Whatever UN and other climate alarmists may say, a slight overall increase in average temperatures over decades and longer is not the concern here. Short-term cold weather can have a big impact on health in some circumstances, but whether any link between the doubling in cold weather deaths and the catch-all ‘climate change’ exists is an open question – natural climate variability hasn’t gone away. More people live to greater ages, for example. Saying a death is ‘cold-related’ is a medical opinion.
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It’s a perhaps unexpected consequence of climate change that periods of deep cold now occur more frequently during American winters, despite an overall trend to warmer temperatures year round, says UPI.com.
That uptick in cold snaps, along with other possible factors, has been linked to a doubling of U.S. deaths from freezing temperatures since 1999, according to new research published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The findings “warrant public health interventions to improve access to warming centers and indoor heating for vulnerable populations,” according to research led by Dr. Rishi Wadhera, an associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard University.
In their study, Wadhera’s team tracked U.S. death certificates for the over 63.5 million Americans who died between 1999 and 2022. In total, exposure to cold temperatures was listed as a direct or contributing factor in a death in 0.06% of cases over that time span.
However, the rate at which these deaths occurred more than doubled over the 23 years covered by the study: From 0.44 deaths per every 100,000 people in 1999 to 0.92 deaths per 100,000 by 2022.
That worked out to an 3.4% annual increase in cold-related deaths year-by-year since 1999, the Harvard team calculated.
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However, the bulk of the change occurred between 2016 and 2022, they noted, which has coincided with accelerations in climate change.
Certain subgroups of Americans are also at high risk of dying from exposure to freezing weather.
Full article here.
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Image credit: NBC
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December 20, 2024 at 05:57AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 