Is there some news here?
So people are dying just staying at home. Sounds scary. What are we all to do now.
Yes. Major macro events in progress.
We have lots and lots of people.
Some would say many too many.
Some would say that’s the problem.
But they won’t all survive.
We will need to adapt to that as a species.
But there’s no investment thesis here (well, maybe air conditioners but they make it worse).
It should be remembered that cold kills many more people than heat. Gasparrini et al. found that extreme temperatures were responsible for 0.9% of deaths. Of those, 18x more were caused by cold than by heat.
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0.pdf
DB2
When I used to hunt ducks up in Montana it would get down to around 35 below. You would think that would be enough to freeze everything. But when hunting along the river on cross country skiis I would find a pocket or two that wasn’t completely frozen over. Oh it looked frozen but it was thin ice. Usually because the river would push up in that part. The skiis helped with distributing the weight but there was a couple of times I still went in. The key was wearing wool. If you had on wool you could roll in the snow and it would automatically freeze the wool and you could brush it off. Freeze dried clothing. Those wool pants and my parka(which was down so didn’t dry) saved me. Also running back to the truck for the heater helped.
In the days before cell phones, it was routine for the local news in west Michigan to report on someone getting stuck in a snow drift, seeing the lights of a house across a field, head for the house, and die before they get there. The police were always reminding people keep their gas tank well filled, and, if they get stuck, stay in the car, run the engine from time to time to put some heat in the car, and wait to be found.
Steve
Well that is better than what they do in Fargo.
Well that is better than what they do in Fargo.
My grandparents had a cottage at a lake outside of Kalamazoo, that looked much like the lake in “Fargo”. I am also very familiar with the conditions depicted in “Fargo” where you can’t tell the sky from the ground, because everything is white.
I want an environmental from God refund for this ride.
I was in Costco today. I am saying this because there is nothing serious in this thread. There was a huge number of people in the food court. We all had our orders in. One guy got half his order. He had been waiting 15 minutes. He then got the second half of his order. A massive meal for one. He complained for two minutes that he wanted his money back for his wait. I said go to the manager over there. I was getting angry. Let the workers work was my thinking as I waited. He was told by the people behind the counter to go the manager. The manager seeing him with an armful off lunch would not return his money. LOL
That proves God will not refund us if we die of cold or hot.
You are getting what you paid for…
and then some
Plus 20
I can’t find worldwide heat death trends subsequent to your 2015 article, but cdc says heat deaths were the number one cause of temperature related deaths in the us in 2021 with about 1600, then over 1700 in 2022, and over 2300 in 2023. If I were industrious, I could probably prove that heat deaths are increasing at a rapid and accelerating rate worldwide. Do you have any heat death studies subsequent to 2015?
It is apparently hard to count direct heat related deaths because of increases in heart attacks and strokes during heat waves that are not diagnosed as heat related deaths.
Zhao et al. published in The Lancet in 2021. They looked at 750 locations world-wide and found five million deaths associated with “non-optimal temperatures”. Cold related deaths were 9.4x greater than heat related deaths.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
DB2
To interpret papers like these it is important to understand how the study was done. The methods section is pretty brief but my best guess is this is a correlational study. I think the authors measured “excess deaths” (mortality above what would be expected) on abnormally cold and hot days and found a lot more excess mortality on cold days. Hence cold-related deaths > heat-related deaths, with most of both occurring in big cities.
Seems to me that this could just reflect the higher risks of driving in snow/ice and the higher risk of influenza in the winter.
This could be why the paper also notes this nonintuitive observation:
"Eastern Europe had the highest heat-related excess death rate and Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest cold-related excess death rate. "
A higher frequency of cold mortality in Africa than in Eastern Europe?!?! Eastern Europeans are probably far more used to dealing with snow/ice and have much higher natural immunity to winter-related respiratory diseases than Africans. The reverse is true when it comes to heat.
Indeed, that is part of the excess winter mortality (EWM). Also things such as heart attacks. However, EWM also show up in warmer countries such as Israel, India and Brazil. For example, myocardial infarctions are significantly (P<0.01) higher in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil in the winter months.
Vardoulakis et al. found that cold related deaths were much higher than heat-related deaths in both the UK and Australia (20x and 16x, respectively). They then modeled the effects of global warming and estimated that the decrease in cold-related deaths would be twice as much as the increase in heat-related deaths.
DB2
So…your studies show a worldwide ratio of cold weather related deaths to heat-related deaths of 18:1 in 2015, and 9:1 in 2021? Sounds like heat related deaths worldwide are rising at an even greater rate than I would have guessed.
I wonder what the numbers are for 2022 and 2023?