Heatwave deaths in Europe >= Gun deaths in the US?

3 RestlessMind 3 8/19/2025, 2:48:18 AM
"Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023" per https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/

"Europe counted 47,690 excess deaths due to heat in 2023, estimated a new study in Nature Medicine." - https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/observatory/news-archive-observatory/heat-caused-over-47-000-deaths-in-europe-in-2023

Comments (3)

toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Previous time this argument was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630872
RestlessMind · 2h ago
Why doesn't Europe embrace AC, which is widely adopted in the US? After all, there were "only" 1714 deaths in the US in 2022 due to heat related causes per https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-die-from-extre...
phillipseamore · 27m ago
A more recent source. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/climate/heat-deaths.html (https://archive.ph/xTsNO)

"While 2023 was the hottest year on record and led to at least 2,325 heat-related deaths in the U.S., more than 21,518 people have died from heat since 1999, according to a study published Monday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association."

"Heat kills more people in the United States than any other type of extreme weather, according to researchers. The study noted a 117 percent increase in heat-related deaths over the past 24 years, with a significant upswing since 2016."

"But heat-related deaths are hard to track. The C.D.C. relies on death certificates from local authorities but there is no consistent criteria to determine the contribution of heat to a death. The tally of deaths from extreme heat could actually be higher, with an average annual number of 10,000 deaths across the United States from 1997 to 2006, according to a 2020 study."