A warmer world lengthens human life, whereas a cooling world may result in “orders of magnitude” higher excess death rates.
A 2022 Lancet study reported 791 heat-related excess deaths and 60,753 cold-related excess deaths in England and Wales each year during the years spanning 2000-2019. That’s an excess death ratio of about 85 to 1 for cold vs. hot temperatures.
Adjusted as deaths per 100,000 person-years, the annual ratio is 1.57 heat-related deaths vs. 122.34 cold-related excess deaths throughout the 21st century.
“Our analysis indicates that the excess in mortality attributable to cold was almost two orders of magnitude higher than the excess in mortality attributable to heat.”
Image Source: Gasparrini et al., 2022
And now a new study reports that, due to warmer urban temperatures, the number of premature cold-related excess deaths avoided averaged 447 per year from 1976-2019 in the city of London alone.
The annual lives saved by warmer winter temperatures rose to 639 during the winter of 2018-2019, which is the equivalent of 70.1 lives saved by “climate change” per million Londoners.
“Since 1976, we estimate 447 (95% confidence interval 5 330, 559) annual cold-related all-cause deaths have been avoided because of milder temperatures associated with climate change.”
“In the most recent winter in our dataset (winter 2018–2019), we estimate 639 fewer cold-related deaths in London associated with counterfactual temperature, amounting to 70.1 wintertime deaths per million people in the population avoided because of climate change.”
Image Source: Hajat et al., 2024
Across the world the cold-death vs. heat-death ratio is less stark than it is in the UK. Still, since the 1980s, cold weather has killed 20 times as many people as hot weather has (Gasparrini et al., 2015).
The stated goal of “net zero” emissions is to reduce warming. And yet warming can be shown to save far more lives than it harms.
It’s good while it lasted!
“New Ice Age Has Begun”… Wait for it.
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