Cold-Hearted Killer

Cold Kills Far More People Worldwide Than Heat

The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, “As Heat Waves Grow Deadlier, Power Becomes a Must” (5-Aug-24). The gist of the article was that heat is a growing, deadly problem. “Heat kills far more people in the U.S. each year than floods, tornadoes or any other type of severe weather, according to the National Weather Service.”

The article leaves the reader with the idea that heat is an important killer that will keep getting worse as the atmosphere warms. That’s true, in a sense. However, compared to cold, heat is nothing.

Gasparrini et al., 2015, looked at the mortality from heat and cold. "Most of this mortality burden was caused by days colder than the optimum temperature (7·29%), compared with days warmer than the optimum temperature (0·42%).”

Consider the following graph from the paper to understand the relative magnitude of deaths from cold and heat.

As the world warms, deaths from cold will drop faster than deaths from heat will increase, resulting in a net reduction in temperature-related deaths. This is generally good news and yet the WSJ article focused only on the negative aspect.