Essay by Eric Worrall
Britain usually suffers a little under 10,000 – 60,000 excess winter deaths every year . But we should apparently be worrying about the 2,800 excess summer deaths.
Climate crisis poses ‘growing threat’ to health in UK, says expert
Exclusive: Prof Dame Jenny Harries warns of dangers to food security, flooding and insect-borne diseases
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev
Sun 23 Oct 2022 22.00 AEDTThe climate crisis poses a “significant and growing threat” to health in the UK, the country’s most senior public health expert has warned.
Speaking to the Guardian, Prof Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said there was a common misconception that a warmer climate would bring net health benefits due to milder winters. But the climate emergency would bring far wider-reaching health impacts, she said, with food security, flooding and mosquito-borne diseases posing threats.
“The heatwave this summer really brought home to people the direct impact,” said Harries. “But it’s the breadth of the impact. It’s not just the heat.”
…
“Colleagues from Pakistan … are suffering from the impacts of flooding. They are dealing with stagnant water, higher risks of sewage overflowing into publicly accessible water spaces,” she said. “We are seeing in some of the things that could be happening in the UK.”
…
This summer, the UK experienced record temperatures of 40.3C and six separate heatwave periods associated with more than 2,800 excess deaths. “If several aeroplanes all exploded and we’d lost that many people it would be front-page news in health protection terms,” Harries said.
…
“We have much to learn from countries that currently have warmer temperatures,” she said. “If we’re going to be a hot country soon we need to be thinking the same way.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/23/climate-change-poses-growing-threat-to-health-in-uk-says-expert
The warm weather = mosquito borne disease claim is complete nonsense. Malaria was a major killer in Shakespeare’s England, in the middle of the Little Ice Age, but most people are not aware of this. The reason is our ancestors didn’t call it Malaria, they called it Ague.
Mosquito borne diseases are controlled by draining swamps and killing mosquitoes, not by controlling CO2 emissions. Pakistan’s post flooding mosquito problems could be cured overnight with a few thousand tons of paraffin and DDT.
As for the claim Britain is becoming a hot country, I put this claim in the same category as all those wild “end of snow” predictions.
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Years ago the UK Met Office tried to scare the populace with claims that we were going to end up with a Mediterranean climate. They quickly realised what a dumb idea that was.
We are still waiting for our “barbecue summers” they also promised.
Ah, yes, the UKHSA that was able to publish figures on vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths until it became too inconvenient that most of the deaths were amongst the most vaccinated. It just became impossible to collect that data, but then the ONS inconveniently published the data that was impossible to collect!
https://greatmountainpublishing.com/2022/07/14/people-who-have-received-the-covid-19-vaccine-account-for-94-of-all-covid-19-deaths-in-the-uk/
So, can the good professor explain why the excess heat around runways causes the vaccinated to expire in preference to the unvaccinated?
“…This summer, the UK experienced record temperatures of 40.3C and six separate heatwave periods”
Really. I was a student in 1976 and experienced that heatwave and there has not been any thing like it since. At the beginning of that summer I stayed at a friends on the south coast and the thermometer registered 110F (43.3C). It became common to drive around with the car heater on to avoid over heating the engine. As an indication of the heat, I swam in the sea just about every day that summer and the sea was warm enough for me to just walk in without any acclimatizing.I swam in the sea during one of the heat waves this summer and the sea was slightly warmer but not that spectacular.
As far as excess deaths – the UK has an ageing population, so there are many more frail and elderly people, and many of those will be in dwellings insulated against cold. In other words more old people living in places that won’t lose heat easily. In addition, Insulate Britain are under the impression we need to insulate houses against the cold because the planet is hotter than ever!
I remember the swarms of ladybirds that summer. But I’ve yet to see ladybirds given as a dangerous outcome of global warming 🙂
Yes, and wasps.
Someone caught a Manta-Ray off Bournemouth Pier, while there was a family Dolphins swimming round the bay.
Good grief – yes I remember that. The blighters had a nasty bite too.
Perhaps if you’d put your thermometer in the shade, it would have registered the actual air temperature, which would have been below the maximum of 35.6 recorded that year.
Not to worry, a deep recession will save the day for them.
She was talking to the Guardian. Enough said.
The entire United Kingdom is above 50 degrees North latitude, surrounded by seas that rarely exceed 16 C (61 F) in the middle of summer, and the sun is less than 17 degrees above the horizon at high noon at the winter solstice. How could such a place become a “hot country”?
Thanks to Boris’ blunders and Vlad’s taking advantage, Britons should worry less about becoming a hot country and start praying for a mild winter, so they don’t shiver too much during the coming gas shortage.
Some of them were complaining about the cold while waiting in line for the Queen’s funeral in September. What about when the cold comes indoors for four months straight?
Just another example where the golden rule of weather/climate extremes applies.
The more extreme the weather event is, the more the contribution from natural variation is and the less that came from climate( change).
superimposing 1 deg. C of warming on the system the last 100 years, doesn’t contribute much more than 1 deg. C of to any individual air masses.
Stating otherwise is junk science,
Memo to Prof Harries: There are billions of people successfully living in areas far warmer than Britain will ever be.
If it’s in the Guardian then it’ll be over the top sensationalist nonsense.
Look at this bad thing here while simultaneously ignoring the even worse thing over there that you already know about but don’t care enough to do anything about.
She is a liar and a cheat.
For Britain to become a ‘Hot’ country it would have to be towed south to somewhere off the south of Morocco. Perhaps they could ask the Royal Navy about the practicality.
Oliver Cromwell died of/with Malaria, September 1658
I’ll keep on saying this: the eco-alarmists will never miss the opportunity of blowing out of proportion any fact or occurrence no matter how remotely related to weather or climate. Almost all of these are distortions, exaggerations, half-truths and omissions that need to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.
They were promising a Mediterranean climate for Britain years ago. The British unaccountably failed to be terrified.
There was a Mediterranean in Britain when the Romans took over . Wine grapes were widely grown.
I suppose it was caused by their coal fired power stations.
Brits are going to have start putting ice in their drinks. That’ll kill them.
Excess winter deaths in the UK are most often from flu and similar seasonal disease… NOT in the majority of cases directly or even indirectly from cold.
The excess heat deaths are directly from heat, something which we did not have before and something which will increase.
So we should be taking the extra threat seriously.
UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) ‘Climate – related mortality and hospital admissions, England and Wales: 2001 to 2020’
“We find relatively little increase in deaths caused by warmer weather and a reduction in deaths caused by cold winters, leading to a net decrease in deaths”
“the warming trajectory predicted by climate scientists is already affecting health in England and Wales: however, in the UK’s cool-to-temperate climate, mortality is limited and appropriate policy and behaviour changes could mitigate much of the health risks from increasing temperatures”
I’m waiting to see how the good Dame proposes to re-position the UK downstream from the Himalayas.