More than 150,000 Americans may die by the end of this century
www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/killer-heat/files/killer-summer-heat-report.pdf
They are really going out on a limb suggesting that 150,000 deaths will occur in the next ninety years – out of the 600 million Americans currently alive or will be born by the turn of the century. Perhaps global warming will make people live to be 170 years old?
For reference – nearly four million Americans will die in automobile accidents by the year 2100. People really should stop giving money to the world-class morons at places like NRDC.
A little inflated on the US population aren’t you…LOL.
But yeah, it sounds scary but it’s nothing in the big scheme of things and they know those deaths could never be disproved so the bloviating will continue.
Actually the 600 million number is very conservative. There are 310 million people now, almost all of whom will be dead in 90 years. They will be replaced by several generations all of which will average more than 310 million population. There will most certainly be more than 600 million unique people living in the US over the next 90 years.
I suspect the actual calculation works something like this:
Reduced pneumonia deaths = 10,000,000
Increased heat stress related deaths = 150,000
Net outcome = 9,850,000 lives saved (or at least extended)
While 10 million is admittedly a guess, pneumonia is attributable to 7% of all deaths annually, so it’s not small potatoes.
Also if you want to look at this objectively, compare hospital death rates during winter months versus summer months. You’ll observe a significant increase in deaths during colder periods…
30,000+ influenza deaths per year. I wonder if warmer weather would change that number one way or t’other.
“Flu season” – “the season occurs during the cold half of the year in each hemisphere.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season
Okay, I see you included those yet to be born this century.
Sharpen up! If you can’t, perhaps consider a career at NRDC. /sarc
I would prefer to die from a combination of old age and sexual excitement, rather than being murdered by an eco-commie fascist regime trying to save the planet. I would like another 30 years of warm summer evenings with my wine and steak.
I wonder where sexual excitement ranks among the leading causes of death. Of course, once the eco-fascists learn that something is a leading cause of death, they will try to outlaw it.
These kinds of nonsensical garbage predictions are actually fantastic because they allow the “projected” deaths due to AGW to be put into proper historical and demographic context. As I wrote in a paper more than three years ago that somehow never got published:
In 1997, Kalkstein and Greene, in a study cited by the IPCC, estimated excess mortality due to climate change for two major US cities, New York and Chicago, and projected that, by the year 2050, New York would suffer 500-1000 additional deaths, and Chicago 100-250. In other words, over a 50-year period, New York would expect to see an increase in excess mortality of 10 to 20 deaths per year as a result of climate change, while Chicago would expect an increase of 2 to 5 deaths per year.
Such estimates help put the “threat” posed by climate change into proper context. 55,391 people died in New York City in 2006. 1,708 people died of complications from diabetes; 1,563 from alcohol-related causes. Roughly 1,000 died in infancy. Heart disease killed 21,000 New Yorkers, cancer another 13,000. 49 people died from heat-related causes in New York City in 2006, the result of two severe summer heat waves. 100 people die every year from construction-related injuries in New York. Does the possibility of further 10 to 20 deaths per year in New York City from heat-related causes due to global warming constitute a “crisis and emergency”? If it does, then why not the fact that construction accidents already kill five to ten times as many New Yorkers per year? Or that infant mortality results in 50 to 100 times as many deaths? Or that heart disease presently kills two to four thousand times as many New Yorkers? Nobody is proposing “global governance” and vast new tax schemes as the only possible approach to dealing with infant mortality, arteriosclerosis, or New York’s ‘construction death crisis.’ Why is “global warming” special?
If we extrapolate Kalkstein and Greene’s estimate for New York City to the country as a whole, we achieve an almost certain overestimate (as excess mortality rates due to heat tend to be much higher in urban than in rural areas) of roughly 737 excess deaths per year attributable to global warming across the whole of the United States. Roughly 2,500,000 people die in the US every year, so this would be an increase of less than three-hundredths of one percent. By way of comparison, 48,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in 2005. 23,000 were accidentally poisoned, 20,000 died in “falls”, 12,352 were shot and killed in gun homicides, 5,500 perished of viral hepatitis, 3,582 drowned, 2,653 died of “medical complications”, and 789 died from the accidental discharge of a firearm. 3,000 Americans died of malnutrition in 2005 – this in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, where obesity has been described as epidemic. In other words, malnutrition already causes four times as many deaths in the US every year as global warming is expected to cause by the middle of the century. Is malnutrition a “crisis and emergency” in America? How about viral hepatitis? Or accidental poisoning? In the context of such real-world figures, it is difficult to construe the imagined excess mortality due to “global warming” as an impending catastrophe demanding immediate and radical corrective action.
Don’t give that jackass Bloomberg any ideas.