Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 12 September 2023

As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age,  the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up.  The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived-cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.

This new panic, the history of which I will not recount, resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and subsequent The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the current crop of international bureaucrats screaming about the Climate Emergency and Global Boiling.   The slight and mostly beneficial general warming is propagandistically portrayed as heating and hotness.  

Heat and Hotness are thus portrayed, always, as Too Much Heat and Too Hot; then to Dangerously Hot and Deadly Heat –in the time-honored 1984-ish propaganda slippery slope. 

Now, the Climate Emergency agenda  demands blood – bodies in the morgue, dead and dying grandparents and dead children, to back up its story-line of  Deadly Heat. 

Thus we have the mainstream mass media repeating endlessly that the warming we are experiencing and the summers we have in the Northern Hemisphere are killing us.

The is a bug in that ointment:  Cold and low temperatures have always resulted in the deaths of far many more humans than warmth and high temperatures. 

The facts have not stopped dedicated scientists, whole teams of them, from trying to prove the opposite of the truth. 

In the United States, climate harm enthusiasts haul out the following chart from NOAA’s weather.gov site page:

Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics.

 This particular graph gives an entirely false idea because it is simplistic.  It comes from the Storm Events Database and does not even pretend to represent total U.S. deaths from extreme temperatures, hot or cold, only those from “storms” in the database.  There is also the Cause of Death problem, which you can read about here.

To discover the truth about Heat v. Cold Deaths, it is necessary to look to the scientific literature on the topic.  A quick survey can be accomplished with a Google Scholar search like this.  It returns the first ten out of very many papers on the topic.  Typical findings are:

“Results: In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality (around 61 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, respectively). In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively”   [ source ]

“Results    Between 2000 and 2010, 3.9% [CI 95% 3.2:4.6] of the total mortality was attributed to cold, and 1.2% [1.1:1.2] to heat.”  [ source ]

Results:  ….” Cold effects on mortality appeared higher than heat effects in this subtropical city with moderate climatic conditions.” (São Paulo, Brazil) [source ]

I wrote seven years ago:  “Surprising Results From Study: Moderate Cold Kills More People Than Extreme Heat”.   That essay related the finsings of the then ‘latest’ study on heat and cold deaths:  Gasparrini et al. (2015) in Lancet 2015; 386: 369–75 (.pdf)

The title told it all.  This chart from Gasparini gives the details:

Compare these hot v. cold deaths bars to those of NOAA’s Weather.gov far above.

Interestingly, as the title declares, moderate cold kills far more than extreme cold or moderate or extreme heat in this multi-country, multi-continent study. 

Coming closer to present time, The Lancet–Planetary Health, published Qi Zhao et al (2021), titled: “Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study”.  The paper has a distressingly long list of authors.  But the authors made their best effort to do dig out “the global, regional, and national mortality burden associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures.”

When all the data was run through the computers and the models, the bottom line was:

“….9.43% (95% CI 7.58–11.07) of all deaths (8.52% [6.19–10·47] were cold-related and 0.91% [0.56–1.36] were heat-related. There were 74 temperature-related excess deaths per 100 000 residents (95% CI 60–87). The mortality burden varied geographically.”

That is:  non-optimal cold ambient temperatures cause ten times the number of deaths worldwide than non-optimal warm temperatures.

Bottom Line:

The question of which causes more human deaths worldwide, higher or lower temperatures, heat or cold, is not controversial.  It is well understood and the findings of many studies are quite clear. 

Cold, low ambient temperature, leads to the death of far more human beings than Heat,  higher ambient temperature, by an order of magnitude, ten times more deaths from low temperatures. 

Any report to the contrary, claiming that heat kills more people than cold, is either made form total ignorance of the facts, or is intentional disinformation.

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Author’s Comment:

It is one of the sillier aspects of the Climate Wars that this issue is bandied about, with major journals, such as the Scientific American publishing such nonsense as “These heat waves pose a major risk to public health. “In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.”

This type of misinformation is dangerous – the Gasparini chart in the essay shows that even in the U.S. extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat, but the real killer (well, leading cause of illness leading to death) is Moderate Cold.

I won’t say that the science is settled…but the evidence is in in Heat v. Cold.  Cold is the killer.

Thanks for reading.

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The only way wind and solar look cheap is by ignoring every associated cost attached to generating power using sunshine and breezes.

For the last 20 years, the wind industry has presented numbers that never add up. Its accounting ‘methods’ include vastly overstating output (revenue) and grossly understating generating costs (including Operations and Maintenance) (expenses); and completely ignoring the cost of having every single MW of wind and solar generating capacity matched with another MW of dispatchable generating capacity (coal, gas, diesel or nuclear), likewise when it comes to the additional transmission and grid capacity required to bring intermittent, occasionally generated wind and solar from the rural back blocks to cities and suburbs.

In the piece below, Kathryn Porter does a pretty fair job of calculating the true and staggering cost of wind power, but overlooks the high operations and maintenance costs attached to running these things -which, as they age, continues to increase over time.

A decade ago, one Australian outfit Infigen, reported that the operations and maintenance costs of its fleet of whirling wonders runs at around AUD$25 per MWh (which doesn’t sit with the narrative about wind power being generated with zero marginal cost).

But, apart from that little slip, what Kathryn Porter has to say about the true costs of wind and solar, adds up.

Don’t believe the renewables myth. Wind and solar are not cheap
The Telegraph
Kathryn Porter
25 August 2023

Politicians everywhere are repeating the mantra that renewable energy is cheap, and we need to use it instead of gas (currently expensive in and near Europe) to bring down energy costs for households.

As US President Joe Biden said of clean energy before signing the poetically named Executive Actions on Tackling Climate Change, Creating Jobs, and Restoring Scientific Integrity “it’s affordable; because it’s clean; because, in many cases, it’s cheaper… [clean technologies] will ultimately become cheaper than any other kind of energy, helping us dramatically expand our economy and create more jobs with a cleaner, cleaner environment”.

The Inflation Reduction Act has been designed to make this a reality. Lots of investment in lovely green energy and green jobs. This sounds wonderful.

Unfortunately, renewables are not cheap.

To demonstrate, let’s carry out a thought experiment…

Imagine you build a machine. It’s very expensive to build, but once it’s done, it makes Things. These Things are identical in every way to Things made by other people. Making Things is very cheap: the machine runs on wind/sun/water and has no fuel costs, and no raw materials are required. Making Things is essentially free once you have built the machine. What will you charge to sell your Things?

Normally you would want to recover the cost of building the machine and make some profit. Ten years is reasonable to recover capital costs, so you work out how many Things you will make over ten years and spread the cost plus some profit between them. After ten years, you’re happy to more or less give the Things away, selling them for a minimal amount.

But here’s the rub. Down the road is another Thing factory that was built eleven years ago, whose upfront costs have already been recovered. Those Things are being sold for next to nothing. Who is going to buy your Things now unless you also charge next to nothing? But if you do that, you can’t pay back the money invested in building your machine. That means that unless you can earn money from something other than selling Things, you will never build your factory in the first place.

In the electricity market, we get round that problem with subsidies. Originally, subsidies were paid because the technology for producing renewable electricity was immature meaning upfront costs were exceptionally high, but after more than 20 years of subsidies, this is no longer the case. Today, electricity prices are still determined for the most part by the cost of fossil fuels, so renewable electricity can be sold at much higher prices than the short term cost of production. But even then, renewables still require subsidies.

In fact, subsidies are growing. According to the Energy Information Administration, renewable subsidies in the US jumped to $15.6 billion in fiscal year 2022 from $7.4 billion in fiscal year 2016. In Britain, last year’s subsidy round was hailed as the cheapest and best, but the projects which bid have for the most part stalled as developers ask for more money, despite the high market price of electricity. Only two projects have confirmed they will go ahead and begun construction, while Vattenfall cancelled its Boreas project in the North Sea and Ørsted has warned that Hornsea 3 could be at risk without Government action “to maintain the attractiveness of the investment environment”, saying it is working “very hard” to make the project financially viable but that the electricity prices offered by the Government are not high enough to compensate for surging development costs.

If projects are not economic when electricity prices are at record highs, how will they work if a time comes when electricity prices are very low?

That’s the dirty little secret of the renewables game. The very high upfront costs mean developers have to be paid lots of money, and if the money from selling electricity isn’t enough then it has to come from elsewhere. But ultimately it comes out of consumers’ pockets, whether directly through higher bills, or indirectly through higher taxes.

That’s not all. Developed countries built their electricity grids decades ago when electricity came from a few large power stations. Renewable generation is built where it’s windy/sunny or has good access to water at height or moving fast (for hydro). These places tend to be not where old power stations used to be or where consumers are. This means lots of new infrastructure is needed to connect it all up. Guess who has to pay for that?

Next is the issue of intermittency: wind and sun vary from moment to moment. Individual clouds make a measurable difference to generation, as do gusts of wind. This creates two additional challenges – one is that if there’s no wind or sun, renewable output falls – the famous California “duck curve” measures the way solar output changes through the day with a major drop at sunset, when gas power stations need to take over.

Other sources of generation (there is no at-scale energy storage solution) have to be on standby to run when renewable output falls. But no-one builds standby anything unless it’s worth their while – and that’s another big chunk of change consumers have to cough up.

The other problem with intermittency is that electricity grids need supply and demand to be finely balanced in real time. Grid equipment can be damaged if this balance is not maintained within narrow tolerances. If clouds and gusts of wind change supply from moment to moment, grid operators have to use a range of techniques such as discharging batteries, getting conventional power stations to vary output, or large users to vary consumption, over short timeframes. Unsurprisingly, nobody does any of this for free. Another cost to consumers.

The final sting in the tail is that the grid infrastructure, despite expansion to cope with renewables, often can’t use all the renewable electricity generated. This electricity is wasted, and the renewable generators have to be compensated through “curtailment” or “congestion” fees, again paid for by consumers. According to consulting firm Grid Strategies, costs to consumers from congestion on the US power grid jumped 56 per cent in 2022 to an estimated $20.8 billion from $13.3 billion the year before. In Britain, data from the UK Wind Curtailment Monitor show that consumers paid £125 million in 2022 to turn windfarms off and £717 million to buy replacement gas-fired generation.

Even if the wholesale price of electricity fell to zero to reflect the short-run marginal cost of producing renewable electricity, the price paid by consumers would simply be more disconnected from the wholesale price than it is today. Consumers pay the wholesale price, plus a network cost (including congestion costs), plus a balancing cost, plus a subsidy cost, plus the retailer/supplier operating costs, plus some profits for everyone in the chain from the generator to the network owner to the network operator to the retailer. And then some taxes on top.

And to hit net zero the whole electrical system – expanded renewables, expanded grid, backup fossil, balancing, subsidies, curtailment payments and all – will have to be expanded to multiple times its current size, as fossil fuels used directly in such things as heating and transport are replaced with electricity.

Anyone who thinks all this is going to mean cheaper energy is dreaming. With respect, Mr President.
The Telegraph