“Extra folks die in winter than in summer season, however local weather change may see it the opposite means round” – Watts Up With That?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
An uncomfortable truth for climate alarmists is winter deaths, even in a warm country like Australia, which far outnumber summer deaths. Humans are tropical monkeys – our bodies do not cope well with cold weather.
More people die in winter than in summer, but climate change could see it the other way around
April 27, 2021 6:08 a.m. AEST
Ivan Charles Hanigan Data Scientist (Epidemiology), University of Sydney
Alistair Woodward Professor at the University of Auckland’s School of Population Health
Keith Dear Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Adelaide
Climate change not only poses enormous threats to the planet, it is also harmful to human health. In our study published today, we show some of the first evidence that climate change had observable effects on Australian health between 1968 and 2018.
We found that long-term warming is linked to an altered seasonal balance of deaths in Australia, with relatively more deaths in the summer months and relatively fewer deaths in the winter months over the past few decades.
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We found that there were approximately 73 deaths in the summer of 1968 for every 100 deaths in the winter. As of 2018, there were around 83 deaths per 100 winter deaths in summer.
The same trend, albeit of varying magnitude, was seen in all Australian states, in all age groups over 55, in women and men, and in the three causes of death we examined (respiratory, heart and kidney disease).
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/more-people-die-in-winter-than-summer-but-climate-change-may-see-this-reverse-159135
The abstract of the study;
Increased ratio of summer to winter deaths due to global warming in Australia, 1968–2018
Ivan C. Hanigan Keith BG Dear Alistair Woodward
First published: April 26, 2021
abstract
Goal setting: To see if global warming has changed the balance between summer and winter deaths in Australia.
Methods: The number of summer and winter-related deaths of subjects aged 55 and over for the years 1968–2018 was entered into a Poisson time series regression. Analysis was stratified by Australian states and territories, gender, age, and cause of death (respiratory, cardiovascular, and kidney diseases). The warmest and coldest subgroups of the seasons were compared.
Results: Warming over 51 years was associated with a long-term increase in the summer to winter mortality ratio from 0.73 in the summer of 1969 to 0.83 in the summer of 2018. The increase was faster in years that were warmer than average.
Conclusions: Mortality in the warmest and coldest times of the year converges with increasing annual average temperatures.
Public Health Effects: If climate change continues, deaths will dominate the mortality burden in Australia in the hottest months.
Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1753-6405.13107
In examining the study, the researchers appear to have naively calculated summer and winter deaths, concluding that climate change affects the ratio of summer to winter deaths, as the ratio is less extreme today than it was in 1969.
You don’t have to be a statistics genius to spot a problem. This would be a reasonable approach if nothing else had changed, but something important has changed since the 1960s – the quality of Australian homes.
In 1969, like most Australians, I lived in a non-insulated wooden house. Bitterly cold in winter, even when a wood or coal fire is burning, scorching hot in summer.
Today many, if not most, Australian homes have decent insulation, either because they were built since 1969 or because they were upgraded to make them more comfortable sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. The internal temperature no longer varies as much as it used to. Gas central heating and indoor toilets also became a thing in Australia in the 1970s. I remember the excitement when my family moved into a brick house with insulation and heated floor vents. I didn’t have to spend the winter in a small family room huddled in front of the fireplace.
After moving, if someone caught the flu, they could spend time in their own room, kept warm by central heating, instead of sharing their viruses with everyone and breathing clogged air with stuffy coal and tobacco smoke in the crowded family room .
So it’s no wonder that desperately ill people survive the winters in Australia and run out for good in the summer. Most of the sick people in Australia today do not have to endure the same hardships that their ancestors experienced in the 1960s. This alone should explain the smoothing of the ratio of summer to winter deaths.
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