OT snow

That's global warming/ozone hole/petroleum crisis/trans-fat for you.

No snow here but October has been colder than lately (snow in October was not that rare when I was a kid IIRC). Perhaps the reduced flights because of the pandemic have contributed to that... :-) (just having a laugh about all the talk there is about climate, I know nothing about it). I hate the winter, it can be very harsh here (last time it was harsh, like -15C for weeks and weeks, snow above the knees, -20C at times, was 2016/2017). When the apples on the apple tree started to get reddish in August we both thought of one thing - that "winter is coming"...

Cold is estimated to kill 10x as many people as heat.

We are having a "bomb cyclone" here, which I guess is a recent invention like "polar vortex."

"Bomb cyclone" seems to be a variety of "atmospheric river", what used to be called a storm.

-20 sounds nasty. I won't ski below about -5 c.

-20 is nasty indeed. Below -5C is nasty in my book too - but I won't ski at all. Used to as a teenager; once in my early 20-s a friend talked me into doing it. We were on a cable seat 20 meters above ground when the electricity stopped and we hung there at what was well below -5C, all the winds had come for a meeting etc., this for half an hour. Ever since if I am asked do I ski my answer is "I already did"... I can't even watch winter sports, that's how much I hate the winter.

Better than 2 days in the great Squaw Valley gondola fiasco.

Pity you had a bad experience. I grew up in the bug-infested flat muddy tropics and fell in love with mountains and snow first encounter.

Skiing is absorbing all day. If I do something passive like laying on a beach, I'll think about work. And the motion is like being a bird, or like dirt biking without a noisy smelly engine between your knees.

Between crashes.

Of course, if the weather is really nasty we can drive home to the coast in a few hours. We don't have to live in the snow.

Ouch, two days makes it worse I guess. At least not freezing...

I am not sure the event put me off, I just did not like it that much. And I dislike going into the mountains - it is uphill and the view changes too slowly, being impatient I start walking too fast and lose my breath etc. What I did like was birding with a camera for an hour or two. I do cycling last 3+ years, a few hours of intensive cycling (being impatient I can't just ride slowly) per week keeps me in some reasonable shape.

Cycling crashes happen, too :). I got "run over" by a car last summer. (The idiot did not run me over but was close, I was riding full speed on a main road and he came out of a side street looking through me for other cars so we collided. No real damage was done though). I keep on telling myself to get a helmet, may be a will one day (I even tried - got one at the beginning on ebay or was it aliexpress, came sized for a two year old :D. Still must have it somewhere).

Being able to retreat makes it much better I guess. Our retreat was the cottage we lived in, some years ago in a snowy winter we tried to make snowmen on the terrace. Lucy's was remarkably good in no time, I put plenty of effort (much more than she did) and had what could be a snow penguin at best...

Heh. One full year at 56 N in Labrador & another winter in North Dakota cured me of any snow fantasies forever!

Oh. Wrong place.

That looks ok. The cynical saying in Labrador was something like: "behind every tree there is a lovely young Eskimo maiden waiting to meet you...now get out there and find a tree".

Huh? Who did that estimate? Hot and cold extremes both require adaptation (some behavior, some equipment, some backup procedures) but that doesn't make them unequally dangerous. Death Valley didn't get its name from being benign, nor cool.

We're starting to see life evolving to high-temperature forms, at least the survivors are evolved from the forms of decades past

as well as obvious migration changes, as in birds, which would (in a human population) lead to deaths in small boats in the Mediterranean...

It's completely unclear what deaths are heat-related.

Huh yourself. Google it.

The Lancet study says 20:1.

Of course, cold deaths are worse in poor countries where people have little shelter or fuel and and starvation is a real threat.

And, that article says it's controversial, as it should be. Crop failures and starvation, for instance, don't count as 'heat related death' on medical reports, but crops are pretty much armored in seed husks during cold weather, or buried as roots, only become vulnerable in warmth.

Starvation being a crop-failure indication, it's heat-related. See above... Poor countries aren't short of shelter (a sod-roofed hut isn't cash-hungry), mainly that's a survival problem for herder/nomad peoples and subjugated minorities.

I bet you would be perfectly happy in a dark dirt-floor sod-roof uninsulated hut at zero degrees F, with nothing to burn or eat.

You might lose that bet. Sod-roof hut with internet access is the only possible way you'd win, silly.