Climate Change to Alter Death in the Anthropocene… Or Something Like That

Guest “WTF?” by David Middleton

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The Anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene… It doesn’t exist. Now, on to the story…

DAILY SCIENCE

How climate change could change the way we die
A new study predicts more deaths from injuries in a warmer world.

By Sarah DeWeerdt
January 14, 2020

Global warming of 1.5 °C could result in an additional 1,603 deaths from injuries each year in the United States, an international team of researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature Medicine. They calculated the death toll from 2 °C of warming at 2,135 excess injury-related deaths yearly.

[…]

The Anthropocene

1,603? Are they sure it’s not 1,602 or 1,604?

[…]

The researchers mined 38 years’ worth of US government data on weather conditions and deaths from injuries in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). They calculated the average temperature in each month of the year for each state from 1980 to 2017. They identified months when the temperature was warmer than average in a given state, and compared the death rate from injuries during these months to the background rate of injury deaths.

This enabled them to calculate how mortality from injuries might change if average temperatures in all states increase year-round by 1.5 or 2 °C, the benchmarks set out in the Paris Agreement.

The number of excess deaths for 2 °C of warming, 2,135, represents 1% of all deaths from injuries in 2017. California, Texas, and Florida are likely to have the largest number of these increased deaths.

[…]

“These new results show how much climate change can affect young people,” study leader Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London said in a statement. “We need to respond to this threat with better preparedness in terms of emergency services, social support and health warnings.”

For example, officials could design public health messages specifically targeted at young men warning of the risks from traffic accidents and drowning, and implement additional blood alcohol level checkpoints on roads during hot weather.

Source: Parks R.M. et al.  “Anomalously warm temperatures are associated with increased injury deaths.” Nature Medicine 2020.

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Admin
January 15, 2020 6:24 pm

For once they’re probably right – sunny weather in Australia results in lots of idiots drinking vast quantities of beer and jumping on dangerous toys like jet skis. Obviously the only option to prevent this 1% surge in accidents in nice weather is to shut down the possibility of young people having fun.

Admin
Reply to  David Middleton
January 15, 2020 6:32 pm

Ha 🙂

Bill Powers
Reply to  David Middleton
January 16, 2020 4:14 am

Doctor Who just ran an episode about a barren planet that needed Terra forming it was inhabited by CO2 breathing Monsters and the Monsters were us.
Yep, who could’ve seen that coming? In the future we kill Earth and evolve into horrible ugly monsters that thrive on carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.
All the dandys who are being raise in this Anthropocene Age of Propaganda got a glimpse of our future and that will certainly cause them to take up walking and eating plant food. Fossil fuel is turning us into monsters. Monsters I tell ya! And they’re horrible!!

Philo
Reply to  David Middleton
January 17, 2020 10:35 am

Bill- good trick that- humanity turns into mobile trees and breathes out oxygen. Minor issue but such a monster could probably only take a step or two per hour. But don’t let that get in the way of a good show.

brians356
Reply to  David Middleton
January 15, 2020 6:46 pm

You mean “Donk”?

Patrick MJD
Reply to  David Middleton
January 15, 2020 7:17 pm

You know what a “dag” is?

Greg Cavanagh
Reply to  Patrick MJD
January 15, 2020 9:13 pm

The country version of a wog!

Patrick MJD
Reply to  Greg Cavanagh
January 15, 2020 9:56 pm

Nope. Not in Aus and NZ at least. A “dag” is the bits of sh!t that binds to the hair on animals like sheep and dogs etc. Is also, in Aus and NZ, a good bloke! You’re a dag! Lets not talk about routers the way I say it.

Geoff Sherrington
Reply to  Patrick MJD
January 15, 2020 9:53 pm

Like a mustang.
A piece of s**t hanging from a sheep’s a**e. If is does not fall, then it must hang, Old as old. Geoff S

Reply to  Patrick MJD
January 15, 2020 10:24 pm

Yup,

In my country, Dag is found on sheep, usually around the rear end:)

Cheers

Roger

Reply to  Roger Surf
January 16, 2020 5:10 pm

In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG or dag /ˈdæɡ/ (About this soundlisten)) is a finite directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of finitely many vertices and edges (also called arcs), with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at any vertex v and follow a consistently-directed sequence of edges that eventually loops back to v again. Equivalently, a DAG is a directed graph that has a topological ordering, a sequence of the vertices such that every edge is directed from earlier to later in the sequence.

DAGs can model many different kinds of information. For example, a spreadsheet can be modeled as a DAG, with a vertex for each cell ….etc, etc…

Generally, when speaking in the context of GAGW, “Climate Models” are called a term associated with male bovines in the US.
“Down Under” are they called DS?

Patrick MJD
Reply to  David Middleton
January 15, 2020 9:11 pm

Hogan also did a character called “Super Dag”…lol…

GregK
Reply to  David Middleton
January 16, 2020 3:52 am

That’s all Fosters is much good for.

Mainly seen when you visit friends in the UK and they want you to feel at home.
A bit cruel to tell them that no one in Oz drinks it.

Reply to  David Middleton
January 16, 2020 2:42 am

I think Paul Hogan’s “Leo Wanker” would have also inspired a few Darwin awards!

Charles Higley
Reply to  Eric Worrall
January 16, 2020 4:54 am

What about A/C? Or is that gone in their idea of a future?

How about prognosticating increased deaths from a 1.5ºC decrease in temperature?

As cold kills roughly 10 to 20 times more people than hot, they would be surprising. It must have been hell to live in the Medieval Warm Period, with people dropping like flies—wait, they were apparently unaware that they should be dying and instead were having a great time.

January 15, 2020 6:43 pm

It’s tough to make prediction, especially about the future. Even so…In the future you won’t be able to find one scientist, Hollywood star or politician who will admit he/she/etc. ever believed in the Anthropocene or CO2 causing warming or climate change or anything.

Alan the Brit
Reply to  Robert Bissett
January 15, 2020 11:49 pm

Bang on you’reabsolutely right! They’ll do the typically usual thing & go for not outright denial, just the old “I was miss-understood/quoted/interpreted/maligned, take your pick, their pride will never permit them to do the decent thing & just say, “I was wrong!”

Darrin
Reply to  Alan the Brit
January 16, 2020 3:28 pm

Alan,

In the last year or so things have changed enough that they’ll just claim that a video clip is a “Deep Fake”, they never really said what it shows them saying.

Goldrider
Reply to  Robert Bissett
January 16, 2020 9:23 am

These “predictions” are nothing more than underemployed cubicle-dwellers being instructed to massage some kind of “data” to produce yet another scary headline, nothing more. BTW, no real person with enough brain cells to create a synapse believes this happy horse-shite.

Richard
January 15, 2020 6:54 pm

Just so the mortality rate doesn’t exceed 100% in the long run.

Zig Zag Wanderer
Reply to  David Middleton
January 15, 2020 7:57 pm

… but not alive

Rob_Dawg
January 15, 2020 7:15 pm

Anthropobscene.

Rob_Dawg
January 15, 2020 7:19 pm

> Studies published in the Lancet and the American Journal of Cardiology, among other outlets, show that the incidence of heart failure goes up in the week after a blizzard. The Lancet study, based on death certificates in eastern Massachusetts after six blizzards from 1974-78, demonstrated that ischemic heart disease deaths rose by 22 percent during the blizzard week and stayed elevated for the subsequent eight days, suggesting that the effect was related to storm-related activities, like shoveling, rather than the storm itself.

Looks like a win to me.

January 15, 2020 7:28 pm

“How climate change could change the way we die. A new study predicts more deaths from injuries in a warmer world.
By Sarah DeWeerdt
January 14, 2020

Thank you for this. I will add it to my collection of goofy climate impact studies.

chaamjamal
Reply to  Chaamjamal
January 15, 2020 7:44 pm

added this to my collection of wacky impact studies. Thank you.

Here is the link.

https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/06/21/climate-change-impacts1/

Clyde Spencer
January 15, 2020 7:42 pm

I think that the unstated belief of alarmists is that all change is bad. That is ironic considering that progressives are always trying to change political things in order to achieve social perfection.

Greg Woods
Reply to  Clyde Spencer
January 16, 2020 2:24 am

All of these Alarmists belong to a secret organization known as The Flat Climate Society….

Reply to  Greg Woods
January 16, 2020 3:29 am

That explains their “tipping point” fear – they might fall off!

John F. Hultquist
January 15, 2020 7:42 pm

“Here, hold my beer.”

H.R.
January 15, 2020 7:55 pm

Not buying it. The fact that they made the comparisons based on anomalously warm months spikes my BS meter.

I clicked the link and from what I could make out, they didn’t establish that the increase in accidents occurred on days where the temperature was 1.5 or 2 °C above the base.

I can buy into exploring the hypothesis that on hotter days, people might be doing stupid things that cause injuries that are otherwise not appealing to attempt on colder days. But then I could see exploring the hypothesis that people just sit around in the air conditioning on the really hot days and when there is a break in the heat, everyone gets out of the house and goes wild.

In my reading at the link, I didn’t see any indication that the injuries for the month actually occurred on the hotter days of the anomalous month. Perhaps they looked at that and it didn’t work out until monthly data was examined.
.
.
.
Okay, I went back a re-read the study at the link and it was all monthly data. They did find and adequately show that the injury rates increased in the anomalously warm months compared to the base months. But I’m not seeing that they established that the injuries occurred on the hottest days of those months. Many of those extra injuries may have occurred on perfectly average temperature days.

To be fair, they may have cited daily studies in the links, but I’m in the WTF?!? camp on this one and didn’t bother chasing down their referenced studies.

It gets hot. People play stupid games and win stupid prizes, like trips to the hospital. That’s news?

hiskorr
Reply to  H.R.
January 16, 2020 5:18 am

But “climate” is not an anomalous event! They should have compared accident rates of areas where the average climate temperature differed by 1.5-2 degrees. What they measured was a transient weather effect.

D. J. Hawkins
Reply to  H.R.
January 16, 2020 6:09 am

I’d like to see a companion study on the colder-than-average months.

Curious George
Reply to  H.R.
January 16, 2020 8:45 am

I wonder if they did any research on anomalously warm winter temperatures, or anomalously cold winter temperatures?

January 15, 2020 7:55 pm

“1,603? Are they sure it’s not 1,602 or 1,604?”

No David. I think they meant was actually 1,603.49 deaths.
They simply rounded like the IRS allows on tax returns.

Haven’t you seen that 0.49/0.51 dead-live guy?
He’s out there. He’s probably voting Democrat this year too, like he did in 2018, 2016,….

E J Zuiderwijk
Reply to  Joel O'Bryan
January 16, 2020 1:42 am

We’ve been told wrong all the time. It was not Schrodinger’s cat, it was his guy.

January 15, 2020 8:00 pm

Have control studies been done of a similar sized population shifting house to a warmer climate. How does their health fore and aft?

The hidden premise in this study is that a difference is all attributable to climate change.

David S
January 15, 2020 8:23 pm

If the temperature of Detroit increases 2C then the climate of Detroit will be like that of Indianapolis Indiana or Columbus Ohio. And Detroiters will be dying as fast as people in those two cities. They’ll be dropping like flies. / sarc

Doug
Reply to  David S
January 15, 2020 9:58 pm

If a train leaves Detroit heading to Indianapolis at 100 miles an hour and it is 2 degrees C warmer in Columbus, will there be any sound in the forest? Worth studying at least as much as this one was.

January 15, 2020 8:25 pm

My God! What if Global warming of 1.5 °C resulted in an additional 1,604 deaths from injuries each year in the United States! What if people did not even notice them amongst the .2,9000,000 (approx.) registered deaths in the United States next year

MarkW
Reply to  nicholas william tesdorf
January 16, 2020 7:28 am

I thought the environmentalists wanted more people to die?

Chris Hanley
January 15, 2020 8:27 pm

How many deaths will be averted by a 1.5C temperature increase in , say, Canada, or in Russia not only by the temperature increase but the lower consumption of vodka which the Russians drink for ‘inner warmth’ (well the alarmists come up with all manner of similar ridiculously unlikely scenarios).

James Clarke
January 15, 2020 9:21 pm

Linear stupidity! Climate change studies are full of it, in so many ways. First of all, a climate warming of two degrees over 50-100 years is not the same as a day that is 2 degrees above a 30-year climate mean. One cannot draw a straight line from and apple to an orange and proclaim a climate crises.

Plus, activities change over time. For example, they number of young men who died in car crashes during the Little Ice Age was zero, and is much higher now during the modern warm period. Conclusion: warmer weather kills more young male drivers!

These climate scientists reason like Woody Allen in Love and Death:

WR2
January 15, 2020 9:31 pm

30 years of this nonsense, and they still can’t make their case with actual data? Still relying on guesses layered on guesses? I’m pretty disappointed that humanity hasn’t collectively seen through this BS yet. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Seth von Handorf
January 15, 2020 9:39 pm

Yay, another case of correlation = causation. I’m sure there weren’t any other factors at play besides temperature, though, so why bother looking? (Sarc)

Bob Vislocky
January 15, 2020 9:41 pm

CDC says more people die in winter than summer.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6826a5.htm

Perhaps the CDC needs lessons on data massaging so they can get with the climate program.

James Clarke
Reply to  Bob Vislocky
January 16, 2020 1:31 pm

More people die in accidents when it is warm enough to go outside and play. Far more people die from illness, stress and exposure when it is not. If the planet warms enough for anyone to notice, it is statically reasonable to believe more people will go outside and play more often, resulting in am increase in accidental deaths. This, however, would be reversed many times over by fewer people doing from the cold.

Warmer is better. That is obvious.

January 15, 2020 9:47 pm

Correlation does not mean causation. This an observational study which could be used for hypothesis generation but there are many confounders. And reading their study shows they had a hard time positing a rational pathway from temperature to outcomes.
I find it hard to believe a small change in temperature causes behavioral changes. From the study:

“Average size of anomaly over the study period (1980–2017), a measure of how variable temperatures are around their state–month long-term average, ranged from 0.4 °C for Florida in September to 3.4 °C for North Dakota in February (see Extended Data Fig. 2). Taken across all states and months, the average size of anomaly had a median value of 1.2 °C. Temperature anomalies were largest in January and December and smallest in August and September. ”

So we are to believe warming of 0.4C in Florida’s September and 3.4C in N. Dakota’s dead of winter causes all this mayhem? The first anomaly would not be noticeable and the second might be a god-send. Note the smallest were in the summer (peak injuries!) and the largest when warming might be most appreciated.
File this study under “torture the data till it confesses” or the Replication Crisis. See
http://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/the_irreproducibility_crisis_of_modern_science
This review article brings in climate science as well the social sciences & medicine.

Geoff Sherrington
January 15, 2020 10:00 pm

Like a mustang.
A piece of s**t hanging from a sheep’s a**e. If is does not fall, then it must hang, Old as old. Geoff S

Andy Mansell
January 15, 2020 10:24 pm

How much money went into this report I wonder? Seems to me to be a good example of why everyone wants to keep the CAGW gravy train rolling- how else would anyone ever get paid for such a ridiculous waste of time? People have always done stupid things in extreme hot or cold temperatures- for example when we get lots of snow here in the Peak District, lots of townies come out to walk around in it and some get stuck or fall off things, because apparently they forget that it might actually be dangerous. Can I get a lot of money from somewhere for turning this into a ‘report’? When did common sense become a specialist subject?

JSMill
January 15, 2020 10:30 pm

Methinks … this is closely related to THIS:

https://darwinawards.com/

Ghowe
Reply to  JSMill
January 16, 2020 3:38 am

Yep, also correlated to the number of utube videos posted in the sports/adventure category per month. There are 2 things I missed growing up, as they hadn’t been invented. Big Wheels and skateboards w fancy bearings. I don’t think I’d had made it this far if they had.

Art
January 16, 2020 12:01 am

So then on average, people in the hot southern states must be dying at a much younger age than people in the northern states or Canada.

Right?

harrowsceptic
Reply to  Art
January 16, 2020 1:41 am

So much of Climate Change/Crisis/Catastrophy/whatever it’s called today is based on Predictions. However, maybe we should start using the term “Prophesy” instead of Prediction. Prophesy: “to declare or foretell by or as if by divine inspiration”. It seems that so much of the “scientific” outpouring must be “divinely inspired” rather than based on realistic scientific method. Just a thought.

Derg
Reply to  harrowsceptic
January 16, 2020 3:58 am

+1

Ed Fix
January 16, 2020 1:45 am

From the Quarterly Journal of Correlations Between Two Random Data Sets.

The same journal that regularly prints studies where one data set is compared to about 25 other data sets at the 95% confidence level, and finds one statistically significant correlation. And the author thinks he’s found something.

Forgetting that at the 95% threshold, you expect 1 in 20 uncorrelated pairs to show an anomalous correlation.

January 16, 2020 2:15 am

These clowns deserve to be thrown in Antarctic where they will have an eternal life.