Gary Hollis in his letter of December 13 seems very concerned about the people who are “dropping dead” because they are too hot, but seems to show no concern for the order-of-magnitude more people who are “dropping dead” because they are too cold.
Globally, for every person who dies from being too hot, nine others die from being too cold.
In an article from December 2022 titled “Human Deaths from Hot and Cold Temperatures and Implications for Climate Change”, by Patrick Brown, a lecturer on Energy Policy and Climate programme at Johns Hopkins University, the author observes that “It has been estimated that about 5.1 million excess deaths per year are associated with non-optimal temperatures.
Of those, 4.6m are associated with colder than optimum temperatures, and 0.5 million are associated with” hotter than optimum temperatures”.
This includes not only people who die of hypothermia or heatstroke outright (very few), but also deaths associated with “uncomfortable temperatures”, where the primary cause of death is attributable to a chronic condition (e.g. things like heart disease, diabetes, or TB).
The paper goes on to note, “It has been estimated that warming from 2000 to 2019 has resulted in a net decline in excess deaths globally (a larger decrease in cold deaths than an increase in heat deaths)”.
It is likely that at some point, as global average temperatures increase, that the current trend will change, but the best evidence at the moment is that the current (warmer) temperature is better for human health than the colder one that (I presume) Gary would like us to return to.
Even if the dire prediction of four times as many deaths from heat comes to pass (a dubious prediction in the face of the 20-year trend), we would likely still be better off overall with respect to temperature-related deaths, if you also factor in all the people currently dying from a lack of heat instead of pretending their deaths don’t matter.
The article can be found at thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/human-deaths-from-hot-and-cold-temperatures-and-implications-for-climate-change
Ryan Price
Half Moon Bay
