Cooling is a Scary Thing–Not Good for Living things

9 thoughts on “Cooling is a Scary Thing–Not Good for Living things”

1. There was even a winter effect in the Seattle area in a study done about a year ago.
   Reason is probably seasonal variations in viral illnesses. No doubt that respiratory illnesses are more common in the winter.
   Your research is very good, and a comprehensive set of studies is in the 9th chap of the singer idso book both the 1st and 2nd books on Climate available at the Heartland web site.
   Climate Change reconsidered is the title of the fist book. Interim report is the name of the second. good stuff.
   as for cardiovascular effects, even cool has an impact–for example chillblains and cold damage can occur with temps in the fifties. if people are outside.

2. If you were trying to show that there are wider swings in various causes of mortality out there than 10%, you might have found a better example, but that’s not the point of the discussion. No one I know of claims (for instance) that a 5 degrees C drop in average temperatures is going to raise mortality rates by (for instance) 80%, thus emulating the low-end increase in deaths of those not wearing a seatbelt vs. those wearing a seatbelt in traffic accidents in the US (to name just one cause of mortality at random).
   The discussion centers on the fact that even NORMALLY cold temperatures — let alone a 5C drop below those — are worse for the entire* population than warm temperatures are, and not just for those who happen to be out driving in it.
   I made no mention of a “best time to die” or a “worst time to live,” so I’m not sure where you were going with that. And that “slight increase in mortality” totals some 45k-50k more Russian deaths in winter vs. summer in a country whose population is, as A C pointed out, highly experienced with, and somewhat adapted to, living in the bitter cold. For one study on the effects of abnormal cold (still above 0C) on people in sub-tropical Guangdong Province, see this link: http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1104541/. For one on normal seasonal variations in tropical Bangladesh, see this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3167758/. And for one which has an impressive graph of temperatures & deaths co-plotted over a 20-year span of time in Holland, go to this link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240305/ The graph will be on p.2 of the PDF.
   Cool is not better than warm. Not hardly.
   *There’s not even a discernible difference between those of high or low SES on this one (http://paa2011.princeton.edu/papers/110196); it affects everyone. The two exceptions in the literature appear to be diarrhoea and cancer sufferers; the first group is nearly always seasonally related to the monsoon or summer, while the second cohort consistently shows little or no statistical change in mortality at all, presumably due to the fact that physiological changes induced by hot/cold conditions simply don’t affect the process — cancer either kills you or it doesn’t, on its own calendar.

3. True. Most of the world today is not prepared for conditions in Europe north of the Alps (one of which is that it is not possible to substist without working).

4. I don’t know whether a 15% seasonal variation in mortality is large or not. My hunch is that given the nature of population statistics, it may not even be significant. Also, the best time to die, if such exists, does not necessarily co-incide with the worst time to live. Mortality aggreagates various threshold effects (shortness of breath and such), so it is hard to understand what it means when you see a slight increase in mortality. Such an increase certainly does not seem to be scary compared with small-scale regional variations as depicted here, for example:
   http://longerlives.phe.org.uk/
   Can’t see without much digging how these ranks were calculated, but just by clicking around and normalising total deaths by population, it is easy to see the variance is in the range of 30-40%.

5. Typical, pick a country that has lived with very cold winters for the last 2000 years.
   Try using the rest of Europe or the lower USA states.
   It is what you are used to and have PREPARED for that counts, most of the world is NOT PREPARED for Arctic conditions and the loss of Agriculture that would bring.

6. Using the numbers you provide, I and my calculator find that all-cause mortality appears to increase by some 10%-15% in the winter with no need to blame extreme/anomalous events (blizzards, power outages, etc.). I suppose the 1st Amendment gives you the right to call that variation a “small” one if that’s how you want to characterize it.
   This agrees fairly well with the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (http://gks.ru) for the same period you mention, 2006-2009, for the country as a whole. They report that monthly all-cause mortality for all of Russia during the period averaged around 113 deaths per 100,000. For the summer months, JUN-AUG, that rate dipped to 108 per 100k (108.05), while for the winter months, DEC-FEB, it rose to almost 119 per 100k (118.85), about 10.2% higher than in summertime. Almost all of that seems due to the increase in cardiovascular death rates (72.05 vs. 62.92, winter vs. summer) and, to a much lesser degree, respiratory illness and infection (5.18 vs. 4.41).
   Not sure that I’d call that a “small” variation, personally, but hey, that’s just me.

7. So here have a reporter that is saying we have global cooling or at least flat temps for the past decade. CBS tonight reported that NOAA has released data stating that 2013 is tied with 2003 for the 4th warmest year on record. No wonder the media is not trusted……

8. From Vital Statistics of Moscow, Russia, it does not appear that people are affected in a scary sort of way:
   Deaths per day in 2006-2009
   Jan 373
   Feb 361
   Mar 357
   Apr 341
   May 336
   Jun 329
   Jul 314
   Aug 311
   A large part of this variation can be explained by traffic fatalities which do increase in winter. The years of 2006-2009 were relatively normal.
   In 2010 Moscow had to cope with summer drought, bog and forest fires in the region, unusual heat and persistent smoke in town:
   Jan 336
   Feb 342
   Mar 340
   Apr 317
   May 306
   Jun 318
   Jul 463
   Aug 484
   That year, winter variation, already small, was dwarfed by the summer uptick. Intuitively, I’d imagine heat + smoke wiping out folks that were already short of breath. Unfortunately, the causes of death are not revealed where this comes from. Totals hide interesting stuff.
   Source: http://mr-lighter.livejournal.com/1806.html
   Agriculture may not be as resilient. Its resources are not mobile and are hard to protect.

9. But those left-wing eco-loons promised us global warming, and all of our governments not only backed them up, they robbed us blind, and gave our money away to the scammers. WTF??? Now that we can’t afford heat and electricity any more, they tell us an ice age is coming??? Someone, as a matter of fact, many people…..need to do hard time for this charade!!!