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By Jo Nova
What do you do when not enough people die to suit your religion? Distort the axis and hope no one notices.
Welcome to government-science, where one of top journals in the world uses graphic design tricks for political convenience. In this graph from the paper, 10 excess deaths from the heat looks “bigger” than 50 excess deaths from cold. Isn’t the whole point of a graph so we can compare the bars “at a glance”?
Björn Lomborg corrected this with chart on right. Doesn’t that tell a different story?
Thanks to Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow:
The journal “Lancet” published the chart on left with unequal X-Axis* to downplay fact that cold causes 10X more deaths than heat in Europe. …This is disgraceful for a supposedly scientific journal.
Click to enlarge
Björn Lomborg‘s version shows us exactly how important heat deaths are. It’s no small thing. The news outlets are filled with heatwave porn trying to scare people about normal weather, while politicians try to justify spending billions to “cool” the world. These graphs hide the crime — increasing the cost of energy will kill far more than mythical cooling could ever save.
[…]
By Jo Nova
Across 30 countries heatwaves kill 20,000 people in European cities every year (and cold kills 200,000 but nevermind.)
The new paper by Pierre Masselot et al, is another round of medical investigation showing cold is somewhere between six and twenty times as deadly as heat is. Other studies looked at various countries, or specific regions. This study looked at cities across the whole of Europe. It was pretty big, covering 854 cities of 50,000 or more, and about 40% of the European population.
They picked cities because they are “particularly affected by environmental stressors and potential impacts of climate change”. So they’re admitting they looked at the worst possible living conditions for heat deaths. Obviously cities will be hotter than farms and ski resorts — so if heat deaths were a problem, this study would show it, except it didn’t.
The Lancet
Nobody mention coal, oil or gas…
Mysteriously Northern people in frigid climates were strangely “adaptable” to the cold compared to people in Eastern Europe. What could it be that helps people in Scandinavia deal with the cold so much better than people in Bulgaria?
Northern countries showed the lowest risks […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper estimates that if we increased our tree canopy in cities to 30% we could cool our cities by nearly half a degree. Works better than a windmill…
Photo by Maria Orlova
The trillion dollar global warming camp obsesses over 1.5°C of heat, but the urban heat island has already made our cities 1.5°C hotter than the countryside around them, and nobody gives a toss. Cities are where the lived human experience is for most of us, and despite the threat of that extreme heat made “worse by climate change”, no government does the obvious and sets a tree cover target. There are no Ministers of Regreening, and no carbon credits for suburbia. All we’re getting is concrete bollards and fifteen-minute-cities of pain.
In the green revolution instead of growing gum trees, people are cutting them down because they shade their solar panels. In our capital city they razed a majestic avenue of trees in order to add light rail. A true Green hates cars more than they like trees.
Urban flora not only cleans the air, it also reduces suicides, improves cardiac health, and reduces particulate pollution. One Canadian study estimated that […]
By Jo Nova
To stop heart attacks, we need more CO2
A study on 32 million heart deaths in 27 countries shows extreme cold killed four to six times as many people as extreme heat. Since climate change makes our hottest days hotter and warms our winter nights, this will mean less heart failure in the future.
For every extra summer death due to heart failure, six lives will be saved in winter thanks to people who burn oil. Obviously it’s time to subsidize coal plants to save medical costs. Every dollar spent warming the world is an investment against heart failure. You know the drill.
Naturally in science communication, headlines and truth are 180 degrees apart.
Climate change could worsen heart deaths linked to extreme temperatures
By Cara Murez, HealthDay News
A new multinational analysis of 32 million heart-related deaths over the past 40 years found more occurred on days with severe temperatures, an issue that climate change could make even worse.
The investigators compared heart-related deaths on the hottest and the coldest 2.5% of days in 567 cities with those on days when temperatures were optimal.
For […]
by Jo Nova
And you thought I was being satirical, but no, it’s just today’s installment of two-star climate porn from The Guardian.
What the journalist didn’t mention was that one degree of warming will save 166,000 lives a year, but maybe kill one more person per annum from amebic meningoencephalitis.
Let’s spend a trillion dollars:
How the climate crisis is fueling the spread of a brain-eating amoeba
Naegleria fowleri grows in warm fresh water, making it well-suited to proliferate as temperatures rise in the US
Katherine Gammon, The Guardian
Naegleria grows best in warm waters – temperatures above 30C, and can tolerate temperatures of up to 46C, says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. That makes it well-suited to spread in a warming climate.
“It likes warm surface waters during the summer in the northern latitudes,” he says.
The amoeba causes an illness called primary amebic meningoencephalitis, and while getting sick is rare – between 2012 to 2021, only 31 cases were reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control – it’s incredibly lethal. According to the CDC, only four […]
Even the Australian ABC was telling Australians with a straight face that the extreme heat in the UK was so dangerously bad that healthy young people might die in the heat. For most Australians, it’s not summer if it doesn’t hit 40. And for people with a sauna, it’s not fun if it’s not 60 degrees. People enjoy an hour at 60C all the time without dying. We are mammals, we just need to drink. (And make sure we never forget the kids in the car).
Toby Young at the Daily Sceptic found the perfect study released last week reminding us of how deadly UK heatwaves are:
There are Eighty Times More Excess Deaths Associated With Cold Each Year than Heat
According to a recent study in the Lancet Planetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The eighty fold difference shows how serious a UK winter is, and […]
In a surprise, mammals with a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius do better in warmer weather
Who knew that global warming has saved 166,000 lives a year every year since 2000? Burn coal, save the world! Some countries are just not doing enough to help. Does your nation have a Net-100 Plan for 2050 to double CO2 emissions? It’s never too late to start. Countries that leave coal deposits undeveloped are not part of the solution.
Click to enlarge
Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think
Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal
… climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.
Headlines predictably said “Heat Deaths Up 50%” since the year 2000. But Lomborg points out that most all […]
This might be one of the most incompetent studies of 2o21
Hanigan, Dear and Woodward have done a “unique”, first of, *groundbreaking study* that finally shows climate change is having a detrimental effect on our health (so they say). With great effort to ignore almost every variable that mattered, they found the seasonal ratio of deaths in Australia has changed:
”More people die in winter than summer, but climate change may see this reverse
In our study published today, we show some of the first evidence climate change has had observable impacts on Australians’ health between 1968 and 2018.
We found long-term heating is associated with changed seasonal balance of deaths in Australia, with relatively more deaths in summer months and relatively fewer deaths in winter months over recent decades.
Our findings can be explained by the gradual global warming associated with climate change. Over the 51 years of our study, annual average temperatures increased by more than 1°C in Australia. The last decade (2011 to 2020) was the hottest in the country’s recorded history.
The other interpretation is that it got warmer and deaths in winter declined more than deaths in […]
Doctors are at it again trying to scare people about “climate change”. But all around the world, in every study in every city humans die more from the cold than they do from the heat (and by six to 20 times more). That’s thousands of lives and it happens every single year. Don’t these doctors know anything?
Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability [TV] (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%). Cheng et al.
The awful truth that incompetent self-serving doctors forgot to mention was that cooler room temperatures allow viruses to survive longer, which is just one of many reasons the Flu Season is always worse in winter.
Break my heart, if “climate change” is real the only thing the docs have to worry about is whether they’ll earn less money in winter.
Here’s the headline:
Health system needs to be protected from climate change: doctors
Here’s the real news: The health system needs to be protected from climate-change-doctors. We can’t afford […]
Australia has had the hottest temperatures for a thousand years (according to some). We’ve “shattered records” yet even so, at the peak of this hot era — six times as many Australians were felled by cold weather. Lord help us when the next ice-age comes.
A study on Australian deaths from 2000-2009 found that heat, cold, and temperature variability killed 42,000 people which was about 6% of all deaths. Of those temperature related deaths 60% were due to the cold. 28% were due to sudden changes in temperature. A mere 10% were due to heat.
Greenhouse gases should help prevent 90% of those deaths (they reduce temperature variability too). Looks like we need to burn more coal. For the sake of the vulnerable and needy.
When are our government and our government broadcaster going to start dealing with real problems, not fake ones?
Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%).
Don’t assume we just got lucky. […]
Over the last century there was a remarkable decline in deaths due to hot days and heatwaves. (Not that the media seem keen to say so). Mortality on a hot day declined by fully 75% in the decades after 1960 when air conditioners started to be rolled out.
In the words of the authors from this 2016 study, the people of the US have largely adapted in ways that protect them from extreme heat. The kind of hot days they are talking about happen on average 20 days a year in the US.
There has not been a similar reduction in deaths from cold snaps.
First, we document a remarkable decline in the mortality effect of temperature extremes: The impact of days with a mean temperature exceeding 80°F (26.6C) has declined by about 75 percent over the course of the twentieth century in the United States, with almost the entire decline occurring after 1960. The result is that there are about 20,000 fewer fatalities annually than if the pre-1960 impacts of mortality still prevailed.
We achieved a lot of things in the 20th century, but when Barreca went through the statistics, it wasn’t the introduction of electricity that […]
Cheap energy might save more lives than expensive “climate-changey” energy?
Researchers looked at 47 major cities in Spain, from 1980 to 2015 and checked 554,491 deaths. Even though temperatures have risen, less people are dying of heat in Spain. Apparently human ingenuity, energy and air conditioners were more than able to keep up with climate change. The population is older but less vulnerable to heat now than it was forty years ago.
Air conditioners rose from 5% of the population to 35% during the study period.
Oh the dilemma — to save lives, should we build more windmills to try to change the global climate or aim to get 100% of households access to an air conditioner?
Welcome to the dire threat of climate change:
The relative risk of death fell as temperatures rose (According to the model used). See the caption below.
From the Discussion in the paper:
The temporal evolution of heat-related mortality risks here found is, in general, consistent with those reported by previous studies in some other countries [12–15], which provide evidence for a decrease in vulnerability to climate warming despite the ageing of societies. For example, in Spain, the proportion of people […]
The world has record high CO2 levels, which supposedly warms us in winter but apparently not as well as cheap electricity does. As the long winter is set to drag on, Brits are being advised to heat one room as well as they can and live there. This is “progress”…
48,000 Brits dead after worst winter in 42 years
After a brief mild spell, temperatures are set to dip again in April after the chilliest March in 21 years.
It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December 1 and March
That includes nearly 5,000 Brits under the age of 65 whose lives may have been cut short.
According to the Office of National Statistics, one in 10 cold weather deaths are among under-65s, one in 10 among 65-75s and eight in 10 among over-75s.
The Department of Health also said cold conditions worsen winter killers including flu, chest diseases, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
It doesn’t matter where you live — more people die in winter than summer all over the world. It’s not outdoor temperatures that matter — it’s the indoor climate that kills.
Save the world, […]
Some are scoffing at the idea that rising heating costs will kill people. But check out the number-one temperature-killer in 74 million deaths across 13 countries. It’s not the extremes that we need to worry about, the deadly phrase is “mildly suboptimal temperatures”. Look at the blue finger of death in the graph below, starkly showing how irrelevant “extreme heat”, or any other ambient temperature zone, is.
Do you need an excuse to turn the heater on in winter? Low ambient room temperatures will thicken your blood.
Moderate cold accounted for as many as 6.6% of all deaths. Extreme temperatures (either cold or hot) were responsible for only 0·86%.
Join the dots — will we save more lives by:
a) making homes cold now in the hope that lower “carbon” emissions will,
b) mean less deaths from heat in 90 years time despite people probably having better access to heaters and air conditioners?
Would you sacrifice ten years of your life…
Note the big killer “moderate cold” | Click to enlarge
Cold is more likely to kill you in Sydney than in Sweden
Check out the curves below. As a percentage of the population, there […]
“Half a million deaths by 2050!”
The Lancet study in a nutshell: Take climate models that don’t work, and guesstimate what might happen to agriculture because of the climate we probably won’t get. Then use those guesses of food production in 2050 to fantasize what that means for human mortality. After all, we don’t know how many people are killed today by “4% less fruit and vege and 0.7% less meat”, but we can estimate what that dietary change will do in 2050 after a medical revolution, 35 years of plant breeding and agricultural changes. Not to mention a few more rounds of global food fads and phases of Vegan, Paleo, Atkins, and 5:2 Fasting. (But how did they factor in the mortality effect from another 2,000 episodes of MasterChef?)
Seriously, CO2 has increased crop yields, and will continue to do so until we hit 1000ppm (or maybe 2000). Around the planet, plants grow in warm places, and shrivel up and die in cold ones. So do people. Cold kills 20 times as many people as heat does. It must take a lot of modeling to calculate “more deaths” from two good outcomes.
Look at where fruit grows. […]
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 […]
Here’s a tale of how to generate headlines from circular reasoning built on brave assumptions. All it requires are some unskeptical science journal editors and gullible journalists. Et Voila!
Congratulations to Chip Knappenberger, Pat Michaels, and Anthony Watts, whose response to Åström et al was published Wednesday.
In October 2013 Åström et al claimed that global warming had killed lots of people in Stockholm, hundreds. But the first thing you need to know is that they don’t appear to start with actual mortality data in the early 1900’s. Surprised? Me too. Anthony Watts found it hard to believe . The other thing worth knowing is that extreme heat was defined as the top 2% of hot days, and in Stockholm that mean everything above a terrifying 2-day-moving-average mean temperature of 19.6C (67 F).
From the methods:
We collected daily mortality during the period 1980-2009 and daily temperature data for the period 1900-2009 for Stockholm County, Sweden.
Åström 2013: Figure 2 j Temperature distribution of 2-day moving average of mean temperatures during summer months. Grey distribution, 1900–1929; black distribution, 1980–2009.
It appears the authors compared calculated death rates (using a model) from 1900-1929 with rates from 1980-2009 and concluded that […]
Excess winter deaths are more than triple the number killed on the road.
Indur Goklany compares average daily deaths for each month in Australia and New Zealand and shows that in both countries (like in much of the rest of the world) there are more deaths in the cooler months.
While climate change legislation aims to make the world cooler, statistics show that the cooler months consistently have higher mortality.
In the unlikely event that legislation might succeed in reducing global temperatures, based on past statistical records, thousands of extra people may die as a result. In study after study, it’s clear that more people die in the colder months than in the rest of the year. The trend applies even in warm countries like Australia.
Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period.
The statistics indicate that:
For the 10-year period, 1998-2007, Australia had excess winter deaths of 6,779 per yr out of a total of 131,613 deaths per yr (avg.) This works out to 5.2% of all deaths per yr (on avg). For the 10-yr period, 1999-2008, NZ […]
Tomb of Hong Quan Fu. Photo Iflwlou拍攝
It seems a warmer climate might be bad, but a colder one is deadly.
Once upon a time, people thought that overpopulation triggered crashes, but in this study by Lee and Zhang the hard numbers suggest instead that it was climate, and of course, it’s not the warmer kind of climate that causes the problems but the colder kind.
Malthusian cycles of population boom and bust aren’t the drivers here (though presumably having a large population means there is little buffer when the deadly cold spells hit).
From NIPCC: Cold Periods caused population crashes in China over the last millenium
…there were 5 major population contractions in China between 1000 CE and 1911, and all of them occurred in periods with a cold climate, when mortality crises triggered population collapses. [Abstract]
How much fun can you have in a long frost? Almost every kind of uprising, pain or plague.
In one population crash, the losses were as high as 49% of the peak. In the face of a 50:50 death rate, “perspective” doesn’t seem like quite the right word.
10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]
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