One would never know that from all the AGW hype and computer models that simply haven't panned out- This information was come by the hard way- Real world data was gathered over a period of time. Considering how dam cold the past few years have been in most of the North American continent alongside many other areas of the globe this seems a timely articleDigression begins: It’s late May here and guess what? Other then a few warm days in a row, our temperatures have been mostly below normal for this time of year. To date we’ve planted our cool weather plants, but, nothing that requires warmer temps. That would be tomatoes, peppers & eggplants. Worst of all the furnace has been on, intermittently and this Friday coming is going to be quite cold for this time of year.*Ottawa area: Birds still delayed by cooler than normal weather* Natural Gas Futures gain..."The weather may be cooler than normal in most of the lower 48 states through May 24, according to Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland" Digression over, let’s get back to deadly Cold Weather:Heat waves get more attention, but cold weather claims more lives, according to a new study analyzing deaths in 13 countriesI simply can’t imagine why ‘heat’ gets more attention then cold? Really, I can’t ;)
“After examining more than 74 million deaths that occurred in 13 countries from 1985 to 2012, researchers calculated that 7.3% of them could be attributed to cold weather and 0.4% to hot weather.”The researchers collected daily data on weather conditions, air pollution and deaths from 384 cities around the world. For each city, they calculated the temperature at which deaths were least likely to occur. All other days were compared to days with this “optimum” temperature.In all countries, the optimum temperature was close to the upper end of all temperatures recorded there. In the United States, for instance, 84% of days were colder than the optimum temperature and 16% were warmer. At one end of the spectrum, 93% of days in Sweden were below the optimum temperature and 7% were above it. At the other end, Brazil had 60% of days below and 40% of days above its optimum temperature.The 2.5% of days that were the very coldest in each location were considered extremely cold, and the 2.5% of days that were hottest were examples of extreme heat.With the bulk of the days in all areas being below the ideal temperature, days rated cold but not extremely cold were blamed for the most deaths — 6.7% during the study period
From earlier today: