The Truth About Summer Mortality Rates
By Paul Homewood
Whenever we get a bit of sunshine, somebody like Lord Krebs is wheeled out to warn us that we’re all going to drop like flies. What the charlatans never bother to tell us is that, in the UK, July & August have the lowest death rates of the whole year.
From the Office of National Statistics:
| Mean number of daily deaths each month and mean monthly temperatures, England and Wales, August 2013 to July 20141,2,3 | |||||
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| Year | Month | Mean daily deaths | Five-year average daily deaths | Mean monthly temperature | Five-year average temperature |
| 2013 | August | 1,190 | 1,195 | 16.7 | 15.8 |
| 2013 | September | 1,238 | 1,230 | 13.6 | 13.7 |
| 2013 | October | 1,295 | 1,306 | 12.2 | 10.5 |
| 2013 | November | 1,341 | 1,349 | 6.1 | 7.2 |
| 2013 | December | 1,442 | 1,574 | 6.1 | 3.3 |
| 2014 | January | 1,473 | 1,599 | 5.4 | 3.3 |
| 2014 | February | 1,467 | 1,480 | 5.9 | 3.9 |
| 2014 | March | 1,379 | 1,417 | 7.4 | 5.9 |
| 2014 | April | 1,349 | 1,373 | 9.8 | 8.7 |
| 2014 | May | 1,286 | 1,291 | 11.9 | 11.1 |
| 2014 | June | 1,267 | 1,237 | 14.9 | 14.0 |
| 2014 | July | 1,268 | 1,205 | 17.4 | 16.2 |
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-338623
Many more people die in cold weather. For instance, the highest summer death toll in the last five years was in the cold , wet summer of 2012, which had a death toll of 113683. In contrast the summer of 2013, the warmest since 2006, deaths were only 110602.
And this does not only apply to cold climates, as a recent study in the Lancet found:
Cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather, and it’s not the extreme low or high temperatures that cause the most deaths, according to a study published Wednesday.
The study — published in the British journal The Lancet — analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.
Because the study included countries under different socio-economic backgrounds and with varying climates, it was representative of temperature-related deaths worldwide, the study said. The sharp distinction between heat- and cold-related deaths is because low temperatures cause more problems for the body’s cardiovascular and respiratory systems, it added.
"Public-health policies focus almost exclusively on minimizing the health consequences of heat waves," Gasparrini said. "Our findings suggest that these measures need to be refocused and extended to take account of a whole range of effects associated with temperature."
This report backs up a U.S. study last year from the National Center for Health Statistics, which found that cold kills more than twice as many Americans as heat.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weather-deaths/27657269/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Do those figures include suicides? The rate is known to spike during very hot weather
Yes, it should cover all mortalities.
I have always heard that suicides spike around Christmas time because it is a time for friends and family and people that don’t have any or are having problems with their families feel depressed. You may have noticed that Christmas time is usually cold for most of the world. So your contention that suicides increase in hot weather seems strange to me. Are you sure that such claims aren’t just bullshit? Like the time I read an article were the researcher said that Scandinavians had just reached an average height of 6 feet… which is taller than Americans. The article said that Scandinavians are historically short (obvious bullshit) and that the reason they have reached 6 feet tall is because they have socialized medicine (much more bullshit). When the interviewer asked if all of the Mexicans in the US didn’t bring down the average height of Americans the researcher said that that was not a significant factor (bullshit was squirting out his ears at this point).
There’s this study that was published in 2007
“Above 18 degrees C, each 1 degrees C increase in mean temperature was associated with a 3.8 and 5.0% rise in suicide and violent suicide respectively. Suicide increased by 46.9% during the 1995 heatwave, whereas no change was seen during the 2003 heat wave.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17666493
A run of sleepless nights caused by very hot weather can literally send some people out of their minds
Reblogged this on JunkScience.com and commented:
This gets missed when the summer heat death scares fire up.
Hope that someone brings this (relatively obvious) fact to the attention of the BMA committee that has been enjoined into the climate debate to try to give it more credibility than the Pope can in the UK. Paris 2015 is getting nearer…. at the current rate of brainwashing from the media, it is going to cost us dearly.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections and commented:
Mortality rates (all causes) by month.
It is interesting to push the data a little further. The correlation between temperature and mortality rate is good (r = .96). Taking this relationship and applying the much vaunted, but increasingly unlikely, 2 deg K rise would save 456 lives per year ( a reduction in mortality rate of 2.81%). Of course we must remember that correlation does not prove causation in looking at this, but it hits at the BMA Committees’ assertions about the danger of warming.
Clearly these statistics swallow up the effects of the odd extreme hot / cold day, but the benefit of warmth is what we would logically expect.