Chilling Effects
In what sense do 10% of people die of the cold? And why is heat-related death most common in Greenland?
Oct 19
I.
On the recent global warming post, a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um:
There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right?
You can find the source here (study, popular article). The study confirms that it is claiming that 8.52% of all deaths are cold-related (plus an additional ~1% heat-related). It separates the world into a grid of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree squares. It uses a bunch of assumptions and interpolations to get a dataset of daily average temperatures and mortality rates for each square over ten years. Then it calculates a function of how mortality varies with respect to temperature. The lowest point of that function, usually a pretty normal temperature, gets dubbed “the minimum mortality temperature” or “MMT”. Then they calculate how many extra deaths happen compared to the counterfactual where it was always the MMT, and they get five million. Where are these deaths?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects
