Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future Pursuing the ... - Magazooms

6. Increased Human Mortality
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The claim: Human mortality will escalate due to increasingly more severe and frequent heat
waves, as well as a result of the enhanced spreading abroad of numerous vector-borne diseases,
all brought about by CO2-induced global warming.
In exploring this sixth climate-alarmist claim, we examine the veracity of the prediction that
rising temperatures will lead to future increases in human disease and death, beginning first
with a discussion of correlations of human mortality with temperature followed by a brief
discussion of viral and vector-borne diseases.
With respect to correlations of human mortality with temperature, Christidis et al. (2010) have
written that “the IPCC AR4 states with very high confidence that climate change contributes to
the global burden of disease and to increased mortality,” citing the contribution of Confalonieri
et al. (2007) to that document. In the NIPCC Report Climate Change Reconsidered (Idso and
Singer, 2009), however, it is concluded that rising temperatures lead to a greater reduction in
winter deaths than the increase they cause in summer deaths, resulting in a large net decrease
in human mortality, based on findings described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature up
through 2007. Thus, we here review only studies of the subject that have been published after
that time, to see which viewpoint has ultimately prevailed.
In an effort handsomely suited to evaluate the supposedly very-high-confidence contention of
the IPCC, Christidis et al. extracted the numbers of daily deaths from all causes reported on
death registration data supplied by the UK Office of National Statistics for men and women fifty
years of age or older in England and Wales for the period 1976-2005, which they divided by
daily estimates of population that they obtained by fitting a fifth-order polynomial to mid-year
population estimates, yielding deaths per million people, after which they compared the results
with surface air temperature data that showed a warming trend during the same three-decade
period of 0.47°C per decade. In addition, they employed a technique called optimal detection,
which can be used to estimate the role played by human adaptation in the temperature-related
changes in mortality they observed.
As expected, during the hottest portion of the year, warming led to increases in death rates,
while during the coldest portion of the year it lead to decreases in death rates. But the real
story is in the numbers. The three scientists report, for example, that if no adaptation had
taken place, there would have been 1.6 additional deaths per million people per year due to
warming in the hottest part of the year over the period 1976-2005, but there would have been
47 fewer deaths per million people per year due to warming in the coldest part of the year, for
a lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 29.4, which represents a huge net benefit of the warming
experienced in England and Wales over the three-decade period of warming. And when
adaptation was included in the analysis, as was the case in the data they analyzed, they found
there was only 0.7 of a death per million people per year due to warming in the hottest part of
the year, but a decrease of fully 85 deaths per million people per year due to warming in the
coldest part of the year, for a phenomenal lives-saved to life-lost ratio of 121.4. Clearly,
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