Just as you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry, you probably shouldn’t discuss climate policy during a heatwave…

Because the thing about this global warming thing is that it’s effects aren’t global. The Southern hemisphere, for instance, is having a pretty frigid time right now, with snow in South Africa (as Kathryn pointed out yesterday) and some real “brass monkeys” (as we’d say in the UK) in Argentina and New Zealand. And even in the US, a friend of a friend in Alaska on a fishing trip says it is so cold and stormy out there they can’t get out on the water.

As for the deaths, while heatwaves kill more than cold snaps, cold winters kill more people in aggregate than hot summers. As an example, even the UK Department of Health admits this:

By 2050 – assuming the UK enjoys increasingly warmer, if wetter, winters – they estimate that excess cold weather deaths will have dropped by as much as 20,000 a year, if nothing else changes. The increase in deaths related to the heat will be much less, between 800 and 2,800 a year.

Global warming is exhibited mostly in making winters and nights less cold, rather than in increasing summer daytime temperatures.