New Australian climate scare: "Climate change could quadruple deaths"

Welcome to the wonderful world of climate modelling! Models are an ideal tool in the hands of people who feel a need to produce ever new global warming scares. The latest example is an Australian study, "The impact of temperature on years of life lost in Brisbane, Australia", published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Climate change could quadruple deaths", is how Cosmos magazine describes the central finding of the new study.

Once the team had produced a statistical model, they used it to predict the effects of increased temperature due to climate change on deaths in the city in the year 2050. If temperatures in Brisbane rise on average by just one degree, Barnett's study suggests that there will actually be fewer temperature-related deaths than there are now. That's because cold deaths are currently the main problem and there will be fewer as the climate becomes warmer.

A 2 ºC increase, however, will markedly raise the number of deaths due to heat and at 4 ºC, "the health consequences become catastrophic" with more than four times the current level of 'years of life lost' due to heat.

The problem with this kind of studies is that that they totally ignore the fact that people tend to adapt to different environmental circumstances. In this case the authors even admit this:

The authors emphasised that their study assumes no change in the way Brisbane deals with climate, and so is probably a worst-case scenario. Things can be done to improve the situation. "It would be a good idea to insulate properly every house in Brisbane,"said Barnett, "starting with houses belonging to people over 65."

Dr. Barnett even concedes that cold weather is right now the worst killer in Brisbane:

"There are more deaths from the cold in Brisbane than Hobart!" said Barnett. "It's because Brisbane houses are very open to allow the air to flow through. When it gets cold, a lot of Brisbane houses tend to be exposed to what's outside." Barnett also suggested that people living in warm climates often don't have the right clothes for cold weather.


Read the entire article here

PS

Australians are welcome to e.g. Scandinavia to learn how to thrive in a cold climate. In the same way there are places where Australians - and the inhabitants of Brisbane in particular - could learn to function in much warmer climates. But for the true global warming cultists, these simple facts of course spoil the party.

Another major problem with these kind of studies is, of course, that they take the unsubstantiated IPCC warming "predictions" for granted.