From Johns Hopkins/Bloomberg School of Health, where they apparently haven’t looked at this data before writing a worrying scare story. The simple fact is, record high temperatures are simply not on the increase.
Climate Change Analysis Predicts Increased Fatalities from Heat Waves
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Global climate change is anticipated to bring more extreme weather phenomena such as heat waves that could impact human health in the coming decades. An analysis led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health calculated that the city of Chicago could experience between 166 and 2,217 excess deaths per year attributable to heat waves using three different climate change scenarios for the final decades of the 21st century. The study was published May 1 edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
“Our study looks to quantify the impact of increased heat waves on human mortality. For major a U.S. city like Chicago, the impact will likely be profound and potentially devastating,” said Roger Peng, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We would expect the impact to be less severe with mitigation efforts including lowering CO2 emissions.”
For the analysis, Peng and his colleagues developed three climate change scenarios for 2081 to 2100. The scenarios were based on estimates from seven global climate change models and from mortality and air pollution data for the city of Chicago from 1987 to 2005. The data were limited to the warm season from May to October of each year.
From 1987 to 2005, Chicago experienced 14 heat waves lasting an average of 9.2 days, which resulted in an estimated 53 excess deaths per year. In the future, the researchers calculated that excess mortality attributable to heat waves to range from 166 to 2,217 per year. According to the researchers, the projections of excess deaths could not be explained by projected increases in city population alone. The exact change due to global warming in annual mortality projections, however, is sensitive to the choice of climate model used in analysis.
“It’s very difficult to make predictions, but given what we know now—absent any form of adaptation or mitigation—our study shows that climate change will exacerbate the health impact of heat waves across a range of plausible future scenarios,” added Peng.
Authors of “Towards a Quantitative Estimate of Future Heat Wave Mortality Under Global Climate Change” include Jennifer F. Bobb of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Claudia Tebaldi of the University of British Columbia, Larry McDaniel of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Michelle L. Bell of Yale University and Francesca Dominici of Harvard School of Public Health.
The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Environmental Protection Agency.
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Ken Harvey said:
“Teach those 2200 people in Chicago to take some salt, plenty, when it gets really uncomfortably hot and not one of them will get heat stroke. Ask any army veteran who ever served in a really hot theatre. Sadly I am really not allowed to tell them that as the current dictum is that salt is really bad for you. Nutrition science is not too different to climate science”.
I think Ken is right, in fact I think climate scientists, nutritionists AND Public Health “educators” are all the same people. We used to call them “busybodies”. I think they morph into each other
I wake up in the night in hot weather with terrible leg cramps, if I put more salt on my food I don’t get cramps. If it is hot, I perspire and lose the excess salt anyway. In UK we have a government that tells us not to eat too much salt, sugar, fast food, to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, not to smoke, to drink no more than 14 “units” of alcohol a week if you are a woman – 21 if you are a man, take exercise, avoid unprotected sex, stick to speed limits etc etc etc.
If I do all of this I will live to be 100.
If I have do all of this, why on earth would I want to live to be 100?
The cramps alone would have me phoning the assisted suicide line; Oh I forgot that isn’t allowed either.
you mean more people than live today will die in the next 89 years? OMG! Global Age Disruption batman! 😉
If they’re predicting greater fatalities from heat waves they’re still correct but not because of climate change. They’re correct because the world is getting older on-average. Older people who are usually in worse physical condition than younger people have a harder time dealing with heat. They’re correct because we’re just now experiencing the final bubble of retirement of the worlds first baby boom.
Climaet models are the gift that keeps on giving. They provide the path to rich grants to ‘study’ just about every whacko effect that could be linked to a warmer earth. Never mind that it is not happening and won’t happen.
Yet again we have these computerised “excess mortality” prognostications trotted out. This time for those who will die between 2081 and 2100.
Do they honestly expect anyone to take this seriously? How many predictions (whether based on computers, goat entrails, tea leaves or crystal balls) for something to happen in 70 – 90 years time have turned out to have any predictive skill whatever?
They did, however, manage to get it published in what purports to be a serious journal.
Amazing.
But I sometimes wonder if anyone could be bothered to tot up all the shroudwaving prognoses together, what might be the result?
So we would have those who would meet their doom from global warming warming, global warming cooling, global warming sea level rise, global warming malaria, global warming water shortages, global warming photochemical smog, global warming storms, global warming crazed bunny rabbits and all the rest all added together.
Then add in all those who ‘may’ be struck down by breathing PM10s, those who die of allegies caused by ‘air pollution’, those killed by eating fish / meat / vegetables that have excess nitrates / phosphates / pesticides / hormones etc etc. Those who are not strictly vegan. Those subjected to ‘passive smoking’. Those who eat salmonella eggs or BSE cattle or Listeria cheese. Those developing cancer from too much UV. Those who don’t get enough sunlight. The obese.
I could go on. And on. And on. And on.
Not to mention those who get so depressed by the constant doom laden predictions that they top themselves.
My hunch is, that were you to add up all these vast predicted batallions of the doomed, you would find no one left at all.
Not a soul.
It’s beating a dead horse, but back in the day, when the king wanted to hear a happy minstrel song, the minstrel wrote such a song. When the king wanted to have a royal painting, the royal painter painted him one. When the king needed a wench, the royal w*monger procured one. Now the king wants to hear songs, see paintings, and know that his subjects are sc*wed, the royal climatologists are right at work.
Ryan Maue says:
May 3, 2011 at 11:20 am
Two guesses for winter record highs, and one for July. Someone should try and figure this out…
High anomalies or high temperatures. Anomalies, winter. Tempreatures, summer.
Of course it has nothing to do with obese unfit people not being able to cope with weather extremes.
No nothing as simple as that.
I wonder if they have charted people’s increasing weight against increasing mortality rates in the summer?
Douglas DC says:
May 3, 2011 at 9:51 am
“We are about 2-4 weeks behind in our spring here in NE Oregon, and when it gets above 50F shorts and T-shirts come out. I cannot believe this hysteria…”
A quick look at classic.wunderground.com reveals that the midwest has been well below normal all Spring. Today, St. Louis is running in the sixties when it normally is in the eighties.
Conversely, in western europe, we are 6 weeks ahead with our main crop potatos, I’m eating strawberries and have been for more than a week, cherries on heavily laden trees and swimming pool is just over 21°c unheated and outside with no dome covering. Global warming is great.
Please can someone tell me how we can model anything beginning 70 years ahead? We have no idea of the technological advances that might have been made by then, or other changes that might have occurred. By then computer programs, for example, might have advanced sufficiently to capture all the capriciousness of Nature and show these results to be deficient (very likely).
Just what is the point of such studies?
Taphonomic says:
May 3, 2011 at 10:15 am
But then as the study states: “No universally accepted definition of a heat wave is currently available”
In the UK the recognised definition of a heat wave is three hot days followed by a thunder-storm
PhilJourdan says:
May 3, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Dave Wendt says:
May 3, 2011 at 11:43 am
9-10 billion or more people will die by 2100.
you mean more people than live today will die in the next 89 years? OMG! Global Age Disruption batman! 😉
I deliberately chose a fairly conservative number, because I didn’t attempt even a back of the envelope calculation. I suspect even a rudimentary analysis would yield a much larger projection for total mortality over the next 90 years, even if present trends of improving life expectancy continue and accelerate.
In the entire history of medical science, there has been only one disease discovered which is absolutely 100% fatal. Everyone who gets it dies from it eventually.
It’s called Life.
Jeremy says:
May 3, 2011 at 1:28 pm
If they’re predicting greater fatalities from heat waves they’re still correct but not because of climate change. They’re correct because the world is getting older on-average. Older people who are usually in worse physical condition than younger people have a harder time dealing with heat. They’re correct because we’re just now experiencing the final bubble of retirement of the worlds first baby boom
————————————————————————————–
The problem with older people is that they don’t feel thirsty. You have to force them to drink water. This means that the big problem is older people living alone.
On warm days mineral water and soup (salt) and someone to help them.
“Objectives: We estimated the future excess mortality attributable to heat waves under global climate change for a major U.S. city.”
A thousand pardons, O’ Most Empathetic and Credible of the Public’s own
grant seekingHealthcare Scientists, but perhaps you could also find – somewhere within the vastness of your incomparable, scientifically based concern for the wellbeing of Humanity – the extra incentive needed to estimate the excess mortality attributable to your own envisioned conversion of more “major” U.S. cities into what are now only Democrat Inner City Ghettos, but would allegedly soon becomeCommunism’sSustainability’sLivingrotting Icons, should your mitigation “cure” be enacted, as you suggest below?“Conclusions: The impact of future heat waves on human health will likely be profound, and significant gains can be expected by lowering future carbon dioxide emissions.”
“Profound, and significant gains”, indeed, especially as [not] compared to mere “adaptation“, whose complete absence over ~90 yrs. was rightly presumed as a given in the calculation of your paper’s comparative “excess mortality” figure at that future time, and thus also entered into the [lack of] significance of your completely subjective “
could possiblycan be expected” standard for mitigation’s alleged benefit, no doubt because of yourabsurd rent seekingUtopian Society’s natural evolution toward the production ofCommunism’s“Sustainability’sLivingrotting Icons”, our “major cities”?There are several studies which show that people in different climate regions have adapted to different optimum temperatures. Within a band of 3°C, mortality is lowest, below and above that band, mortality increases, but the 3°C band of lowest mortality is at lower temperatures in colder regions than in warmer regions.
More important is that cold related increased mortality is about a factor 10 higher than heat related increased mortality. See Keatinge e.a. for Europe:
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/321/7262/670
Bloke down the pub says:
May 3, 2011 at 2:13 pm
In the UK the recognised definition of a heat wave is three hot days followed by a thunder-storm.
Sorry to disagree but that is the definition of a British summer
Any serious paper that discusses deaths due to temperature changes MUST consider both cold and warm weather deaths. In other words … this paper qualifies as “not even wrong”.
The effect that AGW has on heat related deaths is significant and will likely become worse as long as idiots believe that they can combat AGW by curtailing industry and energy use. Having policies based on the belief that there is AGW, and that it is bad; means, fewer and fewer people have the means to maintain a safe climate for themselves.
Be SCARED, very SCARED. EPA paid for this study and will use the “conclusions” to justify more regulations.
Johns Hopkins is also infamous for the debunked study claiming that 700000 extra deaths in Iraq.
Real data from real observations in Australia shows no mortality effect from heat waves at all: http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/187_11_031207/nit10385_fm.html
And in fact deaths from heart disease dropped.
JPeden says: May 3, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Nice use of strikes there.
One suspects the public health researchers have been extraordinarily busy for years in their specific realm [petri-dishes] of remote and Indigenous health. Situated in the tropics they are now set to deduce that improving [culturally appropriate] housing conditions, education, employment and health services will improve the situation for the Aboriginal peoples living in the Kimberleys of Western Australia. The industry of anthropologists, architects, the arts, and urban planners had teamed up for decades with the environmentals (ecologists) previous to these public health experts, but their work achieved ?what? No individual property rights or change to rule of law for all. Though they did actively pursue a newer form from the rent-seeking economy in these remote areas. An economy based on a hybrid-carbon model as a solution was promulgated.
Unfortunately the same public health researchers use indigenous studies from Harvard and Canada.
Voting and working Australians were left totally in the dark that mortality OR morbidity rates had improved in these remote areas. As were a few generations of remote children and youth.
A rather sobering report was written in The Australian this weekend by Nicholas Rothwell. Well worth a read.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/living-hard-dying-young-in-the-kimberley/story-fn59niix-1226046773687
JPeden says: May 3, 2011 at 2:57 pm
And lastly, IF the Queen’s (or King’s) English had been taught to these people in the past thirty-forty years with the curriculum based in the sciences, arts and history as the missionaries did, the world views of the hocus-pocus, voodoo science which controlled and decimated human lives [and the development of industry] would have been replaced, as it should have. And countless children and youth would have been enjoying a life that most other Australian children enjoy.
In addition to the accepted role of salt in cooling by sweating, there is another process, exothermic transmutation of sodium to potassium. I know, I know, hard to believe by some, but Louis Kervran’s lifetime of meticulous experiments have not been contradicted by duplication.
http://educate-yourself.org/zsl/zslclouiskervran23jul02.shtml
Low energy transmutation is alive and well. As is cold fusion.
dave38 says:
May 3, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Bloke down the pub says:
May 3, 2011 at 2:13 pm
In the UK the recognised definition of a heat wave is three hot days followed by a thunder-storm.
‘Sorry to disagree but that is the definition of a British summer’
True enough. I missed summer last year, I was taking a shower.