Apparently the prospect of deaths among the elderly due to temperature increases caused by climate change carry less weight than the prospect of deaths among younger people according to Adrian Barnett - whom I'm sure did not pause to think of how his words might be received by older Australians when he participated in this media release on January 16, 2012 concerning a recently published study he co-authored with the CSIRO's Dr. Xiaoming Wang and others:
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in conjunction with CSIRO has conducted a world-first study into the potential impact climate change will have on 'years of life lost' in Brisbane.
Associate Professor Adrian Barnett of QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) said while many other studies had examined death rates on hot and cold days, this was the first study to examine years of life lost.
"The results are startling," Professor Barnett said.
"Temperature-related deaths currently account for 6,572 years of life lost per year in Brisbane, which is more than the annual number of years of life lost to breast cancer of 3,733.
"The figure is so high because Brisbane has a very narrow comfort zone of a mean temperature between 20-25°C, on days when the temperature is above or below this range we tend to see an increase in years of life lost."
Years of life lost sums the life expectancy of all deaths according to age at death, so it gives more weight to younger deaths.
"We wanted to use years of life lost because we suspected that many temperature-related deaths were in the elderly, which would reduce the public health importance of temperature compared with other issues," Professor Barnett said.
"In fact we found the opposite, with a surprisingly high years of life lost figure."
Professor Barnett said things would only get worse as Climate Change continued.
"A 2°C increase in temperature in Brisbane between now and 2050 would result in an extra 381 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," he said.
"A 2°C increase in temperature is the figure the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is dangerous but could be reached unless more aggressive measures are undertaken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Professor Barnett said should temperatures increase beyond the 2°C mark the results would be catastrophic.
"A 4°C increase in temperature would result in an extra 3,242 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," he said.
In Cosmos Online on January 16, 2012:
Commenting on the study, Colin Butler of the Australian National University in Canberra said, "The 'years of life lost' approach is the real breakthrough in this paper," adding that he wishes he had thought of the idea himself. "They show that heat waves have a bigger effect on mortality in younger and middle-aged people than we would expect."
Abstract of the study The impact of temperature on years of life lost in Brisbane, Australia:
Temperature is an important determinant of health. A better knowledge of how temperature affects population health is important not only to the scientific community, but also to the decision-makers who develop and implement early warning systems and intervention strategies to mitigate the health effects of extreme temperatures1, 2. The temperature–health relationship is also of growing interest as climate change is projected to shift the overall temperature distribution higher3, 4. Previous studies have examined the relative risks of temperature-related mortality, but the absolute measure of years of life lost is also useful as it combines the number of deaths with life expectancy. Here we use years of life lost to provide a novel measure of the impact of temperature on mortality in Brisbane, Australia. We also project the future temperature-related years of life lost attributable to climate change. We show that the association between temperature and years of life lost is U-shaped, with increased years of life lost for cold and hot temperatures. The temperature-related years of life lost will worsen greatly if future climate change goes beyond a 2 °C increase and without any adaptation to higher temperatures. This study highlights that public health adaptation to climate change is necessary.
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