By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
I’ve come across plenty of junk climate studies, but this has to be one of the most amateurish:
The study, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature Communications, showed how the death toll from temperature hazards overtook the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the South West region of England, when the UK was in the throes of the pandemic.
Lead author Dr Eunice Lo, Research Fellow in Climate Change and Health at the University’s Cabot Institute for the Environment and Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, said: “The statistics are stark and illustrate how high the health burden of adverse weather is in the UK in the current climate. I anticipated higher levels of mortality than normal as the country was also experiencing a record heatwave during the peak of the pandemic, but the extent of the increases are surprising and concerning.”
The researchers sprang into action after Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, highlighted at COP26 that the climate crisis was a far bigger problem than COVID-19, which would prove more fatal without immediate changes.
Their findings clearly evidence such claims with analysis revealing temperature-related mortality exceeded COVID-19 mortality by 8% in South West England between 2020 and 2022. Temperature-related deaths were also just a quarter less than deaths from COVID-19 in London and not far from a third less (58%) in East Midlands over the same period.
Dr Lo said: “The pandemic rightfully generated huge media attention with the spotlight on daily briefings announcing the latest death toll and public health interventions. Although many, and in some parts of the country more, people were dying from high and low temperatures, this largely went under the radar.
“Ironically the record temperatures, topping 40 degrees, were associated with positive news of people enjoying the sunshine which perhaps reflects a general lack of awareness about how harmful excess heat can be.”
The research highlighted how the coinciding crises presented by COVID-19 coupled with a heatwave or conversely an extreme cold snap put health services under unprecedented pressure, potentially increasing avoidable loss of life.
Findings showed combined excess deaths from extreme temperatures and COVID-19 between 2020 and 2022 were at least twice as high than the previous decade, depending on the region.
Dr Lo said: “The figures strongly demonstrate how negative consequences compound when there are co-occurring major health and weather-related events. For instance, extreme cold during the outbreak of an unexpected disease puts massive strain on hospital bed availability. This research therefore underscores how the UK must be more robustly prepared for such eventualities, which are likely to coincide more often in future with the growing spectre of a changing climate and other global health threats.”
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2024/may/hot-and-cold-weather-extreme-deaths-paper.html
And this is the paper:
Abstract
Extreme weather and coronavirus-type pandemics are both leading global health concerns. Until now, no study has quantified the compound health consequences of the co-occurrence of them. We estimate the mortality attributable to extreme heat and cold events, which dominate the UK health burden from weather hazards, in England and Wales in the period 2020-2022, during which the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in terms of mortality. We show that temperature-related mortality exceeded COVID-19 mortality by 8% in South West England. Combined, extreme temperatures and COVID-19 led to 19 (95% confidence interval: 16–22 in North West England) to 24 (95% confidence interval: 20–29 in Wales) excess deaths per 100,000 population during heatwaves, and 80 (95% confidence interval: 75–86 in Yorkshire and the Humber) to 127 (95% confidence interval: 123–132 in East of England) excess deaths per 100,000 population during cold snaps. These numbers are at least ~2 times higher than the previous decade. Society must increase preparedness for compound health crises such as extreme weather coinciding with pandemics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48207-2
For a start, the study rehashes the claim that the UK recorded 40.3 °C unprecedented extreme heat4 and a record number of around 3000 heatwave excess deaths.
But as the ONS clearly explained at the time, these deaths were merely brought forward a few days or so; those people were already dying, and were not killed by the heat, as Eunice Lo implies. Over the summer as a whole, the death rate was by a long way the lowest of any season, so there were never any “excess deaths”.
But Eunice’s paper gets worse, a lot worse!
According to the paper:
Figure 1a shows that heat-related mortality (red lines, with red shading indicating its 95% confidence interval) in England and Wales primarily occurred between July and September during the study period of 30 January 2020 to 31 December 2022. A total of 8481 excess deaths (95% confidence interval: 6387–10,493) were attributable to high temperatures.
In months other than July, August and September, cold-related mortality (blue lines, with blue shading indicating its 95% confidence interval) dominated over heat-related mortality. Over the study period, a total of 128,533 excess deaths (95% confidence interval: 107,430–153,642) were attributable to low temperatures, indicating a fifteen-fold larger cold-than-heat mortality burden.
So deaths from cold far exceed any from heat? Well, yes Eunice, I think we already knew that. But it has nothing to do with climate change.
So where pray did this ridiculous headline come from?
Cold weather is not worsened by global warming. Did you really think it did?
On the contrary a warmer climate must mean that the public health threat is reduced. To claim that excess deaths in winter are only now a “major national public health threat” is grossly dishonest.
What is most interesting though is this sentence in the press release:
The researchers sprang into action after Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, highlighted at COP26 that the climate crisis was a far bigger problem than COVID-19, which would prove more fatal without immediate changes
So perhaps we should put the real blame on Vallance for this shockingly bad study. He was clearly looking for some data to support his climate crisis scare, no matter how dodgy.
No doubt poor Eunice just did what she was asked to do!