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In a surprise, mammals with a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius do better in warmer weather
Who knew that global warming has saved 166,000 lives a year every year since 2000? Burn coal, save the world! Some countries are just not doing enough to help. Does your nation have a Net-100 Plan for 2050 to double CO2 emissions? It’s never too late to start. Countries that leave coal deposits undeveloped are not part of the solution.
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Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think
Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal
… climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.
Headlines predictably said “Heat Deaths Up 50%” since the year 2000. But Lomborg points out that most all […]
The world has record high CO2 levels, which supposedly warms us in winter but apparently not as well as cheap electricity does. As the long winter is set to drag on, Brits are being advised to heat one room as well as they can and live there. This is “progress”…
48,000 Brits dead after worst winter in 42 years
After a brief mild spell, temperatures are set to dip again in April after the chilliest March in 21 years.
It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December 1 and March
That includes nearly 5,000 Brits under the age of 65 whose lives may have been cut short.
According to the Office of National Statistics, one in 10 cold weather deaths are among under-65s, one in 10 among 65-75s and eight in 10 among over-75s.
The Department of Health also said cold conditions worsen winter killers including flu, chest diseases, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
It doesn’t matter where you live — more people die in winter than summer all over the world. It’s not outdoor temperatures that matter — it’s the indoor climate that kills.
Save the world, […]
Higher electricity costs mean more people turn off their heaters
There’s a big freeze coming to Britain with minus 12C temperatures possible in the next three weeks.
Last year in winter in England there was a remarkable 40% rise in winter deaths
David Archibald emails that last year was a mild winter for Brits, but the death toll rose from the normal 25,000 excess to 34,000 people. Remembering that it’s moderate cold that kills far more people than extreme temperatures. The UK government advises rooms be heated to at least 18C. (I’ve been in a Canberra house where the temperature fell to 11C indoors, and that was in May.) Despite all the newspaper headlines about outside temperatures, the big killer is indoors.
The big killer is indoor temperature and moderately cold, not extremes.
Campaigners demand urgent cuts to power bill after number of winter deaths among the elderly rise by 40%
Pensioner groups are demanding urgent measures to cut the cost of heat and light after official figures revealed a surge in deaths last winter. There were some 34,300 so-called ‘excess’ deaths during the cold months, according to new figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). […]
Now this is climate change. If you can believe this study, wow:
“In the tropics, annual mean temperature fell from 27 to 5 degrees Celsius”
And we worry about a warming of one degree in a century.
“It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid’s impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. “The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time. It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis,” says co-author Georg Feulner who leads the research team at PIK. It took the climate about 30 years to recover, the scientists found.
The real threats are not fertilizer and balmy weather, but rocks from space, and cold, cold, cold…
How the […]
And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold?
How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity?
What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday.
MOSCOW — Some 215 Russians have died this year in a prolonged period of abnormally cold winter weather, the health ministry said Monday as the overall death toll for Europe rose to well over 600. [National Post]
NASA Earth Observatory. Dark blue areas are -15C below average. White areas are average. Deep Red are 15C above. (See the NASA link below for the proper scale):.
The Danube has frozen over from Austria to the Black Sea, and 224 ships (some delivering fuel) have been stuck in their ports. Schools in Bosnia have been closed for days. Trains in Montenegroare at a standstill, and one train with 50 passengers was stranded in a tunnel for three days before rescuers began evacuating people yesterday.
In Serbia 11,000 villagers are trapped by huge […]
Tomb of Hong Quan Fu. Photo Iflwlou拍攝
It seems a warmer climate might be bad, but a colder one is deadly.
Once upon a time, people thought that overpopulation triggered crashes, but in this study by Lee and Zhang the hard numbers suggest instead that it was climate, and of course, it’s not the warmer kind of climate that causes the problems but the colder kind.
Malthusian cycles of population boom and bust aren’t the drivers here (though presumably having a large population means there is little buffer when the deadly cold spells hit).
From NIPCC: Cold Periods caused population crashes in China over the last millenium
…there were 5 major population contractions in China between 1000 CE and 1911, and all of them occurred in periods with a cold climate, when mortality crises triggered population collapses. [Abstract]
How much fun can you have in a long frost? Almost every kind of uprising, pain or plague.
In one population crash, the losses were as high as 49% of the peak. In the face of a 50:50 death rate, “perspective” doesn’t seem like quite the right word.
10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]
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