Guest “No schist Sherlock” by David Middleton
Cold-weather accounts for almost all temperature-related deaths
August 18, 2020With the number of extreme weather days rising around the globe in recent years due to global warming, it is no surprise that there has been an upward trend in hospital visits and admissions for injuries caused by high heat over the last several years. But cold temperatures are responsible for almost all temperature-related deaths, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research.
According to the new study by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, patients who died because of cold temperatures were responsible for 94% of temperature-related deaths, even though hypothermia was responsible for only 27% of temperature-related hospital visits.
“With the decrease in the number of cold weather days over the last several decades, we still see more deaths due to cold weather as opposed to hot weather,” said Lee Friedman, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences in the UIC School of Public Health and corresponding author on the paper. “This is in part due to the body’s poorer ability to thermoregulate once hypothermia sets in, as well as since there are fewer cold weather days overall, people don’t have time to acclimate to cold when those rarer cold days do occur.”
[…]
University of Illinois Chicago
Did he just blame global warming for the cold weather-related deaths?
“With the decrease in the number of cold weather days over the last several decades… people don’t have time to acclimate to cold when those rarer cold days do occur.”
Yes he did!
It was even in the conclusion of their paper:
Conclusions
Science Direct
While climate change is increasing the number of extreme heat days, it may also impact cold adaptation resulting in more serious adverse health outcomes when severe cold weather events do occur.
Did it ever occur to these academics that green energy polices might be the primary reason that cold weather kills 16 times as many people as hot weather?
Willful efforts to make energy more expensive and less reliable (see California) increases energy poverty and kills more people than more people than cCoal and Cecil B. DeMille… Combined!
Cold weather-related deaths have been rampant in Illinois for years.
Illinois consistent nationwide for cold-related deaths
January 29, 2018CHICAGO (AP) — Illinois was consistently in the top five states nationwide for cold-related deaths per year from 1999 until 2016, according to a federal agency’s report.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Illinois also ranked 15th nationally on average during the same time period for cold deaths per 100,000 people.
Cold weather has taken the lives of hundreds of Illinois residents, the Chicago Tribune reported. The Illinois Department of Public Health says 593 people died from exposure to excessive natural cold or hypothermia between 2008 and 2016. The highest yearly total occurred when the polar vortex hit in January 2014 and claimed the lives of 110 people.
[…]
AP
This may come as a shock to modern academics, but waaaaayyyy back in 2019, it was well-known that making home heating more expensive kills people.
Lower Heating Prices Prevent Winter Deaths, Particularly from Cardiovascular and Respiratory Causes
Death rates are known to be highest in winter months in areas with cold weather. In Inexpensive Heating Reduces Winter Mortality (NBER Working Paper No. 25681), researchers Janjala Chirakijja, Seema Jayachandran and Pinchuan Ong assess whether the cost of heating contributes to this “excess winter mortality.” High heating costs can present households with difficult tradeoffs: set their homes to uncomfortably low temperatures, or reduce their spending in other areas, such as food and medical care. Either type of response can potentially increase health risks.
[…]
The estimates imply that the lowered price of heating due to shale natural gas production and other factors in the late 2000s averted 11,000 winter deaths per year in areas that relied on this heating energy source.
[…]
The National Bureau of Economic Research
There you have it! Frac’ing saves lives!
Reference
Friedman, Lee S., Chibuzor Abasilim, Rosalinda Fitts, Michelle Wueste. Clinical outcomes of temperature related injuries treated in the hospital setting, 2011–2018. Environmental Research, 2020; 189: 109882 DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109882
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Our bodies react to cold by increasing both what is called “cold-inducing RNA binding protein” (CIRP) & “RNA-binding motif protein 3” (Rbm3). This is a cold response which limits potential cellular damage.
Cold exposure elevates levels of circulating catechol-amines (adrenalin/noradrenaline). Their action downstream (via HSE & HSF1) results in more of the “heat shock protein 72” (HSP72) being made, which is a dynamic of nervous system cold tolerance.
The Original Post implies human cold exposure is less & thus people more vulnerable.In order to become adapted to conserving body heat this may be true in the following context; experimentally it took exposure to 18*C for 1.5 hours 5 days/week for 8 weeks to induce cold reactive body heat conservation.
Salient features of having actual adaptation to cold include: increases lipo-lysis, decreased glyco-lysis, reduced heart rate, lower catechol-amines, slower breathing rate (reduced Oxygen uptake & reduced CO2 ventilated/minute) & among cellular actors increased expression levels of Sirtuins 1-4, CIRP, Rbm3, HSP72 & HSP90alpha.
gringojay,
These are technical processes,
triggered and controlled
depending on the composition of the messenger substances adrenaline, serotonin and steroids.
__________________________________________
After all it’s the operators decision for another spring.
Ah, yea, cold weather has always killed more humans than warm. Who are these idiots just now figuring this fact out?
It MAY also impact cold adaption… There’s that word again. Non science, not worth wasting time reading. Cretins.
It never occurs to this sort of academic that green energy polices might be the reason that cold weather kills 16 times as many people as hot weather, because they know that this is not a matter for scientific reasoning but is part of the Core Belief of the Global Warming-Climate Change Religion. They also know that they will be handsomely rewarded by the Church of Global Warming-Climate Change for their Testimony of Faith.
How is it that “climate change” formerly known as “global warming” which so far accounts for perhaps 1 degree of warming, can also account for heat waves where temperatures are 10 or 20 degrees warmer than normal. And how can “climate change” have caused the extreme heat waves of the 1930s which were far worse than anything in recent decades. Just asking.
DHR -Do refer to NOAA\NASA temperature graphs “adjustments” of the globe.Then consider that up to 40% of the temperatures are supplied by models!
These idiots should stay all day long in freezer rooms so that they can adapt to global warming.
File this under: Alarmist Morons Think Climate Should Never Change.
Though I’m a trucker I once was an SF medic that wrote the lesson plan and taught heat and cold injuries at the Special Operations Medical Course. To wrote that lessons plan while at Ft. Sam Houston, TX and thus had access to some of the top experts in the Army and Air Force to refer to on most of the subject matter.
I have been in stage II of hypothermia twice. Pretty tough not to get too cold at some time or other when your serving in an SF unit that specializes in cold weather and high Alpine operations. And yet in 8 1/2 year on those teams I never once had a team member suffer a cold injury worse than stage 1 hypothermia or chilblains.
The hypothalamus has primary control of body temperature. In a healthy adult by far the greatest potential for an injury that effects the function of the hypothalamus permanently is heat stroke. The other levels of heat injury such as heat cramps and heat exhaustion do not cause long term disfunction of the hypothalamus.
Hypothermia, when one gets to stage III can result in temporary disfunction of the hypothalamus. This why people in that stage will sometimes shed their warm clothes. But people that recover from even severe cases of hypothermia rarely suffer any long term effect on their ability to thermo-regulate.
This line: ““This is in part due to the body’s poorer ability to thermoregulate once hypothermia sets in, as well as since there are fewer cold weather days overall, people don’t have time to acclimate to cold when those rarer cold days do occur.” is Bull hockey IMO. “This is in part due to the body’s poorer ability to thermoregulate once hypothermia sets in, as well as since there are fewer cold weather days overall, people don’t have time to acclimate to cold when those rarer cold days do occur.” Acclimated or not, when your cold, your cold, and your going to get warm if you can! It is the failure to get warm that results in the injury!
I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and every year we get about 100 days of what most people would call bitter cold. I’m not sure if anyone ever dies from the cold unless they fall prey to some series of unfortunate circumstances where they are trapped in it.
When I was young I worked winters surveying oil and gas pipelines in rural areas. We carried newspapers, cigarette lighters and axes, and we would stop every so often and build fires. You have strategies for adapting to cold weather, is what I’m getting at here. Nobody I knew ever had frostbite, and we would sometimes work all day at minus 30 degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile, check out the daily temperatures in Phoenix. where the temperature seems to exceed 37 degrees Celsius (that’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit) most days during the summer. I doubt if very many residents of Phoenix die of the heat because they know how to live and work in it.
Most adaptation is cultural, rather than biological.
They have taken a simple truth, that cold weather has a much higher rate of “attributable deaths” than hot weather, and even attempted to magnify those “attributable deaths”, and then tried to piggyback “climate change” onto that with the idiotic idea that people are less able to acclimate to the cold now, because it happens less frequently, causing further deaths. “Attributable deaths”, of course can mean just about anything you want it to. This is a similar thing to what is happening with deaths attributed to Covid-19. It all depends on your agenda.
I suppose we should have come to expect this sort of slop from Warmunists by now, but it still never ceases to amaze how dumb as well as dishonest they are. They make it up as they go.
I have to wonder how much of the increase is from the growth in homeless population? The mentally challenged (both the ill and low IQ) who used to be institutionalized are now roaming the streets and exposed to extreme weather.
Cold weather kills more people than hot weather because … same as it ever was:
https://www.statista.com/search/?q=winter+mortality+&qKat=newSearchFilter&isRegionPref=40&isoregion=0&isocountrySearch=&category=0&interval=0&archive=1