Science Alert warned Monday “worsening human-induced climate change” is contributing to an increase in heat-related deaths as the United States languishes under a “heat dome.”
“Despite being preventable, the leading weather-related deaths in the US are caused by heat,” the article states, adding that heat-related deaths “are rising as heat waves like this one occur more regularly thanks to worsening human-induced climate change.”
“Extreme heat events are also increasing in their intensity and duration, bringing along greater fire danger too,” it contends, arguing that “millions are at risk” from the intense heat.
The group’s assertion that in the U.S. most weather-related deaths “are caused by heat” does not stand up to scrutiny, however, since the majority of weather-related deaths come from cold, not heat.
According to data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over the past twenty years annual heat-related deaths in the U.S. have ranged between 0.9 and 3.6 per million people whereas cold-related deaths have ranged between 3.6 and 5.9 per million people.
The two graphs below, furnished by the EPA using data from the CDC, depict this disparity visually.
The imbalance between heat-based deaths and cold-based deaths becomes even more apparent when looking at the global scenario, where cold-related deaths dwarf heat-related deaths by nearly ten to one.
The UK-based Lancet medical journal, which regularly laments the dire consequences of climate change, published a study in 2021, which found that 5,083,173 deaths worldwide were associated with “non-optimal temperatures per year,” and then went on to explain that the vast majority of these were “cold-related” rather than “heat-related.”
According to the Lancet, people around the world are 9.4 times more likely to die from the cold than from the heat.
It added that over the past 20 years, the death rate from heat has slightly increased due to global warming (+0.21 percent), but that the death rate from the cold decreased by more than twice as much (-0.51 percent) during the same period.
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Politically speaking, Americans leaning Democrat tend to view climate change as a much graver threat than Republican-leaning voters, according to the most recent polls.
Last March, the Pew Research Center reported that “few Republicans see climate change as a top priority for the country. Just 12% of Republicans and Republican leaners say dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.”
By contrast, 59 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress and an even larger majority (78 percent) views it as a major threat to the U.S., Pew found.