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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: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 20 2015, @01:43PM
TFA almost says the same thing. They don't even know what people died of - they just note some increases in temps, some increases in death rates, and presume that the two numbers are related. Jeeez, Louise!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday July 20 2015, @02:23PM
Anecdotal (times a million people) my FiL died a couple decades ago while raking leaves, surely if yardwork kills you, you're in a really bad place and were gonna die in yer sleep a week later anyway, but none the less, if the temps were a tad lower then he'd have had less leaves to rake and surely would have died a little later, although probably not much. He should have run the lawnmover over the leaves and mulched them in place instead of bagging and landfilling anyway, and if global warming means he had 7 bags of landfilled leaves instead of 6 pre-global warming bags, and that extra one killed him, well, how many more signs do you need that maybe raking leaves as a sick old guy is a bad idea?
Now you can invest trillions in economic destruction to eliminate coal burning to rather optimistically lower temps in a couple centuries to reduce tree and therefore leaf growth to get the old guy another week or so on the planet.
However it seems blindingly obvious that it would be almost infinitely cheaper, if you know you're going to have excessive elder-killing-yardwork, to not plant so many deciduous trees. Wouldn't it have been enormously cheaper to buy him an extra week of life by planting a nice pine evergreen sapling instead of a sugar maple? I mean maples are nice, but if they're gonna kill you, because climate change means they grow bigger and faster, then they're not so nice after all. Or stop raking and bagging and landfilling leaves and mulch in place?
I'm just saying, a good summary of global warming deaths is today a tiny fraction of the population can just barely survive doing really dumbass things today like living below sea level in New Orleans, or not owning a snowblower up north, or living in Florida, but given a choice of economic destruction of the entire world or the much cheaper solution of having a tiny minority stop doing dumbass things, it seems maybe the dumbasses need to step up and take one for the team and stop being idiots who just barely survive today and are not going to survive tomorrow.
I'm not even sure from a survival of the fittest argument its good to rescue dumbasses. As a believer in evolution, people who insist on living in a desert in CA or Vegas probably should be doomed for the benefit of future generations. Sure, if you think its a great idea to live below sea level in hurricane alley, maybe you should live there that's the perfect spot for you. A century from now I think people would thank us for cleaning the herd's genetics a bit. Given that the alternative of implementing Idiocracy is worse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @09:05PM
That's called "correlation", dumbass. It means they are, in fact, related, but it says nothing about how.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @10:13AM
if you don't know how something is correlated, how can you possibly know that it "in fact" is correlated?
...dumbass