Some are scoffing at the idea that rising heating costs will kill people. But check out the number-one temperature-killer in 74 million deaths across 13 countries. It’s not the extremes that we need to worry about, the deadly phrase is “mildly suboptimal temperatures”. Look at the blue finger of death in the graph below, starkly showing how irrelevant “extreme heat”, or any other ambient temperature zone, is.
Do you need an excuse to turn the heater on in winter? Low ambient room temperatures will thicken your blood.
Moderate cold accounted for as many as 6.6% of all deaths. Extreme temperatures (either cold or hot) were responsible for only 0·86%.
Join the dots — will we save more lives by:
a) making homes cold now in the hope that lower “carbon” emissions will,
b) mean less deaths from heat in 90 years time despite people probably having better access to heaters and air conditioners?
Would you sacrifice ten years of your life…
Note the big killer “moderate cold” | Click to enlarge
Cold is more likely to kill you in Sydney than in Sweden
Check out the curves below. As a percentage of the population, there are more deaths in Sydney than in Bejing at 5C.
Australian houses are not designed to be warm. Sweden’s are.
Figure 1 shows overall cumulative exposure-response curves (best linear unbiased predictions) for 13 cities selected to represent each country, with the corresponding minimum mortality temperature and the cutoff s to defi ne extreme temperatures. |. Click to enlarge
Blame house design, we Australians don’t take the cold seriously (read more about the flaws at this link).
Professor Adrian Barnett, a researcher based at the Queensland University of Technology, has studied death rates associated with abnormal weather conditions plus occupant access to heating and cooling, and has established a link to the quality of housing in Australia and a corresponding increase in death rates during cold spells.
Professor Barnett’s studies have concluded that Australia’s death rate due to cold weather, which at 6.5% is almost double that of Sweden’s at 3.9%, is almost entirely due to the poor quality to which we build our homes.
Swedish homes are designed and built to stay comfortable during all weather conditions, whereas comfort in Australian homes is often an afterthought, usually covered by an oversized air conditioner which continually battles poorly insulated walls, leaky doors and windows. Australian homes are referred to as “glorified tents” due to this phenomenon, which particularly affects less affluent homeowners and of course, renters.
