The medical journal The Lancet recently published one of the largest studies ever undertaken of weather-related mortality risk. Analysis of over 74 million deaths in 384 locations over 27 years led to the conclusion that 7.7 percent of the deaths were due to exposure to non-optimal temperature, of which 7.3 percent were from exposure to cold and only 0.4 percent were due to exposure to heat. In other words, for every one person who died due to extreme heat, eighteen died due to cold. "People are dying", little Greta declares. Yes, from cold weather, and warming would save them.
This latest study is a large one. But it’s by no means the first or only one of its kind. As we have previously reported, cold kills far more often and reliably than heat. For that reason, if the number of extremely hot days goes up and the number of extremely cold days goes down, on balance the result will be fewer, not more, deaths. Yet the reduction in cold-related mortality is conveniently overlooked by the alarmists for whom climate change is always bad no matter what.
Of course the benefits of warming-induced cuts to cold-weather mortality require some actual warming to happen. And judging by our Climate Emergency Tour, Canadian cities have seen far too little to make us optimistic on that front.
It's not the absolute temperature that kills, it's the unusual deviations from the norm. Thus in warm countries like Greece, cooler than average temperatures will result in an increase in deaths, even though more northern countries, experiencing the same temperatures, do not have higher deaths. So, it's a bit more complicated than meets the eye.