Amid all the hysteria about next week’s extreme temperatures – which could climb to 41°, according to the Met Office – it’s worth bearing in mind that many, many more excess deaths in England and Wales are associated with cold each year than with heat. According to a recent study in the Lancet Planetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.
Needless to say, the report’s authors blame these excess deaths on ‘climate change’ in general and have nothing to say about the likelihood of the 65,000 figure increasing next winter as a result of rising energy bills.
The researchers analysed 10.7 million deaths that occurred in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 across over 37,473 small areas that include around 1,600 residents, also known as lower super output areas (LSOAs). They then linked these data with high-resolution gridded temperature maps and potential drivers of vulnerability to heat and cold, including demographic and socio-economic factors, health and disability, housing and neighbourhood, landscape, and climatological characteristics. This allowed the researchers to characterise differences across small areas and map variation in temperature-related mortality risks across the two countries.
Dr Pierre Masselot, Research Fellow in in Environmental Epidemiology and Statistics at LSHTM and co-author of the study, said: “The results come at a critical time as countries and communities face increasing health impacts due to climate change and need to find effective ways to adapt to changing temperatures. The analytical framework also provides a flexible tool that can be adapted for future studies which aim to model temperature-related risks and impacts at small-area level under different climate change scenarios.”
The authors emphasised that, while the research showed that excess mortality attributed to cold was significantly higher than that attributed to heat, these results should be interpreted with caution as more cold than hot days were recorded throughout the year. Despite this, they highlighted that cold-related mortality is evidently a considerable health burden, particularly in deprived areas, and should be addressed with targeted public health interventions.
Nevertheless, any un-biased person reading this report cannot help but conclude that the rising cost of utility bills caused, in part, by the Government’s pursuit of ‘net zero’ will result in far more deaths than next week’s heat wave.
If you really care about reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures, shouldn’t you focus your energies on getting the Government to scrap its ‘net zero’ target, lift the ban on rracking and start investing billions in nuclear, instead of disrupting traffic and sporting events?
You can read the Lancet Planetary Health study here.
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Nobody cares about reducing deaths due to temperatures. Since summer 2018 didn’t repeat on its own so far, these people care for establishing summer as synonymous for deadly heatwaves due to climate change ([Politicians fiddling while] Europe burns! — headline I saw on the BBC today. I’ve added the missing half to the well-known saying).
To add some perspective to this heatwave: I usually do my main grocery shopping on Sunday. This amounts to packing a backpack full of glass bottles and walking about 1.6 miles to the Caversham Waitrose. There, I put the bottles in a glass container, buy a backpack full of stuff and (last Sunday) walk back the same way, making for a 3.3 miles roundtrip (both rounded to one decimal from the actual distance). Last Sunday, it was sunny and very hot, hence I carefully stayed in the shade whenever possible and made a smoking break after about half of the distance to recover a little.
Today, the first day with a Met office Extreme Heat weather warning in place for Reading, I did nothing of that sort as it was overcast and much more pleasant to walk despite covering a larger distance (from Caversham over Christchurch Meadows accross Reading bridge, from there through the Forbury and the Abbey ruins to the Back of Beyond to have a beer. Then, alongside the canal to High Bridge and passing through the Oracle Riverside).
The Bullshit Britain! Corporation claims temperatures will jump almost 10C upward tomorrow. I’ll believe that after it happened.
I’m usually in Caversham Waitrose on a Sunday. Caversham Waitrose did have a good young (ish) manager (bearded) in there in the ‘pandemic’. I felt…(for various reasons) that he was very happy to see customers not wearing masks… Staff ‘relaxed’ – some wearing, some not. Then he went to Marlow so Caversham had a new manager. Cue all the staff back in b____ masks. (This was last year.) Saw him there again recently – hope he’s back.
Thankfully, the times when I was the only faced being in there are over, at least for now. Even the customers are meanwhile overwhelmingly unmasked again. Much nicer.
A temperature change of 10C from one day to the next is not at all unusual, indeed most forecasts are predicting that temperatures in England will drop 10C between Tuesday and Wednesday. Given that temperatures can change that much in 24 hours (and in some parts of the world by much more) and always have at times I think it shows how rediculose it is for alarmists to claim that a temperature increase of 1 or 2 degrees will lead to disaster and the end of the world as we know it.
There’s a crucial difference here: The first refers to actually measured temperatures. The second to a fictional global temperature created by (incorrectly) averaging an ever-changing set of different temperature measurements.
Contrived example why this is nonsense: Assuming there’s a couple with the man measuring 1.9m and the woman 1.35m (not that uncommon), their average height is 1.625m. What does this number communicate about the two people? Answer: Nothing. It communicates that x=1.9 and y=1.35 is one of infinitely many solutions for the equation (x + y) / 2 = 1.625.
Everybody who talks about a global temperature is either too clueless to understand why such a thing doesn’t exist or intentionally deceiving people with nonsense-calculations.
Written like a true sceptic! Keep up the good work!
Today, in Norfolk, a maximum of 31 deg C outdoors; 25 deg C indoors, with no fans, and certainly no air-conditioning.
I still can’t believe that item from yesterday/early today(Telegraph), about the union leader demanding that workers can bunk off when the temperature reaches 25 deg C! Laughing stock, or what?
What were the temperatures for people working on that death railway in French Indo-China (or wherever it was)? And the hunidity!
Yes, let’s hear more about those deaths from cold. The ones likely to be caused by people being unable to afford to heat their homes; after all, Boris would be disappointed if people forgot to follow his orders “let the bodies pile high”. Is the government going to talk about deaths by cold with the same glee that they’ve been saying people will die of heat? Of course not, because if they were to ration fuel to satisfy “green” targets, or make it impossibly expensive, they’d have blood on their hands. Are they trying to make people think of death by heat, so that we “welcome” the cold? More nudge theory?
I’ll believe in the “fabled forty” IF it happens. Not before. I have my bingo card ready for the Wednesday backtracking: “Actually, it wasn’t as bad as we
knew it wouldn’t bethought it would be. But it is a warning.”It was 25c today, south coast, and a very pleasant breeze. Assuming its where they record the temperature. Its the Nudge unit pushing the Climate Agenda and the media with their click bait.
The BBC are currently claiming 42 degrees Celsius for Sheffield on Tuesday. And 41 for Luton, Peterborough and Cambridge.
There was a story, wasn’t there, about out door work being suspended in Chinese cities where the temperature was to hit 42 degrees C. We’ll see if the Sheffield prediction turns out to be true.
I’ll say again, these over-insulated new-builds in the South were reported some years ago as being uncomfortably hot in warm weather, even when using air conditioning.
If some people die from heat this week, the climate scare mob will have some responsibility, same as with Grenfell and their EU rules cladding (cf. the late, great Christopher Booker).