Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 12 September 2023
As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age, the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up. The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.
This new panic, the history of which I will not recount, resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and subsequent The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the current crop of international bureaucrats screaming about the Climate Emergency and Global Boiling. The slight and mostly beneficial general warming is propagandistically portrayed as heating and hotness.
Heat and Hotness are thus portrayed, always, as Too Much Heat and Too Hot; then to Dangerously Hot and Deadly Heat –in the time-honored 1984-ish propaganda slippery slope.
Now, the Climate Emergency agenda demands blood – bodies in the morgue, dead and dying grandparents and dead children, to back up its storyline of Deadly Heat.
Thus we have the mainstream mass media repeating endlessly that the warming we are experiencing and the summers we have in the Northern Hemisphere are killing us.
There is a bug in that ointment: Cold and low temperatures have always resulted in the deaths of far many more humans than warmth and high temperatures.
The facts have not stopped dedicated scientists, whole teams of them, from trying to prove the opposite of the truth.
In the United States, climate harm enthusiasts haul out the following chart from NOAA’s weather.gov site page:
Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics.
This particular graph gives an entirely false idea because it is simplistic. It comes from the Storm Events Database and does not even pretend to represent total U.S. deaths from extreme temperatures, hot or cold, only those from “storms” in the database. There is also the Cause of Death problem, which you can read about here.
To discover the truth about Heat v. Cold Deaths, it is necessary to look to the scientific literature on the topic. A quick survey can be accomplished with a Google Scholar search like this. It returns the first ten out of very many papers on the topic. Typical findings are:
“Results: In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality (around 61 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, respectively). In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively” [ source ]
“Results Between 2000 and 2010, 3.9% [CI 95% 3.2:4.6] of the total mortality was attributed to cold, and 1.2% [1.1:1.2] to heat.” [ source ]
Results: ….” Cold effects on mortality appeared higher than heat effects in this subtropical city with moderate climatic conditions.” (São Paulo, Brazil) [source ]
I wrote seven years ago: “Surprising Results From Study: Moderate Cold Kills More People Than Extreme Heat”. That essay related the findings of the then ‘latest’ study on heat and cold deaths: Gasparrini et al. (2015) in Lancet 2015; 386: 369–75 (.pdf)
The title told it all. This chart from Gasparini gives the details:
Compare these hot v. cold deaths bars to those of NOAA’s Weather.gov far above.
Interestingly, as the title declares, moderate cold kills far more than extreme cold or moderate or extreme heat in this multi-country, multi-continent study.
Coming closer to present time, The Lancet–Planetary Health, published Qi Zhao et al (2021), titled: “Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study”. The paper has a distressingly long list of authors. But the authors made their best effort to do dig out “the global, regional, and national mortality burden associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures.”
When all the data was run through the computers and the models, the bottom line was:
“….9.43% (95% CI 7.58–11.07) of all deaths (8.52% [6.19–10·47] were cold-related and 0.91% [0.56–1.36] were heat-related. There were 74 temperature-related excess deaths per 100,000 residents (95% CI 60–87). The mortality burden varied geographically.”
That is: non-optimal cold ambient temperatures cause ten times the number of deaths worldwide than non-optimal warm temperatures.
Bottom Line:
The question of which causes more human deaths worldwide, higher or lower temperatures, heat or cold, is not controversial. It is well understood and the findings of many studies are quite clear.
Cold, low ambient temperature, leads to the death of far more human beings than Heat, higher ambient temperature, by an order of magnitude, ten times more deaths from low temperatures.
Any report to the contrary, claiming that heat kills more people than cold, is either made from total ignorance of the facts, or is intentional disinformation.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
It is one of the sillier aspects of the Climate Wars that this issue is bandied about, with major journals, such as the Scientific American publishing such nonsense as “These heat waves pose a major risk to public health. “In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
This type of misinformation is dangerous – the Gasparini chart in the essay shows that even in the U.S. extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat, but the real killer (well, leading cause of illness leading to death) is Moderate Cold.
I won’t say that the science is settled…but the evidence is in regarding Heat vs. Cold. Cold is the killer.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Lets not forget India, just north of the Tropics – also a strong bias towards cold related deaths over heat related deaths.
Clearly the BBC have forgotten about India’s cold related deaths. No surprise there though.
Makes you wonder why they continue to ban any screening of ‘It ain’t arf hot mum’ set in India eh?
Maybe that series was set during a period prior to Global Warming, so might be confusing…..
Yes, if by “forgotten” you mean intentionally ignored and buried inconvenient facts.
Anyone in any state of health can die of cold as—sadly—too many otherwise hale hikers do when caught out by the elements. Heat on the other hand hastens the end of only the already moribund.
That is not to say we should be indifferent to slightly premature deaths due to heat. But we should be clear that it is the slight shortening of life we most regret rather than the actual death. In which case we can legitimately be very much more anxious to prevent early death from avoidable hypothermia.
I don’t think I’m being callous…
In the real world, say, in London. The homeless living rough on the streets do not die of heat and I doubt they ever will. They do die of cold.
People dying of cold
Dec 2022
Homeless people ‘freezing, blue and scared and will die in sub-zero temperatures’
People living on the streets are ‘freezing, blue, shivering and scared’ and some will freeze to death, as more sub-zero temperatures are predicted this winter, a grassroots group has warned.
Streets Kitchen volunteers, who head out every day to deliver essential items, are still seeing 50 to 70 homeless people outside a day in different parts of London. Those delivering aid say they have been left with the impossible decision of ‘who gets a sleeping pod and who doesn’t’, with snow and icy conditions gripping the UK over the past week.
Snow engulfs a sleeping bag lying on the hard, cold street in one picture taken in the capital, highlighting the haunting conditions people are facing. It comes despite a number of authorities across the country, including in London, activating the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP).
SWEP is triggered when temperatures fall below 0°C and is designed to ensure councils open additional emergency accommodation for people sleeping rough when there is an increased risk of death due to the weather.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/12/15/london-homeless-people-freezing-and-scared-and-will-die-in-winter-17936752/
People dying from heat… (there aren’t any…)
How To Help London’s Homeless In The Heat
Homelessness charity Evolve Housing + Support has produced a list of tips for how Londoners can help rough sleepers and save lives, by donating the following items either directly to individuals or to shelters:
Sun cream to help prevent skin damage
A bottle of water and food for hydration
Hats and sunglasses to prevent sunstroke and avoid risk of eye damage
Hand-held fans to lower body temperature and prevent heatstroke
Baby wipes to help with sanitation and avoiding athlete’s foot
https://londonist.com/london/features/how-to-help-london-s-homeless-in-the-heat
Alternatively, give them somewhere to live?
“”SWEP is triggered when temperatures fall below 0°C and is designed to ensure councils open additional emergency accommodation
That’s a bit rough.
It may have changed but in my part of the world (North Notts), the figure is 4°C
and there were, still are, lots of rough sleepers around Worksop and esp Shireoaks.
(They get through immense amounts of NOx Laughing Gas)
They were some of the earliest migrants from eastern Europe. From Poland mostly, who came to work in the huuuuge warehouses and distribution centres around there – it being effectively = The Centre of England as far as ‘distribution’ goes.
UK people will be hearing all about ‘Wilko’ and Worksop is where Wilko has one of its (only 2) distribution centres – Wilko employs about 25% of Worksop.
Not any more. Thanks Boris.
Anyone who ever wandered into a branch of Willko will not be surprised that it went out of business. It makes the now defunct FW Woolworth look classy
Wilko always put me in mind of Woolies, even smelt similar.
I was in London a few weeks ago, 25C and they were apparently swooning about from heat ‘sickness’. LOL!
quelgeek ==> It is a sad fact that many a healthy and strong kiker or camper has died unnecessarily because they did not understand the dangers of hypothermia, even on a relatively warm day.
How is “moderate cold” defined, Kip? Below freezing? Above freezing?
Tom ==> I give the link to the paper. But generally “We calculated attributable deaths for heat and cold, defined as temperatures above and below the optimum temperature, which corresponded to the point of minimum mortality, and for moderate and extreme temperatures, defined using cutoff s at the 2·5th and 97·5th temperature percentiles.”
More details in the full .pdf file here.
Thanks, Kip.
Even the hale and hearty can be felled by heat stroke if they don’t get enough water.
“The facts have not stopped dedicated scientists, whole teams of them, from trying to prove the opposite of the truth.”
Firstly, it occurred to me in a comment I posted yesterday that:
“I often wonder what it must be like to be teaching secondary school children an unscientific – i.e. modelled – pack of falsehoods, knowing it and continuing to do it regardless. I know I couldn’t.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/09/11/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-567/#comment-3781966
Then, of course, we have the antics of the self-appointed gatekeepers of the Journals – basically, whatever it takes. So, it is unequivocally an unscientific political venture that treats science as a [modelled] fig-leaf of respectability and crucially, authority – you’re no climate scientist etc
The media is the propaganda wing of the enterprise so it’s easy to perpetuate and ramp up the fear and to shut up or rubbish any dissenting voices. The public hears one side and one side only.
These so-called scientists trying to prove the opposite of the truth are quite the opposite. They are the priesthood of the new religion. Gone is the cassock in favour of the white coat. And woe betide anyone who questions the narrative(s).
Unlike say physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, etc., “scientists” are like artists. They are allowed to self-identify. Getting a white coat out the dress-up box and saying the words that go with the costume is enough.
Isn’t it just a question of what you are dedicated to? Josef Mengele was apparently a doctor.
Why attribute worldviews to professions? As an engineer I meet colleagues whose political or philosophical views surprise the heck out of me – like how could they believe that?! “They” probably think the same thing about what I believe.
It’s worse. I have lived and worked in that world. Actually doing real science and speaking the truth was discouraged and often punished on a regular basis. Rewards were for those who promote the propaganda of the day.
The silver lining may be that the tighter the Uniparty regime’s grip on the narrative, the more that skepticism will sound new and brilliant. The more appealing as a way to rebel against ones parents.
One lives in hope – yea even now
“I often wonder what it must be like to be teaching secondary school children an unscientific – i.e. modelled – pack of falsehoods, knowing it and continuing to do it regardless. I know I couldn’t.”
I doubt secondary school teachers know the difference. Where and when would they be exposed to contrarian or skeptical opinions or research?
You’ve identified what sounds like a major danger of working with kids. Or being a CEO?
“The media is the propaganda wing of the enterprise so it’s easy to perpetuate and ramp up the fear and to shut up or rubbish any dissenting voices. The public hears one side and one side only.”
This is the central problem we have. All the institutions of influence in society are in bed with the climate change alarmists/leftists-Marxists. Their powerful voice is the only thing a lot of people hear. If they don’t tell people the truth, then there are going to be problems.
The Propaganda effort from the Left is almost overwhelming. One has to have a good foundation in facts to be able to wade through the lies and distortions they put out about the climate and politics and everything else interesting to radical leftists.
A lot of people are being misled by the radical Leftwing Media. They are so powerful and influential that their lies and distortions of reality may take our country away from us. That’s what they are trying to do now using any means possible.
From Global Cooling Panic to intentionally cherry-picking, hot vs cold, sums it up why the climate debate isn´t settled at all. In neurology we were first presented for the living brain, then the walking brain and here in the near “present” the talking brain.
When it comes to the debate about Hot vs Cold, I always tell people to read The Little Match Girl.
Hans Christian Andersen : The Little Match Girl (sdu.dk)
And then lets us discuss what the figures actually shows … reading The Little Match Girl takes “around” 240 to 300 seconds. This suggestion, to give them a point of view, gets cold very fast.
My next question is, can you own the science, as stated by UN last year. Perhaps it´s the first question, that makes their “brains” to walk away. No wonder why psychology have shown that many people who believe the (C)AGW-agenda, won´t even debate simple figures based on simple question.
If you made it up I suppose you could try to copyright it?
If you took up the subject the talking brain as the main focus for an article it won´t be published in either Nature, Science or The Lancet, because it´s not “in-tune” with the current narrative(s) being published about CC.
Face to face communication, eye contact or eye movements affects in the real world, is a “scary” thing for them and a to “hot” topic based on emotions and the “dangers” of how brain synchronisation in the MSM and the social medias works.
Looking at brain synchronisation, it is clear that the children now in psychology is the main focus from the (C)AGW-group because children can influence their parents decisions. The litterature published about how children can influence their parents the resent years when it comes to have an impact is fairly large. It is very clear why children today is to be .taught about “global boiling” all you have to do is to read chapter 6 in The First Global Revolution.
Copyright MB1978 … :;
Vulnerability. Or being easily hurt, influenced, or attacked etc
IPCRESS is part of the national curriculum, and it works…
“Climate anxiety in young people: a call to action …psychological effects of climate change unrelated to a climate event are less well characterised. Referred to as eco-anxiety, climate distress, climate change anxiety, or climate anxiety, these terms describe anxiety related to the global climate crisis and the threat of environmental disaster.3, 4, 5 Symptoms associated with climate anxiety include panic attacks, insomnia, and obsessive thinking.6 Feelings of climate distress might also compound other daily stressors to negatively affect overall mental health, potentially leading to increases in stress-related problems such as substance use disorders, anxiety disorders, and depression.3 With little available data, the prevalence of climate anxiety cannot be quantified, although there are indications that young people are adversely affected.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30223-0/fulltext
Mass propaganda and indoctrination have really done a number on the young.
Children can foster climate change concern among their parents
Children can foster climate change concern among their parents | Nature Climate Change
Climate Action for (My) Children
Climate Action for (My) Children | Environmental and Resource Economics (springer.com)
I agree … these articles above is just two by many in the litterature … and it goes by the way of the word shock waves when it comes to the Mass propaganda and indoctrination that have really done a number on the young, see page 116 in The First Global Revolution … and page 118 where it´s written: “Thanks to modern means of information, young people are being rapidly exposed to more and more facts that give them reason to consider their elders as lacking responsibility and awareness with regard to enormous dangers such as nuclear holocaust, pollution and the violent destruction of environment. Furthermore, a shower of unrelated disasters and news reports on everyday violence are like a series of shocks that lead to the feeling of generalized disorder”
The First Global Revolution A Report By The Council Of The Club Of Rome Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider Random House, Inc. Pantheon Books ( 1991) (archive.org)
Children can….
Exactly so. What we older parents call ‘pester power’.
Is it possible that they can’t “… debate simple figures based on simple question”.
Trying to figure out how a “heat related death” is even possible in England, Northern Eurasia, or much of North America. Will get back if I come up with anything.
Burning at the stake for climate heresy?
Or tar (hot) and feathered for climate heresy?
The yammering about heat related (“extreme heat”) deaths simply defies common sense. It is like the old saying, “Doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.”
Everybody knows that the human body can tolerate just about any air temperature if (1) you stay out of direct sunlight, and (2) stay hydrated so that the body’s normal temperature control mechanism (sweating and evaporation) can function … whereas cold weather, even a little of it, can easily kill you if you aren’t dressed appropriately, meaning not using the body’s natural temperature regulation mechanism which cannot cope with cold.
Which explains why cold related deaths fantastically outnumber heat related deaths. An virtually all of the heat related deaths due to ambient air temperature (as opposed to, say, working in a furnace room of a steel factory) are due to people not staying out of the sun or failing to properly hydrate themselves.
Imagine that you are Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. The more straw you buy, the more gold you get. The warmunists would complain about increasing costs of straw. The gold surplus is a separate matter owing to their excellent management skills.
The thing is also that cold death are slow, as the cold causes the veins to constrict, limiting blood flow. This is something that can take two weeks before death sets in. Dying from heat is more acute and is therefore faster to make headlines.
Not in this context.
At the risk of some distasteful hair-splitting, we’re not talking about people overtaken by grass fires or illegal migrants locked in shipping containers. We’re talking about deaths attributed specifically to hot weather; deaths that can be discerned only by subtle study of numbers in excess of what was expected—months or years later. And those make headlines because editors want to sustain a narrative.
I am uneasy making distinctions between ways of dying so I will leave it at that.
I agree that the comparisons of cold and heat deaths are compelling. I’ve used them myself. But perhaps a subtly different kind of comparison would be more informative.
Specifically, has anyone compared the total temperature-related, i.e., heat- plus cold-caused, deaths of locales whose mean temperatures differ (but preferably have equally wide max-versus-min ranges)?
Absent such comparisons, we’re left with the following possibility. Yes, there are more cold deaths than warm deaths. But maybe raising the mean temperature increases the number of heat-related deaths more than it reduces the number of cold-related deaths. I’m inclined to think that’s unlikely, but I’m not sure.
Has anyone researched this? It’s probably messy, because locations that have the same mean temperatures can have markedly different temperature swings. But it would be good to know whether such a comparison has been (creditably) done.
Joe ==> Yes, there has been research on that — but usually on short databases or “for the future”. Generally the findings are that as Global Average Temperature rises, there will be fewer cold deaths and more heat deaths. The Press report on it is in the Washington Post — the original study is mentioned in the essay above, and is here.
Thanks a lot; obviously, I was too lazy to run that down–but you already had, so I didn’t have to.
Note the logical flaw–or at least the bias–in that Post piece’s spin. Admitting not only that cold deaths dwarfed heat deaths but also that cold deaths decreased more than heat deaths as the global mean increased 0.9°F. over the last couple of decades, the author countered that such heat deaths as there were occurred more in poor countries, which are less able to adapt.
But what if they are? The chart above suggests that cold deaths exceeded heat deaths even in Thailand, and total temperature-related deaths decreased in the last two decades despite poor countries’ putative inability to adapt. So there’s little reason–other than the groundless assumption that we’re at the “Goldilocks” point–to expect that they wouldn’t do so as mean temperature similarly increases over the next two decades.
This is particularly true since the wealth increase we’d expect in coming years will likely have a greater effect on poor countries’ abilities to adapt than on rich countries’, which to a great extent are already adequate. And “polar amplification” means that hot places won’t warm nearly as fast as cold places will–and that diurnal temperature variation, which could be more determinative than absolute temperature, will probably decrease.
The woke countries are furiously destroying their wealth so intensely, and collecting what remains into small privately controlled piles, how can there be any reasonable expectation of a general “wealth increase”?
Some policy trends do seem to pose a risk, don’t they?
Joe ==> In the coming decades, more of the poor will have fans and air conditioning as well as better homes with adequate heating. Thus proofed against both ends of the col/heat problem.
That’s my view, too.
Even if it weren’t true, as I suspect it is, that the reduction in temperature-related deaths has been caused in part by the recent warming, our increased wealth has reduced our vulnerability to non-optimal temperatures, and in the future increased wealth should disproportionately benefit the currently poor in this regard. But proposed climate policies may retard that wealth increase.
This article from 2015 says that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather and that moderately warm or cool weather kills far more people than extreme weather. Increased strokes and heart attacks from cool weather are the main cause of the deaths. There are more cool days than cold day so that may be the reason that cool weather causes more heart attacks and stroke deaths than cold weather.
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
scvblwxq ==> This is the study referred to in the essay, with the chart from Gaspirini.
Another point is that according to standard greenhouse gas theory, most of the warming will occur in the places that are currently the coldest. While the areas that are currently the hottest, will see the least warming.
That’s the way it looks to me. And reduction in diurnal temperature variation may be at least as beneficial as the moderation in cold regions’ climates.
One of the tenets of AGW is that CO2 should cause more warming at night and in the Winter, so it seems unlikely that an increase in the mean would result in heat-related deaths more than the decrease in cold-related deaths.
Kip, you’ve got to stop talking sense and BELIEVE!
Here’s what Dr Friederike Otto (Fredi to her friends) said in a recent interview
“What were concerns over the impact on (sic) climate change are understood realities, it is costing thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths globally every single year”
She is a physicist with a doctorate in the philosophy of science and has lots of models, so she must be right 🙂
https:/www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/oxford-people/fredi-otto
https://www.ox,ac.uk/news-and-events/oxford-people/fredi-otto
Fred was one of the objectors to Alimonti et al
Fred was one of the objectors to Alimonti et al.
Indeed.
Which rather indicates that Fred is one of the illuminati … or thinks she is, which may be worse still.
I do hope that i will live long enough for (some of) these ignorant, evil, fraudsters to face reasonable justice.
Auto
strat ==> It’s FREDI….I believe the proper pronouns are she/her/etc.
I think it might be easier for people to “make-do” with heat with something like a spray bottle (if available) and shade. Cold is a tougher thing because burning fuel inside (wood or charcoal) can also kill. This happens every year in northern regions where many from warmer latitudes have immigrated.
The other thing is preparedness – I know it can go to 115°F [46°C] in summer and -20°F [-29°C] in winter – so I am prepared. The literature uses “non-optimal” temperature to confuse this issue. I might have only 6 weeks of optimal weather. The other 46 I need to actively deal with.
I like ice in my drink, not on the ground. People who claim cold is better never sleep in wet blankets. That should be your first clue.
The Sun has also just started a Grand Solar Minimum and some scientists are realizing that it may be getting quite cold in the coming years. Even NOAA, who is on the Climate Change bandwagon, forecasts that the Sunspot Number, which reflects the number of hot areas associated with them, will start dropping in 2025 will be dropping down to zero and staying at zero until at least 2040 when their forecast stops. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/predicted-sunspot-number-and-radio-flux
There is also a paper by the solar physicist, Valentina Zharkova, who discovered how two magnetic dynamos at different depths in the Sun give the 11-year sunspot cycle and another cycle of around 350-400 years. She says that the Sun is going to be cooling enough to lead to a mini-ice age for around 40 years with probable crop failures starting in a few years.
‘Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7575229/
Very nice Kip.
Bob ==> Thank you, glad you liked it and hopefully found it informative.
“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Stands to reason. Any warm blooded animal would suffer more in the cold.
“This type of misinformation is dangerous”
Calling it “misinformation” is very magnanimous on your part, Kip. It’s disinformation, propaganda, lies.