How Real Are Heatwave Death Claims?
Yesterday I reported on the latest attempt by the CCC to scare the public about worsening heatwaves.
According to PBC Today:
Now, the CCC has warned people could be at risk if action is not taken. According to the organisation, the number of deaths due to heat waves is set to more than triple by 2040. With 7,000 deaths a year expected to be attributed to deadly heatwaves, the CCC is calling on the government to act now.
The last real heatwave in the UK, July 2006, is often held up as an example of how many excess deaths occur in hot weather.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
According to the Met Office, there were 680 excess deaths. But how reliable are these guesstimates?
The first thing to note is that the summer months traditionally have the lowest death rates of the whole year, with August lowest of all months. This hardly supports the general assertion that hot weather is harmful to health.
Now let’s home in on the summer season. I have included September as it has a similar death rate to June:
As we can see, the percentage of deaths in 2006 was not in any way unusual. Indeed, the highest percentage was in 2011, one of the coldest summers in the last decade. (I have used “percentage of annual deaths”, as the annual death rate has been creeping up in recent years).
And what about the month of July itself?
We actually find that the death rate was lower in 2006 than the following two, wholly unexceptional years.
There seems to be little evidence to show that the heatwave in July 2006 had any long term effect on death rates.
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