Estimating changes in mortality due to climate change By Neville Nichols

Introduction Global temperatures are constantly increasing due to the “greenhouse effect” Many studies show that winter mortality is higher than summer mortality Study to prove this was conducted on Melbourne, Australia It is the extreme temperatures (hottest & coldest) that are most related to human health, so winter & summer were used in the studies Winter mortality is higher than summer mortality, which means more people die in the winter due to the cold, sickness, etc, but there is a short increase in mortality in the summer due to heatwaves, as we know, living in NYC For this study, no experiment was necessary, data was just collected & analyzed

Why should you care? Mortality means death Increase in mortality means increase in death Increase in death means the people you love and care about will die sooner!

Data & Methods Temperature data from each winter 1979-2001 was collected (mean daily mortality & winter mean minimum temperatures) The two variables were then correlated with each other to see how they relate to one another “High-pass filtering” was used to remove other factors that affect mortality, such as old age High pass filtering – a method scientists use to get rid of other variables such as like I mentioned, old age, population demographics, long term effects, etc

You can see that there are more deaths of the elderly in the winter than in the summer Overall, the average lines confirm this

Results Increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius results in winter mortality decrease of 4.5% However, a 2 degree temperature increase during the summer in NYC resulted in 2.6% increase in mortality Therefore, over time, it is likely that as temperature continues to increase, winter mortality rates will decrease 4.5% less people die in the winter as temp increases by 0.7 degrees

Conclusion Global warming will lead to less people dying in the winter, but more people dying in the summer The relationship between mortality and winter mean temperature in Melbourne can predict mortality rates in the future