BBC Ignore Cold-Related Deaths In India
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
I see the BBC are up to their usual tricks again:
India saw a 55% rise in deaths due to extreme heat between 2000-2004 and 2017-2021, a recent study published in the medical journal, The Lancet, found. Exposure to heat also caused a loss of 167.2 billion potential labour hours among Indians in 2021, resulting in loss of incomes equivalent to about 5.4% of the country’s GDP.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-652998
To simply compare two 5-year periods is highly unscientific and meaningless statistically.
Nevertheless the Lancet study clearly shows that cold-related deaths vastly outnumber heat-related ones in Southern Asia:
The Lancet paper also links to a study by Gasparrini et al, which specifically covers India. The latter includes this table:
Table 2. Deaths (in thousands) attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India in 2015.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002619
So cold-related deaths outnumber heat ones by about 7 to 1. Yet nowhere in the BBC article is there are any recognition of this. Neither do they ask the question of what the Indian government is doing to protect its people from cold weather.
The final paragraphs of the BBC report are therefore doubly ironic:
But clearly, Indians are still not taking heat seriously enough.
According to reports, the place in Navi Mumbai where the government ceremony had taken place had recorded a maximum temperature of 38C (100F) on Sunday. Yet, photos of the event showed thousands sitting directly under the sun with no roof or covering to offer shelter. Only a few carried umbrellas, or wrapped towels on their heads.
"I live in Delhi where the temperature can touch 50C and I see very few people even bring out their umbrellas," Mr Pillai says.
Without wishing to underplay the health risks of hot weather, particularly amongst the vulnerable, it is plain that most healthy Indians are not averse to a bit of sunshine!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Are excess deaths painful?
What do their death certificates say?
How many excess (sic) deaths have to happen before you lose your rights?
Are the people that gain from excess deaths the same ones who do the counting? Thought so.
Why do they do this?? Apart from betraying at every turn the objectivity that we used to be able to guarantee we could rely on from the BBC, there is something desperately patronising and arrogant in the idea that sitting out in 38°C heat without a hat immediately marks Indians as brainless pillocks rather than as people who are used to that climate.
The following story from the DT says a lot about the BBC brains as well.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/21/bbc-hire-labour-activist-oscar-bentley-fact-checker/
I particularly like the idea that “any opinions expressed by employees before joining are “completely irrelevant”.” You what??
Big mistake to judge another culture that has existed many thousands of years by our values, beliefs and traditions. Arrogance to be he max.
Colonialism . . . is the word.
As heat-related deaths increased, did cold-related deaths decrease? I mean, in reality, not in models.
I suppose a letter to the DT would be wasted….? Could you get Esther Rantzen to write it? 🤔
Lord Gm=nome should give Homewood a fiver a week for providing so much top notch Pseuds Corner content
So what. Is Private Eye full of statisticians or just full of…..?
Things that appeal to ones sense of the sardonic like Penny Mordant ‘s twenty thousand quid tip from First Corporate Consultants, and the growing reputational correlation of Climate Audit and Tucker Carlson.
Pip, pip !
“So cold-related deaths outnumber heat ones by about 7 to 1. Yet nowhere in the BBC article is there are any recognition of this.”
The BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines, Section 3: Accuracy – Guidelines states:
[My bold]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/accuracy/guidelines/
Stop making up generalities:
That’s the ratio for malaria + cancer+ heart disease morbidity
_____________________________
Moderate Cold / Extreme Heat
BBC is working to reduce excess deaths. They are saving lives. Which makes them Heroes of the Soviet Union (or British equivalent).
∴ the article isn’t about the weather in India. It’s what good people BBC and the UK government are. They should wear a ribbon showing they care more than you do. You must do what BBC and government tell you, because they are saving lives.
Classic CM agitprop.
And I was watching – until I turned it off – a program on Wild Weather from (I’m fairly sure) the BBC, which claimed that ice melting from Greenland has increased 12 fold in recent years.
It took only a second for the heretical thought to peep out and me wonder why Greenland is still covered with ice.
And the Arctic had the coldest spring and summer on record in 2022. Not a signature of increased warming.
And ever since one BBC cameraman boasted about ‘tricks of the trade’ and how to get spectacular glacier front collapses**, I have my doubts about the scenes showing just that.
** Use a helicopter or drone to drop timed explosives into a fissure in the glacier.
Graeme No 3,
that reminds me, of when Prince Charles, as he was then, was being made Prince of Wales, the BBC got children to smash Investiture mugs so they could film them. Nothing new with their ‘tricks of the trade’
Potemkin Villages spring to mind
Almost unbearable, I feel like I’m drowning. Not in rising sea levels but tides of green propaganda.
In this case what is bad is made even worse when you unwittingly catch an awful politician from your own neck of the woods.
WARNING – Green slime ahead :-
“Green co-leader Carla Denyer praised for Question Time responses” https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/green-co-leader-carla-denyer-praised-for-question-time-responses/
The BBC really don’t want a debate, they simply exist to pump out the state narrative.
A free download of the most-borrowed book in the BBC Climate/Energy library is available here:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwia-ObQi7z-AhWUjVwKHZrXDfgQFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fprofile%2FGrigori-Evreinov%2Fpost%2FData-visualization-which-is-best-for-within-and-cross-source-data%2Fattachment%2F5b0690b6b53d2f63c3cdcad5%2FAS%253A629755908993031%25401527156917765%2Fdownload%2FHow-to-Lie-with-Statistics.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0ImDBraHH5PQd18xH1xQqu
Nice one! I was recommended to read it back in the 70’s and it still rings perfectly true today.
Page gone on the BBC news website!
Yes.
Bias Broadcasting Cabal cannot take scrutiny so resorts to crass blatantly crass censorship.
Ha ha, it is indeed AWOL. A win for Paul and objective fact-checking!
No Paul’s link is not quite right. Here is the full link
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-65299807
👍
Oh well, just take comfort in the thought that they will have lost another £10-11m in income this month as more people cancel their licence.
“I see the BBC are up to their usual tricks again” It seems to be “never ending story”. After “How to talk with children about climate change” we are now have
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65339214
“How to talk to your parents about climate change”
The editors of this BBC section are quite clearly evil, vicious, nasty bastards to put it mildly. This crap has to be stopped.
Comparing 2 periods like that is almost certainly simply fraud. Why not just show deaths since say 1950 adjusted for age and population?
Presumably because that doesn’t give the right answer.
So fraud.
Just a little o/t but Sarah Ferguson has done another of those ‘I am not a scientist, we’re all going to die’ pieces in the DT. It’s so bad…..
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/04/21/sarah-ferguson-fergie-climate-change-terrified/
I seriously doubt she wrote it Harry but I am pretty sure she was paid to put her name to it.
Yep, it’s “scare-the-children-junk-science.”
Virtually every sentence can be picked apart.
One of my favorites:
‘The world’s tropical forests, which regulate our climate’
Who knew? The Tele is educational!
I couldn’t get past the statement:”Average temperatures in India (bold, underlined) have risen by 0.7%…
What exactly does that mean?
Fewer will die of cold.
Homewood risks being perceived as being obtuse or dishonest when he uses regional statistics to argue against the reality of countries getting hotter.
India has been driven to rebuilding cities to make them cooler, and moving state capitals to cooler climes by rising heat, not climate hype on the BBC.
The cold weather deaths tatistics he invokes are unambiguously labeled “South Asia”, not “India”.
Four South Asian nations have more glaciers than India and the millions of square kilometers of frigid uplands in Nepal ,Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bhutan all take their toll – people may perish of hypothermia in Hunza and heatstroke in Hyderabad on the same day
Perhaps you missed Paul’s “The Lancet paper also links to a study by Gasparrini et al, which specifically covers India. The latter includes this …
Table 2. Deaths (in thousands) attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India in 2015.”
That study is “Mortality attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India: a nationally representative case-crossover study” which is the source of the Lancet’s data for India.
Falsely claiming someone “…risks being perceived as being obtuse or dishonest …” when you’ve ignored the information Paul offered, is ironic.
If India is getting warmer, then cold-related mortality will likely decrease more than heat-related mortality increases, and so in that context, it will be net beneficial.
Your further misrepresentation confirms the perception in question:
The authors did not study hypo-and-hyperthermia deaths but the correlation of temperature and mortality
“for stroke, IHD, respiratory diseases, malaria, and cancers for ages 30–69 years and ages 70 years and above … we combined these cause-specific deaths from the six climate regions to run separate case-crossover model for each mortality cause.
We derived the overall cumulative temperature–mortality associations from the cause-specific models and centred these associations on the cause-specific MMTs. Malaria and cancers were chosen as control diseases for the temperature–mortality relationship.”
And more damningly they conclude:
Attributable risk fractions and number of deaths
In South Asia, average annual temperatures could rise by more than 2°C by the mid-21st century compared to the average in the 20th century [42]…
we note that over the last three decades, the proportion of moderately hot and extremely hot days has increased, and the proportion of extremely cold and moderately cold days has decreased in India (Table 3).
However, the absolute number of people exposed to moderately cold temperatures is largest and has risen by about 270 million since 1981. The relative risks for extremely hot temperatures were more extreme than for moderately cold temperatures.
R.S.
Just like the BBC, you omitted context and forgot to point out:
The BBC studiously avoided doing that.
” The public should be educated about the adverse impacts of cool temperatures, particularly as the largest absolute growth has been among populations exposed to moderately cold temperatures.“
As that suggestion rests on a rush towards cooler climes by Indians fleeing rising temperatures, may I suggest Anonymous Coward Sahib be repenting prevaricating and reading the words of Nobel Laureate Kipling , who unlike this echo chamber has been writing many Plain Tales from the Hills., as Sahib is giving
climate denial wallahs of small brain a bad reputation!
And yes, the 270 million increase in persons at risk owes more to demographic than climatic change.
Strangely, India’s 1,418 million citizens are thriving in our benign climate.
Look — a squirrel !