 exceeds those expected from SSP5-8.5 (being just equal to it previously), while temperatures are within the bounds of those possible from SSP5-8.5. If the topic is future emission pathways, then reference to SSP5-8.5 as our current trajectory would be inaccurate. If the discussion is energy imbalance and warming, then SSP5-8.5 is (more or less) where we are, and reference to SSP2-4.5 as our trajectory are equally inaccurate. All of this is to say that the inability to connect emission estimates, with the measurements of energy imbalance and temperature calls into question whether current modeling efforts accurately reflect reality.
If revised physics means we reach similar warming with lower emissions than SSP5-8.5 assumed, that doesn't vindicate SSP5-8.5. It means the climate response has changed relative to expectations. The scenario's defining assumptions about emissions and socioeconomic development would still be wrong, even if some of its predicted forcing outcomes turned out to be on track anyway.
I look at all this from a communicator's perspective. And the credibility of any claims related to 8.5 levels of forcing will just be weakened if it's tied to something that was fundamentally wrong/mishandled.
The RCPs, and SSPs since and SRES before, come out of the work of the IPCC. Looking only at emissions, up until the last Assessment Report (AR6), we were on the emission pathway of RCP 8.5 (go back and look at the first figure in On the Death of RCP 8.5 post). Since the pandemic emissions have fallen away as the deployment of alternative energy has bloomed. Looking at warming, RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, is not wrong, whereas use of RCP4.5 to describe our EEI and temperature trajectory would be. The first paper on the new emission scenarios to be used in AR7 has just been published. Hopefully, the problems with the emissions-warming modeling will also be revised. Until then anyone writing about the energy imbalance or temperature change either makes reference to those modeled based on 8.5, or a nuanced derivative (8.5-like). You seem to prefer the later. Fair enough, we live in a messy world. Communication is complicated.
we may not burn the fossil fuels that were modeled as necessary to hit RCP8.5 .....but the positive feedbacks could take us significantly in that direction....
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-human-caused-aerosols-are-masking-global-warming/
The previous record of the Météo‑France “national thermal indicator” was 29.4°C, which was reached in 1947. The national thermal indicator is based on day-night averages of 30 city stations, not rural stations. The recent heatwave got to a stunning half-degree C higher than it was in 1947.
French temperature records are not adjusted for the Urban Heat Island effect.
Typical nighttime UHI intensity (urban–rural air temperature difference) in French cities is around 2–6 °C on average, with peaks around 10 °C in certain extreme conditions in dense cores, especially during multi‑day heatwaves.
Recent examples (e.g. Reims, Aix‑Marseille, other case studies) report urban–rural differences up to 7–10 °C in heatwave situations, and these are expected to increase in frequency as the regional climate warms.
Given that, we're supposed to be surprised that a 2026 French record is half a degree warmer than a record set over three-quarters of a century ago? This is supposed to show terrifying global warming?
Really?
Man, you guys are easily impressed …
Regards,
w.
I would think that if France had been roughly as hot 🔥 they would have rolled out a/c big time years ago.
I am easily impressed by how society adapts. Obviously, France has gotten way hotter.
"Without a move away from fossil fuels, future heatwaves will keep testing the limits of public health systems and more people will die."
Decarbonization makes good sense, but not as a strategy to save lives in heat waves:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-cutting-emissions-cant-fix-europes
Thank you for this well researched piece.
Have you seen evidence that suggests the role of deforestation and land use as a major factor in global warming?
There is a silver lining. Per AI, the CO2 footprint of the average EU citizen is 9 tonnes per year. If 10,000 die this is a reduction of 90,000 tonnes per year CO2. Since global temperature is an almost linear single variable function of CO2 concentration we can determine this relationship: dT=2.04*10e-16*X where X is pounds CO2. The temperature increase avoidance due to the deaths is therefore 0.00000004 degrees C. per year.
While small it should be included as a negative feedback input to ensure we’re being as transparent as possible and not give deniers any fuel for dissension. And since we’re capable of determining the number of deaths attributed to any weather event we can also let the survivors know that those who died did not die in vain.
Heh. Looks like Lara made good her threat to report me for harrassment. She managed to get herself deleted too! A useful update for me. Otherwise, just as well for both of us, and the thread I guess.
Maybe I'll plan on reporting her next comment for silliness 8^D! Would that work with Willis, I wonder? Meh. Ima leave him to Prof. Dessler.
[Late edit: This is definitely a win for the thread. If all doomers or deniers would simply delete their own comments, I for one would feel no need to respond: mission accomplished 8^D! MA]
Super informative. I'm curious about the comparison to modeled 2070s weather though. On your chart it looks like one model (blue line) spits out a heatwave nearly as severe in the 2020s. There are also some that exceed today's conditions by around 2050. What is the basis for saying 2070s are the right comparison?