Claims that global warming will have net negative effects on human health are not supported by scientific evidence. Moderate warming and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon-dioxide levels could provide net benefits for human welfare, agriculture, and the biosphere by reducing cold-related deaths, increasing the amount of arable land, extending the length of growing seasons, and invigorating plant life. \

The harmful effects of restricting access to fossil fuel energy and subsequently causing energy costs to increase would likely outweigh any potential benefits from slightly delaying any rise in temperatures. Climate change is likely to have less impact on health and welfare than polices that would deprive the poor living in emerging economies of the benefits of abundant and inexpensive energy.

Key Takeaways

A colder climate generally poses a much greater risk to human health and causes more deaths than a warmer climate.

An increase in warmer conditions would not significantly increase the range of vector-borne diseases such as malaria or Lyme disease.

Life expectancy has improved tremendously as a result of access to affordable and reliable energy

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The potential for an increase in the health and welfare effects of increasing carbon-dioxide concentrations and the concomitant warming of the climate has become an increasing focus of those concerned about climate change. Some claim that climate change is responsible for an increase in virtually everything that adversely affects human life and that it may also lead to a rapid deterioration of human health and welfare. During the past three decades, a politically-driven pseudo-science has invaded research in toxicology and epidemiology through governmental funding and environmental pressure. These efforts were intended to promote government regulatory activity, including expansion of regulatory controls.

In this Special Report, claims regarding the effects of climate change, rising air temperatures, and increasing carbon-dioxide concentrations will be identified and investigated. The results will show that a slight warming of the planet may make it more habitable and hospitable, that concerns about increases in disease proliferation due to climate change are vastly overstated, and that the expansion of abundant and inexpensive energy through the development of affordable and reliable energy has produced nearly two centuries of human progress and welfare. In particular, some of the policies intended to curb anthropogenically induced climate change may restrict access to affordable and reliable energy and are thus-ironically-harmful to low-income individuals across the world.

See full report here.

A new Lancet study ominously reports that from 2000 to 2019 in England and Wales there were an average of 791 heat-related excess deaths and 60,753 cold-related excess deaths each year. That’s an excess death ratio of about 85 to 1 for cold temperatures.

Adjusted as deaths per 100,000 person-years, the annual ratio is 1.57 heat-related deaths vs. 122.34 cold-related excess deaths throughout the 21st century.

“Our analysis indicates that the excess in mortality attributable to cold was almost two orders of magnitude higher than the excess in mortality attributable to heat.”

Several other new studies report heavily skewed ratios for cold- vs. heat-related excess deaths in the modern climate.

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 32 times higher than for heat in Switzerland from 1969-2017.

Schrijver et al., 2022

“Total all-cause excess mortality associated with non-optimal temperatures was 9.19%, which translates to 274,578 temperature-related excess deaths in Switzerland between 1969 and 2017. Cold-related mortality represented a larger fraction in comparison with heat, with 8.91% vs. 0.28% .”

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 7.6 times higher than for heat in 326 Latin American cities from 2002 to 2015.

Kephart et al., 2022

“Climate change and urbanization are rapidly increasing human exposure to extreme ambient temperatures, yet few studies have examined temperature and mortality in Latin America. We conducted a nonlinear, distributed-lag, longitudinal analysis of daily ambient temperatures and mortality among 326 Latin American cities between 2002 and 2015. We observed 15,431,532 deaths among 2.9 billion person-years of risk. The excess death fraction of total deaths was 0.67% for heat-related deaths and 5.09% for cold-related deaths.”

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 6.8 times higher than for heat in a city in India (Pune) from 2004 to 2012.

Ingole et al., 2022

“We applied a time series regression model to derive temperature-mortality associations based on daily mean temperature and all-cause mortality records of Pune city [India] from year January 2004 to December 2012.  The analysis provides estimates of the total mortality burden attributable to ambient temperature. Overall, for deaths registered in the observational period were attributed to non-optimal temperatures, cold effect was greater 5.72% than heat”

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 42 times higher than for heat in China in 2019.

Liu et al., 2022

“We estimated that 593 thousand deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures in China in 2019 with 580 thousand cold-related deaths and 13 thousand heat-related deaths.”

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 46 times higher than for heat in Mexico from 1998-2017.

Cohen and Dechezlepretre, 2022 (full paper)

“We examine the impact of temperature on mortality in Mexico using daily data over the period 1998-2017 and find that 3.8 percent of deaths in Mexico are caused by suboptimal temperature (26,000 every year). However, 92 percent of weather-related deaths are induced by cold (<12 degrees C) or mildly cold (12-20 degrees C) days and only 2 percent by outstandingly hot days (>32 degrees C). Furthermore, temperatures are twice as likely to kill people in the bottom half of the income distribution.”

Excess mortality due to cold temperatures was 12.8 times higher than for heat “across 612 cities within 39 countries over the period 1985-2019.”

Mistry et al., 2022

“Here, we perform a comprehensive assessment of temperature-related mortality risks using ground weather stations observations and state-of-the-art reanalysis data across 612 cities within 39 countries over the period 1985-2019. ...In general, across most countries, the estimates of the excess mortality are very similar, with a global-level excess of 0.53% for heat, and 6.02% versus 6.25% for cold, from ground stations and ERA5-Land data, respectively (’Global in Fig. 5 and Table S3)....”

If there really is a concern for human health and extending life spans, there should be much more emphasis placed on reducing the costs of energy to heat homes, as well as minimizing exposure to cold temperatures.

Instead, the invariable focus is on the dangers of “climate change” or heat waves that put humanity at a tiny fraction of the risk that cold temperatures do.

Warmth saves lives. Cold kills. This has been true throughout human history, and it is no less true today.

Read more at No Tricks Zone

See also here how this is true in all regions.

Make No Mistake, Reality Consistently Drives Reason Into Power Choices

At a time when campaigning politicians defy reality with extravagant promises, recent developments suggest reason may be returning to the electric power sector --- even as the Biden administration frantically tries to spend billions on “renewable energy.”

Much of this drama plays out in the Pacific Northwest.

There, policymakers favor faddish, ideological approaches to energy needs over practical technologies relying on fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro.

One result has been the intrusion of expensive, unreliable, and environmentally damaging wind turbines on the beauty that makes the Northwest special.

Among those saving us from ourselves are native people, for whom the land is sacred. They recently forced the federal government and Gov. Tina Kotek, D-Ore., to cancel the sale of large offshore tracts for wind development.

Also playing a role were market realities.

Only a single, inexperienced company bid on the project.

Other competitors dropped out because offshore wind is financially risky, involving high costs and the hazards of a corrosive and stormy marine environment.

Besides, who wants intermittent power that costs more than it is worth?

No one.

Another ally in the fight for sanity is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, sometimes known for questionable schemes, such as blocking out the sun to cool Earth.

Sweden nixed that.

Nevertheless, Gates rightly has championed nuclear power, much maligned despite obvious advantages. In 2006, he founded TerraPower to develop an advanced breeder reactor that will power a plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

With one billion dollars from Gates, TerraPower broke ground in June.

The plant is designed to run 50 years without refueling.

In Pennsylvania, Microsoft, which Gates continues to advise, signed a 1.6-billion-dollar agreement to power data centers with 800 megawatts of nuclear power from Three Mile Island.

With the generating capacity of thousands of large wind turbines, TMI’s Unit 1 will provide power far more reliably than wind and solar.

TMI’s reopening would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Many now seem to have forgotten the partial meltdown of Unit 2 in 1979.

Or, they’ve come to understand that the risks of nuclear power can be managed --- just like the hazards (real or imagined) of other modern technologies.

Then there is Amazon, a company better known for its delivery of consumer goods than for its profitable data centers.

Eastern Oregon’s residents are familiar with Amazon’s large, dreary concrete buildings that have elaborate cooling equipment and large backup generators should utility power fail.

These hint at enormous power consumption.

Lured by Oregon’s generous tax breaks, Amazon and other web service providers like Google and Facebook built data centers to take advantage of the state’s cheap hydroelectric power.

However, the newcomers did not realize that public officials were inadequately planning for the increased power that new data centers would require.

This came at a time when politicians were also forcing electric utilities like Portland General Electric to switch to wind and solar while promoting an all-electric economy.

Data centers had to find reliable power and meet the ideological requirements of Oregon politicians. It did not work. The centers now need more electricity than the Oregon grid can supply.

Blackouts are a distinct possibility.

Although ideologically aligned with Oregon politicians, Amazon executives realized their very profitable data centers would fail if they kept posturing with renewable energy.

So, they took a bold step on Oct. 16, announcing that they will work with X-Energy to build small modular nuclear reactors to provide the power they need.

These will be set up, not in Oregon where nuclear power is essentially banned, but across the Columbia River in Washington State, near an existing nuclear plant.

Power can be easily shipped to Oregon.

Amazon announced that it is working with Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 Washington State utilities on this nuclear project. This suggests that many Northwest utilities are finally acknowledging that the region will need great amounts of new and reliable power.

Thank you, Amazon, for promoting a solution to the looming Pacific Northwest power shortage. This may not save us from the massive rate increases that are beginning to hit consumers due to the renewable debacle.

But it may keep the lights on.

Following two back-to-back hurricanes that severely pummeled the Southeastern United States, climate activists have swooped in like vultures, blaming political conservatives for the destruction wrought by Helene and Milton. At MSNBC, Chris Hayes spouts, “We have known for decades that our planet is warming and that we would start seeing the brutal effects. But conservatives remain so deep in their denial that they are flailing around for anyone or anything else to blame.”

While many attempt to falsely connect hurricanes to anthropogenic climate change, the truth is these monster storms are a natural and necessary function of our planet’s atmosphere. But that didn’t prevent CNN from posting a piece wildly declaring, “Helene was supercharged by ultra-warm water made up to 500 times more likely by global warming.”

Hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean traditionally begins on June 1, as the equatorial waters warm to near 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the minimum temperature required for a hurricane to form. Water temperature is often considered the fuel for a hurricane because as the warm water evaporates it subsequently condenses within the storm releasing latent heat. However, there are a multitude of other factors that must be present for hurricane formation including a storm’s distance from the equator, light winds blowing into the center of the storm, high humidity values, and something we refer to as the “saturated adiabatic lapse rate” which is basically the rate at which saturated air cools with altitude. When all of these ingredients are in perfect sync, a hurricane begins to form.

Dr. Neil Frank, longtime head of the National Hurricane Center, contends the total number of hurricanes each year ebbs and flows in sixty-year cycles. On the average, each year there are ten tropical storms (wind speeds less than 74 mph) that develop over the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. Six of these storms become hurricanes (wind speeds of 74 mph or more).  In an average three-year period, roughly five hurricanes strike the United States coastline, killing approximately 50 to 100 people anywhere from Texas to Maine. Of these, two are typically major hurricanes (winds greater than 110 mph).

The cover endorsement for my recent book, Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty and Property, was written by Dr. Frank. He contends there is no evidence suggesting we are seeing more hurricanes than ever (over the past 170 years of records), and he insists the frequency and intensity of hurricanes has not changed over years.  Additionally, Dr. Frank reminds us that hurricanes are a beneficial component of the overall global atmosphere as they act as mechanisms which draw hot air from the earth’s equatorial regions into the jet stream which then transports the natural warmth to the colder latitudes. This allows for expansive and comfortable temperate zones, where most of us live.

But why do recent storms seem worse than ever? The answer is threefold.

First, there is no doubt property damage, in terms of dollars, is on the rise. This trend is driven by the continued development of expensive property along the coasts putting more value at risk of wind and water damage. Also, flooding has increased due to residential and commercial properties edging right up to the water’s edge. Under these modern circumstances, any given hurricane would cause more damage than it would have in the past. Sadly, the same could be said for the number of lives lost during these storms.

Second is media coverage. Back when I was presenting the weather for both CBS-TV News and KPIX-TV in San Francisco, content producers knew severe weather gains eyeballs. It is still true on TV today.

Third, there is the ad nauseam, agenda-driven propaganda put forth by activists attempting to pin their climate fiction hoax on deadly hurricanes.

But why is Florida seemingly often in the crosshairs?

Because the “Sunshine State” is a sitting duck. It’s a 500-mile long, 160-mile wide peninsula extending into the warm waters of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico with 1,146 miles of coastline and an average elevation of a mere 100-feet. Given that the average hurricane is about 300-miles-wide, the Florida peninsula is a prime target for potential disaster. As a result, during this 2024 season, of the nine hurricanes formed to date, four have hit the United States with two terribly striking Florida.

Brian Sussman is an award-winning meteorologist, former San Francisco radio talk host, and bestselling author.
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I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality. 

Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?

The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers.  As examples, on the electricity generation side, natural gas power plants that currently supply about half of our electricity are slated for forced closure at the rate of several a year until all of them are closed by 2040.  The longer the net zero fantasy goes on, the more difficult and costly it will be to re-open these plants (if they are even still standing), or build new ones.  Wind and solar facilities are getting built at the cost of billions, with huge subsidies, producing essentially no useful power.  Every time another one gets built, the taxpayers and ratepayers are on the hook to pay its costs for its entire life.  On the consumer side, residents of large buildings are under a mandate to discard their current natural gas or oil heat systems in favor of inferior electric heat pumps, at costs estimated at $100,000 per housing unit or more for older buildings.  When the net zero project gets abandoned, these massive investments will be a deadweight loss.  And there are many other examples of the ongoing damage being caused by the mandates.

So what will be the event that causes the project to crater?  If nothing else comes first, at some point we will get hit with a string of catastrophic blackouts.  That would surely wake people up and almost certainly force a re-think of the project.  But just waiting for this catastrophe to turn things around is not really a great idea, for two reasons:  first, to their credit, the people who run the grid are good at keeping it going in difficult circumstances, meaning that we could get “lucky,” and the catastrophe could be postponed for years during which enormous ongoing damage from mal-investment occurs; and the second problem is that when the blackouts come they could cause real human harm and tragedy, such as deaths of people with electric heat who freeze in their apartments.  In other words, people who care about New York owe it to their fellow citizens to try to straighten this out before the catastrophe hits.

And thus it comes about that three public-spirited guys, who have been observing the ongoing slow-motion train wreck with horror, have written a Report to urge New Yorkers to defy the statutory mandates to electrify building heat.  The title of the Report is “Don’t Do It!  Report to New York Co-op and Condo Boards and Trade Associations On LL97 Conversion To Electric Heat.”

The three public-spirited guys are myself and co-authors Roger Caiazza and Richard Ellenbogen.  Caiazza is a retired air pollution meteorologist who has a blog called the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, where he writes prolifically about New York’s impending energy disaster.  Ellenbogen is a Cornell-trained electrical engineer who does not have a big internet presence, but is a very knowledgeable frequent commenter on New York’s various regulator dockets relating to the energy transition, where he pulls no punches.  The three of us wrote this Report for no compensation so that nobody could accuse us of being shills for the fossil fuel industry or the real estate industry or any other special interest.

The reason that the Report is directed to condominium and co-op Boards and Trade Associations is that the condo/co-op community represents a group of hundreds of thousands of voters who find themselves in the cross-hairs of New York’s impossible energy mandates.  Among other New York residents, small building residents and single-family homeowners have been exempted from the heat conversion mandates (at least for now), while rental tenants are insulated by rent regulations.  So the boards and shareholders of the large condos and co-ops are the largest group of residents directly affected by the mandates.  Many boards of these buildings are only now starting to look into how to comply with the 2030 mandate to convert to electric heat, and getting feedback from consultants about the enormous costs.  Few of them realize that the State at the same time has no credible plan to generate enough electricity to make the heat conversion mandate work.

The distribution of the Report to the relevant communities has recently begun.  Daughter Jane - known to readers here as a frequent contributor - has set up a group called New Yorkers for Affordable Reliable Energy ("New Yorkers ARE") to organize grass-roots opposition to complying with the heat conversion mandate.  Co-author Roger Caiazza wrote a post for Watts Up With That two weeks ago announcing the issuance of the Report. 

I recommend the Report to readers who are at all interested in the depths of ignorance and incompetence of the New York legislators and regulators who are pushing the impossible"energy transition.” It’s only about 15 pages long, with a good Introduction and Executive Summary at the beginning that capture the gist.  Here is a summary quote from the Executive Summary:

The Net Zero transition is by far the largest, most expensive and ambitious government-directed project ever undertaken in New York. However, the statutory mandates of the CLCPA and LL 97 have been enacted without:

* Any detailed Feasibility Study of whether this transition is possible under basic physics and existing technology;

* Any Demonstration Project anywhere in the world showing how an electrical grid can function relying on mostly on wind and solar and without emissions-creating resources for back-up of intermittency;

* Any detailed analysis or projection of the costs to New Yorkers of this transition, whether in their capacities as taxpayers or ratepayers or both.

This Report assesses issues of the feasibility and cost of New York’s electricity transition project.  The purpose is to advise New York residents, particularly co-op and condo owners and their Boards who are subject to LL 97, on how they should respond to the statutory mandates. The Report reviews facts and data showing that there are strong reasons to believe that the goals that have been set, and mandated by law, are impossible of achievement, let alone at any remotely affordable cost. The State and City have totally failed in their responsibilities to their citizens to assure that the mandates they have enacted are feasible and affordable. 

So to get back to the initial question of how New York’s energy madness will end:  An alternative to just waiting for the blackouts to come will be for a critical mass of New Yorkers in the cross-hairs of the mandates to refuse to comply and to demand that the mandates be rescinded.  We are attempting to start that process into motion.  Let’s hope that we have some success.