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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According to the researchers, the projections of excess deaths could not be explained by projected increases in city population alone.
So, let me get this straight: one prediction does not “explain” another prediction and therefore global warming? This study should be titled: “Reification Gone Wild”.
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Ken Harvey says:
May 3, 2011 at 12:04 pm
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.
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Exactly. I found that out as a kid — a few salt tablets along w/plenty of water miraculously cured my headaches & listlessness while working in extreme heat. Still works. Add to that a constantly wetted T-shirt (& in the worst conditions, a wetted head), I can work (reluctantly) for hrs in the heat.
Since salt is not politically correct nowadays, it’s cloaked under the guise of “sports drinks”.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
The rolling blackouts due to insufficient electricity coupled with high prices dissuading the poor from using it at all will be quite devastating. Air conditioning can be quite a life saver when available. People will talk about “the good old days” when it was reliable as well.
Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps?
Claim that more people will die due to the heat. When people do, (because electricity is too expensive, not because it’s actually hotter), you claim you were right.
There was a time when psychics would make predictions for the coming year and newspapers and other media would publish them. Then some bright reporter started publishing LAST years predictions along with THIS years predictions, and then just to rub salt in the wound, made a list of the previous year’s seminal events to see if any of the psychics predicted any of them. Totaly discredited the whole psychic community.
But they learned their lesson of course, predicting just one year into the future was way to easy to discredit, so they started going out…uhm… a few decades. Of course, psychics having been thoroughly discredited, they had to remarket themselves as prognosticators of climate science. Pretty much the same ripoff scheme but they use virtual tarot cards, virtual signs from above, virtual glowing balls only they can see into, and virtual experiments. They have however established a direct connection into your wallet via a proxy taxation system that seems quite real.
Dave, I have no reason to doubt your numbers. I was just being sarcastic at your well made point. Sarcastic to all the malthusians who think that if we make this place an eden, no one dies. You are dead on (pun intended) when you say the only thing that is 100% fatal is life. No one gets out of it alive.