humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Feb 25, 12:58 pm, Puppet_Sock wrote:
> An ignorant, pschotic troll lied:
> [snip]
>
> > > Cold kills more people than heat.
>
> > Data, please.
> > Even the article provided by puppy socks tends to show
> > otherwise.
>
> No, it did not. You are telling a lie. The conclusion
> of the study I linked to was that cold kills more
> people than heat. It was explicitly stated. Twice.

On the other hand, the study showed that the excess mortality per
degree of temperature change is greater for higher temperatures than
for lower temperatures. When temperatures increased above the minimum
mortality temperatures, mortality rates increased by an average of 2.5
deaths per degree, while when temperatures fell below the minimum
mortality temperatures, the mortality increase was on 0.8 deaths per
degree. So the mortality increase per degree for higher temperatures
is 3 times that for lower temperatures. (All death rates are per
million population.)

What the study concluded was that annual excess deaths for colder days
was greater than the annual excess deaths for warmer days. The
average of the seven regions included in the study was 2003 cold
related deaths per year versus 217 heat related deaths per year. But
a major reason for the difference is simply that there are a lot more
"cold" days than there are "hot" days, with an average for the regions
of 287 "cold" days versus 38 "hot" days.

If you calculate a daily mortality rate increase rather than an annual
one, you get an average of 7.0 cold related deaths per day versus 5.7
heat related deaths per day. This is still higher for cold, but it's
not so clear if the difference is significant. Also, the study
doesn't consider non temperature related causes for seasonal mortality
rate changes, such as length of day.

I don't have an opinion on whether heat or cold causes more deaths,
but this study isn't going to decide the question one way or the
other.