Essay by Eric Worrall
“… At an after-work drinks event I attended, a man fainted and collapsed. We gave him water and walked him to his car, through the city. The baking hot streets were utterly deserted. …”
WA had its hottest summer ever, but climate change and heat-related health problems barely made the news
ABC Science / By technology reporter James Purtill
…
We read that extreme heat kills more people in Australia than all the other natural disasters combined.
This has been WA’s hottest summer on record — and the hot weather isn’t over yet.
…
At an after-work drinks event I attended, a man fainted and collapsed. We gave him water and walked him to his car, through the city. The baking hot streets were utterly deserted.
As the month progressed, there appeared to be a growing disconnection with the way news outlets were generally covering the ongoing natural disaster.
News stories often showed people “beating the heat” by going to the beach. A prominent politician devoted one sentence of their weekly column to the weather: “Yes, it’s summer, and yes, it’s hot.”
Richard Yin, a Perth GP and deputy chair of Doctors for the Environment, said the lack of acknowledgement in the media about the impact of heat and climate change was “vaguely terrifying”.
…
If someone “faints” after a workplace drinking session, climate change is to blame? I can think of some other possible explanations.
The claim extreme heat is Australia’s biggest killer is not borne out by the evidence. The following is by scientists who claim the ration between summer and winter deaths is closing because of climate change – but there are still more deaths in winter.
Increased ratio of summer to winter deaths due to climate warming in Australia, 1968–2018
Ivan C. Hanigan, Keith B.G. Dear, Alistair Woodward
First published: 26 April 2021The authors have stated they have no conflict of interest.
Abstract
Objective: To determine if global warming has changed the balance of summer and winter deaths in Australia.
Methods: Counts of summer and winter cause-specific deaths of subjects aged 55 and over for the years 1968–2018 were entered into a Poisson time-series regression. Analysis was stratified by states and territories of Australia, by sex, age and cause of death (respiratory, cardiovascular, and renal diseases). The warmest and coldest subsets of seasons were compared.
Results: Warming over 51 years was associated with a long-term increase in the ratio of summer to winter mortality from 0.73 in the summer of 1969 to 0.83 in the summer of 2018. The increase occurred faster in years that were warmer than average.
Conclusions: Mortality in the warmest and coldest times of the year is converging as annual average temperatures rise.
Implications for public health: If climate change continues, deaths in the hottest months will come to dominate the burden of mortality in Australia.
Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1753-6405.13107
Is this really what the climate alarm movement has come to? A dubious claim that extreme heat is the biggest killer, panic over someone passing out after an office drinking party where the manager was likely paying for the drinks, and a long whinge about people enjoying themselves at the beach in hot weather, instead of focussing on the climate crisis?
What a waste of column inches.
Related