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New research suggests that U.S. climate change, and the unpredictable temperature swings it can bring, may boost death rates in seniors.
"Temperature variability emerges as a key feature in the potential impacts of climate change. The take-home message: Unusual temperature is bad for people's health," said study author Liuhua Shi, a graduate student in the department of environmental health at Harvard's School of Public Health in Boston.
Scientists have long been debating the health effects of climate change, and the general assumption is that it will make people sicker through more extreme heat, more flooding and more polluted air.
Shi and colleagues launched their study in the New England area to better understand how weather affects death rates. "Many studies have reported associations between short-term temperature changes and increased daily deaths," Shi said. "However, there is little evidence to date on the long-term effect of temperature."
The researchers looked at Medicare statistics regarding 2.7 million people over the age of 65 in New England from 2000 to 2008. Of those, Shi said, 30 percent died during the study.
The researchers found death rates rose when the average summer temperature rose significantly, and death rates dropped when the average winter temperature rose significantly.
The researchers believe the increased risk in the summer is due to an increase in the variability of temperatures. According to Shi, "climate change may affect mortality rates by making seasonal weather more unpredictable, creating temperature conditions significantly different to those to which people have become acclimatized."
On the other hand, warmer winter temperatures caused by climate change could actually reduce deaths, the researchers added.
The study appears in the July 13 issue of Nature Climate Change.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday July 20 2015, @01:04PM
a LOT of people are going to have to start dying off before politicians realize we need to actually put resources in to restoring our planet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @01:09PM
Kind of a shallow interpretation.
The problem with analyzing the existing climate change effects is that they need to be compared to a hypothetical world where it's 1 C cooler. We don't know exactly what that's like, and denialists have a (arguably almost justifiable) free pass to dismiss all analyses like this one as conjecture.
And denialism is no longer just a political maneuver by those few in industries who would actually lose out by doing something about climate change. It's become a collective identity. A self-sustaining morass of idiots who don't want to admit their mistakes, least of all themselves.
Bringing this back to being a response to your post: there are people for whom these deaths are meaningless, for whom holding politicians accountable for them is a personal insult to their intelligence. They're really fucked up and they're going to be in this thread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @01:51PM
These people are destroying our society's scientific establishments by pushing wild speculations and meaningless correlations as science (yes everything is correlated with everything else, you can stop checking whether p is less than 0.05 now). This problem goes well beyond the area of climate, that is just one the areas it is most visible because the media likes to hype it. Most doing this stuff are just very poorly trained in math, logic, and history/philosophy of science.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @01:55PM
What an absolute shit opinion, with shit justification. And I can't even tell what "side" you're arguing.
Come on man, separating statistical noise from observational study is important. We aren't talking about spurious correlations, we're talking about correlations with well-understood causative factors.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @02:28PM
I just checked the paper. Amazing they can publish a paper on the correlation between temperature and mortality without any plots of temperature vs time, mortality vs time, or temperature vs mortality. They have not even tried to find the functional form of this relationship, or anything. It is nothing but seeing that two cyclical phenomena are correlated with each other.
I happen to be very interested in relationships between weather and human mortality/births/migration/etc right now, this paper is not helpful. It is trivial to realize that everything is correlated with everything else when you start looking at that type of data. Instead of the one paper necessary explaining that, we get decades and tens of thousands about these "important" discoveries.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 20 2015, @02:45PM
The correlation between temperature extremes, temperature swings, and mortality is already well documented and understood.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @03:01PM
Seasonality is a fascinating topic. My specific interest is regarding infectious disease, which is often seasonal. At least in that case, the driving force behind the cycle is not clear. However, writing a paper merely noting the existence of the correlation between temperature and mortality once again is ridiculous.
If you are going to bother collecting the data together, etc you may as well come up with some theory to fit the relationship. I am sure if they did do that it would be way overblown and hyped though. People forget the point is to then compare that explanation to future data.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @03:02PM
Not that I think you're wrong, but this would a great time to demonstrate this documentation. I don't actually know what kind of medical literature to look for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @03:14PM
Just look up seasonal mortality, you will find tons of papers. However, it is better to get the data and plot it for yourself. There are many interesting patterns (age, birth cohort effects, etc):
http://www.nber.org/data/vital-statistics-mortality-data-multiple-cause-of-death.html [nber.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Monday July 20 2015, @07:58PM
Start here [wikipedia.org]. Then google "Heat related deaths U.S."
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @08:11PM
Ouch. I was hoping for a bit more than "here's an example and google it".
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 20 2015, @08:24PM
I don't really have time to cut/paste a thousand google hits.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @08:38PM
And it wouldn't. I'm sorry, but this isn't the kind of record I was hoping for. I'm looking for rigorous science and not news articles. It's okay. I'm not trying to extract what you don't have, nor am I trying to defend the opposite point from what you're presenting.
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Monday July 20 2015, @11:18PM
That's what Shi said!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @04:58PM
You mean, like we can't know whether that guy who just got shot wouldn't have died from a heart attack a few seconds later anyway?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @05:27PM
Well, nominally speaking, that's a bit apt.
The problem is that framing is that it represents a single discrete death. A case where we can really dig in and examine everything involved. Here, we're talking about a trend modeled against a hypothesized trend. Keep in mind here, I don't think the analysis is particularly flawed, just that the obvious objections aren't completely without merit. Those dropping them are giving them a lot more credit than they're due, but they're real concerns.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday July 20 2015, @01:57PM
The first assumption is our government is honest and effective and the regulation change has any effect on climate change at all. Oh we'll get regulation change, probably just to transfer more wealth to the wealthy. I find the odds of the regulation change having any effect on climate to not be much higher than changing postage stamp rates, or handing our defense contracts. I mean, if these people were intelligently running the banking system, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, or the local DMV intelligently, I'd give them a pass, but lets face it, we're not going to get what we need, or what we ask for, or what they claim they're giving us.
The second assumption is given that it might be possible to determine how many people are killed by climate change, how many people will regulation change kill? Anything more than a token PR-only effort will kill a lot more than zero, quite possibly more than the results of not changing anything, either regulation or climate.
The third assumption is only dead old people matter and/or we're really good at comparing different forms of suffering. Lets say shutting down the coal mines in WV thus eliminating one individual's few remaining jobs in WV saves an elderly person one extra week of life, but the now permanently unemployed and therefore uninsured ex-miner's wife obviously gets no prenatal care so their kid comes out messed up for life. So now you've gotta balance the loss of a very small fraction of a life vs a life long birth deformity. Obviously the numbers are made up, but it is an interesting point that active micromanagement / central planning of the economy to change the distribution of suffering might not only change the total amount of suffering in an unpredictable manner, but also simultaneously change the form of suffering.
So I guess in summary once a "LOT of people" start dying off, we can expect tons of political activity along the lines of copyright limit extensions, corrupt as hell tax incentive deals for major campaign donors, elimination of more civil rights, and bayoneting of the wounded, as traditional for our government. Probably they'll find a way to make it worse, if they profit more off crisis than they do off BAU. They're not going to "fix" anything because they never have and never will.
If by politician, you mean a non-failed-state government, like maybe Canada or the UN or Putin taking over the entire world, then you have to balance the death stats for regime change vs any projections for climate change. Putin fixing climate change after he takes over the world by nuking north america is likely to be a net loss for the environment overall, for example. So merely implementing regime change in the USA isn't necessarily an overall system-wide win, either.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday July 20 2015, @02:24PM
Well, there's your problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @09:00PM
If you're not working, you don't deserve to live. That's the very core of US society.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Monday July 20 2015, @02:35PM
A LOT of people die all the time. We (politicians and all of us who elect them) don't really care about those people, unless there is a real chance that we will be among them.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday July 20 2015, @02:56PM
A LOT of people die all the time. We (politicians and all of us who elect them) don't really care about those people,
a) that isn't true
b) the job of a politician is to care for their people.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday July 20 2015, @06:51PM
a) that isn't true
6,000,000,000 / 80 years / 365.25 days = 205,339 humans dying each day merely from old age. I'd say it's a lot.
b) the job of a politician is to care for their people.
Even if that's true (which is rare,) you are facing the dillemma of Teela Brown. As a ruler, how many people are you willing to kill today (by redirecting their food and healthcare monies to fight against AGW) so that in future some other number of people would be (or maybe wouldn't) alive and well?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @09:03PM
Because those are the only possible places where the money could come from, right? Its not like we could reduce corporate welfare or reduce military spending, nope, those two can never be decreased.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @09:06PM
6,000,000,000
That number is from the last century.
The number has been over 7 billion since 2011.
how many people are you willing to kill today (by redirecting their food and healthcare monies to fight against AGW)
Riiight. More austerity. Typical Reactionary.
How about instead of that we dial back the $trillions pissed away on wars of aggression?
How about not buying so damned many weapons that the excess gets passed out like party favors to militarized police forces?
Start with the weapons that don't work at all--like the F-35 that gets outflown in the air-to-air role by a 40 year old F-16 and gets outflown in the air-to-ground role by a 40 year old A-10.
What about those NINETEEN aircraft carrier task forces that are WAY more than is necessary for "defense"?
How about we tax the uber-rich in the way we did during the Eisenhower administration?
Y'know, the time when the country was booming and there was an -expanding- "Middle Class".
How about we just stop doing things the old, dirty, damaging way and stop burning stuff to produce energy?
Stop subsidizing dinosaurs (dead and otherwise).
Instead, capture some of the petawatts that are available gratis and pollution-free from that big yellow thing.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Monday July 20 2015, @11:47PM
How about instead of that we dial back the $trillions pissed away on wars of aggression? How about not buying so damned many weapons that the excess gets passed out like party favors to militarized police forces?
I don't disagree. However I don't see a socially acceptable method to make that happen. Will you vote for Hillary (who is for wars) or for Cruz (who is for wars?) Does it matter, in the end, who you vote for?
In this situation the money to fight AGW will be coming - and are coming - from pockets of customers like you and me. There is a new expense - carbon credits - on the balance sheet of that coal-fired power plant? Raise the price of energy. The end user will pay; as result, he may be unable to pay for healthcare that he needs (as an example.) The government could help him out by reducing taxes (because of reduction of military expenses) - but it's not all that likely that we will live long enough to see the taxes lowered. What we may see, though, is taxes dropping to zero. But I am unsure that it would be an otherwise happy occasion.
(Score: 1) by dboz87 on Wednesday July 22 2015, @01:40PM
No, the job of a politician is to get elected and dead people don't vote (Unless you live in Chicago).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @05:02PM
The politician will care about them if there is a real chance that doing so will get him re-elected.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday July 20 2015, @05:17PM
That doesn't seem to be an issue in Florida.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].