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Milder Winters Seem Like the Upside to Climate Change, But There Is No Upside

Researchers found that milder winters doesn't mean fewer winter deaths.

Those looking for global climate change's silver-lining in a scorching, cloudless California sky will have to keep searching: a team of French and American public health researchers found that milder winters aren't going to result in fewer deaths during winter.

According to the paper, which comes out today in the journal Institute of Physics, "comparing across cities, we found that excess winter mortality did not depend on seasonal temperature range, and was no lower in warmer vs. colder cities, suggesting that temperature is not a key driver of winter excess mortality."

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In a press release, Patrick Kinney, one of the study's co-authors, explained that "most older people who die over the winter don't die from cold, they die from complications related to flu and other respiratory diseases." He then attributed at least some of these deaths to families lovingly coming together for the holidays and bringing around flu bugs from college.

The researchers looked at winter and summer seasonal mean temperature and deaths in 39 French and American cities, some of which had big seasonal swings, like New York, and some that had comparatively mild winters, like Miami and Marseilles. If a warmer climate leads to fewer winter deaths, then the researchers would expect to see less "winter excess mortality" in the milder cities. There wasn't.

"While seasonal temperature differences spanned a four-fold range, and winter mean temperatures ranging from -5 to over 20 degrees Celsius," the study states, "there was no statistical correlation between the magnitude of winter excess mortality and the seasonal range of temperature."

Adults in developed countries spend 90 percent of their time indoors, according to the paper, so the dryness of winter air allowing for those worse flus is probably as much to blame for winter deaths as the cold.

On the flip side, worse summers still seem worse. The paper did find support for some analyses which "have predicted that increasing heat-related deaths will outweigh cold-related decreases, leading to increasing net mortality effects in future climates."

For example, in Paris, "the increased mortality with cold weather occurred on the relatively small number of days below 0 degrees Celsius in Paris, while more substantial increase in mortality for hot weather occurred on far more days when the mean temperature exceeded 20 degrees Celsius."

So it's more bad news about our changing climate. If you're looking for an upside, as global temperatures rise life probably won't get worse for Miami residents. After the ocean rises, there won't be any.