The doom and gloom, hell and high water howling seems to have hit a traffic obstacle in the form of a new paper in the UK that shows warmer weather saves lives. I really liked this part:
…they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.
From CO2 Science:
Lives Saved per Life Lost Due to Global Warming
Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change 102: 539-553.
Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.
What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.
What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.
What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.
For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.
Reference
Confalonieri, U., Menne, B., Akhtar, R., Ebi, K.L., Hauengue, M., Kovats, R.S., Revich, B. and Woodward, A. 2007. Human health. In: Parry, M.L. et al. (Eds.) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Lives Saved per Life Lost Due to Global Warming
Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change 102: 539-553. Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.
What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.
What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.
What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.
For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.
Reference
Confalonieri, U., Menne, B., Akhtar, R., Ebi, K.L., Hauengue, M., Kovats, R.S., Revich, B. and Woodward, A. 2007. Human health. In: Parry, M.L. et al. (Eds.) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Lives Saved per Life Lost Due to Global Warming
Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change 102: 539-553. Background
The authors write that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri et al. (2007) to that document.
What was done
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate this very-high-confidence contention of the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes from death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by daily estimates of population “obtained by fitting a fifth order polynomial to mid-year population estimates, to give mortality as deaths per million people,” after which they compared the death results with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection, which they describe as “a formal statistical methodology” that can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related changes in mortality they observed.
What was learned
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates, while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. More specifically, the three scientists report that if no adaptation had taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been 47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found there were only 0.7 death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4.
What it means
Clearly, the IPCC’s “very-high-confidence” conclusion is woefully wrong. Warming is highly beneficial to human health, even without any overt adaptation to it. And when adaptations are made, warming is incredibly beneficial in terms of lengthening human life span.
For more on this important topic, including results from all around the world, see the many items we have archived under the subheadings of Health Effects (Temperature) in our Subject Index.
Reference
Confalonieri, U., Menne, B., Akhtar, R., Ebi, K.L., Hauengue, M., Kovats, R.S., Revich, B. and Woodward, A. 2007. Human health. In: Parry, M.L. et al. (Eds.) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
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If you read the article (Tim Williams posted the link above) you will find statements such as:
“it would be easy to compare the recent decrease in cold-related mortality with the increase in temperature and make the seemingly logical assumption that fewer people have died because of milder winters. Our work, however, shows that this is not the case. We find that adaptation of the population to colder temperatures can explain much of the observed change.”
They do acknowledge that had adaptation to cold weather “remained unchanged, then the anthropogenic warming would have produced a detectable decrease in winter mortality.” However, the same ‘detectable’ conclusion with regards to a mortality increase due to warming is also made.
In the end, Anthony, your assertion that this article proves that “warmer weather saves lives,” although technically correct, is only a half-truth and is a manipulation of the article’s intended conclusion. On the other hand, CO2 Sciences’ ‘What it Means’ section is an incorrect exaggeration, as according to the article, “in the real world the effect of adaptation appears to be more important than the impact of the anthropogenic warming.”
Now I’m not trying to tell you that your assertions regarding the overall topic are wrong, merely that this article should not be used to support them.
CUT THEIR FUNDING PRONTO! If this gets out, why people will start flying to places like Hawaii,Greece, Italy, Spain, the Caribbean, maybe even the beaches at Cancun! We can’t have that! Think of the children, and drowning polar bears.
solarbud says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:00 pm
This study looked only at the UK. The IPCC looks at the whole world. You people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave
====================================================
google “Russian drought” “Russian famine”
and get back to us……………………
Then explain why droughts, famines, and heatwaves are considered common in
Russia, and why it has happened so many times, a lot worse, in the past.
Want to go to Cancun:
NASA says Earth’s lakes are warming
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101123/sc_afp/climatewarmingscienceusspace
Frank K. says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:58 pm
“If they are helping society in some way, I’d like to know how…”
I don’t know either, but it seems like they think they are helping the Earth, getting rid of us humans.
Interesting bit of doublethink. You’ll accept that the temperature is increasing if it means that the IPCC was wrong about something. Which means the temperature isn’t increasing because the IPCC is wrong. Please don’t think too hard about this because time will then start going backwards.
Well, this should be very bad news for the AGW skeptics as they are forecasting a rapid decent into the next glacial period.
As it is, this study is nonsense and has no relationship to the global impacts of warming. If AGW only affected the British Isles and was limited to a narrow timeframe, this study might have a tiny bit of merit, but the extrapolation to global effects of warming over a century or more is impossible, and thus this “study” is one more piece for the garbage can of skeptical prattle.
R. Gates says:
“Well, this should be very bad news for the AGW skeptics…”
That means it’s 25% very bad news for you, right?☺
solarbud says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:00 pm
You people obviously don’t care about the folk who died in the Russian heatwave or the Pakistani floods this year, or the crop failures in both those countries and Africa and a host of other places.
You do know the difference between weather and climate, right? Those type of weather events have always occurred. Historically, mankind has always fared far better during periods of warmer climate than colder ones. In fact, it’s just plain ordinary common sense we’d do better, but I guess that is a quality sadly lacking in Warmistas.
Visitor From Venus,
No, you just don’t understand. Temperature isn’t increasing because the IPCC is wrong. Of course they’re wrong, but that’s beside the point. Temperature is increasing because of U.S. postage.
I eagerly await the dead toll body count from the winter of 2011 in the northern hemisphere. I believe the 2010 body count of death by freezing in the southern hemisphere was in the hundreds or perhaps into the thousands.
You know this coming winter will be bad now that we are into the third year of the severe solar minimum.
That is certainly an excellent study, comparing mortality in the warm part of the year with mortality in the cool part. This simulates the effect of global warming but does not relate well to actual global temperature change. That is because the surface air temperature data in the period 1976 to 2005 which according to them was 0.47°C per decade during that three-decade period simply wasn’t. That means 1.4 degrees Celsius in three decades, more than the entire century.They are the victims of temperature fraud perpetrated on the public by pumping up that “late twentieth century warming” that simply does not exist. If you take the global temperature curve put out by NOAA you will notice that there was no warming at all in the seventies and the eighties. While NOAA has greatly distorted the eighties and nineties I believe their data for the seventies and eighties are correct because they had no particular reason to change it then. That means half of the time they think there was a warming there was none. That was a time when some people actually worried about a coming ice age and The New York Times as well as Time Magazine and Newsweek spoke of it. From satellite records you can further deduce that in the eighties and the nineties that followed, up to the super El Nino of 1998, there was likewise no warming. The only actual warming during the last thirty years that satellites have been watching it started with the super El Nino of 1998, raised global temperature by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. There hasn’t been any since and there was none before. The tail end of their time period just gets in on that last warming spurt. Hence, their conclusions about the effect of seasonal warming on death rates stand but nothing can be said about the effect of global warming on death rates. That is because their global temperatures were way off and they observed only a short spurt of warming mixed in with mostly stable temperatures which makes it impossible to calculate resulting environmental effects.
Tim Williams points out that the beneficial effects reported here should be balanced with the harmful effects caused by floods, droughts, hurricanes, etc. However, according to Pielke Jr. the case for increased hurricanes due to warming is non-existent. I do not know about the dreaded events, but excuse me if I am skeptical and would like to see actual evidence that something more than noise around baseline is actually occurring. I think Anthony and others have gone through that thought process before concluding that this paper suggests overall benefits. What is absurd is that climate scientists continue to list a litany of catastrophy such as increased hurricanes, when the evidence is at best inconclusive.
Global warming doesn’t kill us so that is a positive forcing. It means the warmer it gets the more of us there will be to create global warming. My gawd, Jones was right! The obvious government response should be to withhold Medicare coverage to keep the numbers in check.
BTW, I discovered a new tripping point today out in my snow covered driveway. We don’t normally get snow so soon in Seattle and some summer activity articles are now buried.
Felice La Niña, everyone!
What an appalling misrepresentation of a paper, and a cheerful extension of that misrepresentation to an utterly bogus conclusion.
This conclusion is crazy.
The mortality from anthropogenic climate change is not occurring in England and Wales, but in the Sahel and horn of Africa, and in South Asia. (see:Patz et al. (2005).
But even in the English and Welsh over 50s, this summary is the exact opposite of the findings of the paper:
For example, it would be easy to compare the recent decrease in cold-related mortality with the increase in temperature and make the seemingly logical assumption that fewer people have died because of milder winters. Our work, however, shows that this is not the case. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales, (Nikolaos Christidis et al, (2009))
CO2 science;
Four stars for spin.
One and a half stars for reading comprehension.
I got the link wrong to the Patz paper:
Vol 438|17 November 2005|doi:10.1038/nature04188
R. Gates says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:57 pm
As it is, this study is nonsense
=============================
Of course it is….
Gates, you’re so funny. Let the other side get some laughs too.
The warmistas have dominated the nonsense studies for too long.
dennis crockford says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Yeah, less than 1% of the world’s human population… how man MILLION is that? Compare that to, what, 14 proxies that apparently determine the temperature of the entire planet? Snark aside, again, I ask you to consider, a) most of the world’s population lives in the NH, b) most of the land mass is there, too, not surprisingly, c) and most of the effect of global warming is there, too, finally d) it doesn’t make sense to consider places that aren’t warming when looking at the drop in death rate due to… warming. That last one alone would take some severe ignorance to gloss over.
It is not logic-defying nor gargantuan. The IPCC did not consider this positive effect of global warming (this is one of many that are easy to uncover simply through the use of common sense.) Quite simply, cold-related deaths drop dramatically when the planet warms. “High confidence” would imply they considered all effects, not just those that support their opinion.
Mark
Smokey says:
November 23, 2010 at 4:06 pm
And pirates, arrgh!
Mark
I am curious to see how they ruled out possible third variables that could have interfered with this research study. There is a positive correlation between temperature and the death rate, yes, but how do they know for sure that it is the weather improving human health and not some other factor?
This whole warm = bad, cold = good is rather unproductive and simply a political diversion. I still say if you live in Canada warm = good and cold = normal. I would also suggest that if people have not and do not adapted to either situation; something humanity has been doing for thousands of years, perishing because of it, please do so before you have a chance to procreate and in the summer when the ground is not frozen.
Think of it this way: if we have AGW, it means we will have more intense sunlight to power our solar panels to run our air conditioners.
And yet . . .
I had an interesting experience this summer: the temperature in Temecula, CA got up to 111 degrees one day. Hottest day I’ve ever seen around here. I went inside an air-conditioned building for a doctor’s appointment around 2 pm. An hour later, I came out and the temperature had dropped 16 degrees. We had had a very rare summer thunderstorm that had cooled things off. I’m guessing there is a connection there.
Smokey, I like!
It’s a shame that scientists are just now getting around to ‘proving’ that warmer weather is better for people than colder weather because it very much looks like we’re going into the cooling phase of the cycle. Brrr.
Smokey says:
November 23, 2010 at 4:03 pm
R. Gates says:
“Well, this should be very bad news for the AGW skeptics…”
That means it’s 25% very bad news for you, right?☺
______
Now you got it Smokey, that would be IF this “study” had more than 0% validity, maybe…but since it has exactly 0% validity, then it actually represents 0% bad news (and 0% good news). Yet, even though I am only a 25% skeptic, I am not convinced that the next true glacial period is anywhere close by, (probably 20,000-30,000 years by Milankovitch cycles at the earliest).
mike sphar says:
November 23, 2010 at 3:35 pm
“CUT THEIR FUNDING PRONTO! If this gets out, why people will start flying to places like Hawaii,Greece, Italy, Spain, the Caribbean, maybe even the beaches at Cancun!”
Funny you should mention Cancun…Guess who’s partying down there right now?? Read this…
From Kenneth P. Green at the AEI:
“Cancan in Cancun”
…here’s how the Cancun cancan is likely to go:
1) The media will downplay expectations, and diplomats and environmentalists will bemoan how far behind the process is in producing an agreement.
2) There will be a week in which we’re told that diplomatic delegations are working “feverishly” on an agreement, but that the evil and greedy developed countries are still holding out on the massive wealth transfers that have always been the real goal of the process.
3) China and India will proclaim that the process is somehow intended to stifle their development, which they will not allow. (That’s partly true, the Kyoto agenda really is a de-development/anti-development agenda.)
4) Late in the process, it will be announced that negotiations are at a standstill and that the process may fail, dooming the Earth to a flaming death in a matter of decades.
5) At the last minute, the Charismatic Megafauna of the Show will swoop in and dramatically call everyone into a conference room for a marathon, no-breaks, closed-door negotiating session to resolve things. Usually, this is an American president or vice president.
6) At the last moment of the last day, at 4:00 a.m., the bleary-eyed participants will announce that they have reached a agreement on a broad range of goals (mostly aspirational), and that they have agreed to resolve outstanding issues at additional conferences to be held at top-notch resorts in exotic locales, so they can continue the endless rounds of globetrotting and fine dining at taxpayers’ expense (which most of them aspire to).
7) With little pomp and fanfare, they will all retreat to their luxurious fleet of GHG-belching private jets and exit, stage left.