JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Higher electricity costs mean more people turn off their heaters
There’s a big freeze coming to Britain with minus 12C temperatures possible in the next three weeks.
Last year in winter in England there was a remarkable 40% rise in winter deaths
David Archibald emails that last year was a mild winter for Brits, but the death toll rose from the normal 25,000 excess to 34,000 people. Remembering that it’s moderate cold that kills far more people than extreme temperatures. The UK government advises rooms be heated to at least 18C. (I’ve been in a Canberra house where the temperature fell to 11C indoors, and that was in May.) Despite all the newspaper headlines about outside temperatures, the big killer is indoors.
The big killer is indoor temperature and moderately cold, not extremes.
Campaigners demand urgent cuts to power bill after number of winter deaths among the elderly rise by 40%
Pensioner groups are demanding urgent measures to cut the cost of heat and light after official figures revealed a surge in deaths last winter. There were some 34,300 so-called ‘excess’ deaths during the cold months, according to new figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). [...]
How many people have died prematurely because they swapped their fats for carbohydrates?
More fat meant less death (left). More carbs (right) meant the opposite (at least above 60%). (Click to see the full table of Figure 1 results).
New research published in the Lancet shows that low fat diets could increase your risk of death.
Specifically, those who are in the top fifth of carbohydrate-eaters are also about 28% more likely to die than the fifth eating the lowest amount. This is a correlation (only), but the PURE* study was tracking the thing that matters most — all-cause mortality – and they followed the diets of 135,000 people in 18 countries for 5 – 9 years. Loosely, if people avoided high carbohydrate diets, they were less likely to die.
The graph flattens off below “60% carbs” (that’s a percentage of total calories). However, the mortality numbers keep improving for the highest fat intakes which rather skewers 40 years of headlines. I’m guessing that some people who kept carbs below 60% ate more protein instead, which, judging by the “fat” graph, wasn’t as useful.
The McMaster University team announced this quiet bomb, slightly obscured, in a press release [...]
These are Enercon wind turbines in Germany, Lower Saxony. Image: Philip May
This could be a watershed — if word gets out that turbine manufacturers will not even contest claims of noise damage, there could be many more claims around the world. There are rumors these cases are often settled out of court with confidentiality agreements, but who would know?
In an update to the Irish court case we discussed last month, the latest news confirms that the wind turbine manufacturer has admitted liability without contesting it. The court will be deciding damages in April. As I deduced at the time, the wind industry was using desperate wordsmithing to minimize attention on the story. The news item related to it even disappeared from the Irish Examiner. The turbine industry must be hoping no one notices this story.
Stop These Things has an update:
Wind company admits nuisance damage to neighbours Irish Farmers Journal Paul Mooney 5 January 2017
High Court to determine compensation for seven families in April hearing.
[...]
It’s another warmy story:
Worst year in NSW for Salmonella, E.Coli as global temperatures increase
NSW recorded its worst figures in at least five years for diseases caused by food poisoning and mosquito bites, as doctors warn climate change is looming as a public health emergency.
Statistics released last week show 2016 was the worst year on record for diseases including legionnaires’ disease, salmonellosis, listeriosis, E. coli and dengue fever, which flourish in warmer conditions.
–Harriet Alexander, Sydney Morning Herald
More scary than 4000 cases of salmonella is the state of intellectual rigor among medico-unions:
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians [RACP] has released a position paper that described climate change as a “global public health emergency”.
The RACP called for a national climate and health strategy and reduced emissions of greenhouse gases.
With reasoning like that, they could make a lot more people very sick. Are they advocating we use solar panels to stop salmonella?
There has hardly been any warming in the last 20 years anyhow. And if we are doing cosmic epidemiology, so far global warming seems to come with longer lifespans, health, wealth, food, [...]
Humans can adapt to live in locations where the monthly average is over 40°C, and as low as -50°C. That’s a 90°C range. The world has warmed by 0.9°C in 100 years (or less, depending on adjustments). This warming was so dangerous that global population only expanded from 1.7 to 7 billion.
Now, if the IPCC are right, we might heat up by another half a degree by 2100 — shifting those extremes from -49°C up to 41°C.
Prof. Andy Pitman, one of Australia’s leading climate scientists, responds to this risk with all the usual careful analysis we’ve come to expect from mainstream climate experts. Here’s another “children won’t know what snow is” type of Global Panic quote:
“I expect by 2050 … people just don’t go outside,”
– Professor Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at UNSW.
So that’s the end of golf, surfing, and picnics then. Somewhat confusingly, he also said (in the same interview) that we won’t necessarily notice that extra warmth: “… because humans acclimatise to heat quite quickly”. This is what 95% certainty looks like in 2015, ladies and gentlemen — abject panic and [...]
We have found the holy grail and it is chocolate. Lo, “Eating 100 g of chocolate daily linked to lowered heart disease and stroke risk”. One hundred grams a day! That’s about a quarter of the average adult woman’s total daily calorie intake. (About one sixth for a man).
So much for the 99% certain consensus that chocolate was junk food.
ScienceDaily:
Eating up to 100 g of chocolate every day is linked to lowered heart disease and stroke risk. The calculations showed that compared with those who ate no chocolate higher intake was linked to an 11% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 25% lower risk of associated death.
They base their findings on almost 21,000 adults taking part in the EPIC-Norfolk study…
Around one in five (20%) participants said they did not eat any chocolate, but among the others, daily consumption averaged 7 g, with some eating up to 100 g.
Chocolate was associated with younger age… (we want some of that, right?)
Higher levels of consumption were associated with younger age and lower weight (BMI), waist: hip ratio, systolic blood pressure, inflammatory proteins, diabetes and more regular [...]
A new study uses a ‘high resolution air temperature estimation model’ to figure out (guess) the daily air temperature pregnant women in Massachusetts might have been exposed to during their pregnancy. A whopping increase of 8.5C in the last three months was associated with a 17 gram drop in birth weight. Given that global temperatures have risen by about 1 C in the last 100 years, at the current rate, that amount of warming will arrive in 850 years. Then if this correlation has any causal role, the average 3kg baby will weigh about 0.5% less. Scared yet?
Since the researchers are talking about outdoor temperatures, I’m guessing this study will especially concern pregnant women who will be homeless, or without electricity in the year 2850. Obviously the solution is cheap coal powered air conditioners
. Why risk it?*
The Daily Mail h/t Colin
Is climate change affecting birth weights? Exposure to warmer weather during pregnancy leads to smaller babies, study claims Researchers uncovered a link between air temperature and birth weight Found exposure to high air temperature during pregnancy increases the risk of lower birth weight and can cause premature birth An increase of 8.5 °C (47.3°F) in the last [...]
Consensus — slowing real science for decades
There is a surprising amount of interest in the cholesterol story of Matt Ridley’s in The Times and The Australian last week. Surprising to me anyway, because 15 years ago the other benevolent side of cholesterol was pretty clear online. Fifteen years is not a long time in human civilization, but it’s a long time in a human life. And in the case of the war on cholesterol, it’s been running for 40 years. How many people died sooner than they would have, because they followed expert advice?
Finally the official consensus on cholesterol is admitting defeat:
“Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of “nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat, given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease”. “
In the late 1990′s it was widely known online (among health zealots) that our livers are mostly in charge of our cholesterol levels, not what’s on our dinner plates. Something like 80% of the cholesterol in our blood came from our own livers, not the food we eat. Way back then, it was also known [...]
Of seventy four million deaths (that is quite some study) 7.7% of all deaths could be blamed on “non-optimal” temperatures according to Gasparrini et al in the Lancet. But look closely, and 7.3% of deaths were due to the cold and only 0.4% were due to the heat.
This may be part of the reason people retire to Florida, and not so much to Barrow, Alaska.
The biggest killers were not the heat waves that score the headlines, but the moderate cold. Winter kills. (Time to ban winter?)
Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather
Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.
“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from [...]
Researchers were sure fatter people would get more dementia, so they studied two million middle-aged people for nearly a decade but were “baffled to find the exact opposite. Their sample included 45,000 cases of dementia and the obese were 30 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with it.
This contradicts previous studies and was not at all what the researchers expected, so they analyzed the data every which way they could think of but can’t explain the results. Need I say “experts” and “consensuses”?
Scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said they were baffled by the results as previous studies have shown that being overweight raises the risk. –Telegraph
Risk factors such as alcohol and smoking made little difference to the results, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. — Mirror
Dr Qizilbash said the findings held despite attempts to adjust for other causes of dementia and the tendency of obese people to die earlier. “We did a lot of analysis to see if we could explain it but just seems to persist. We couldn’t get rid of it so we’re left with this apparent protective effect,” he said. [...]
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