When federal agencies warn about "premature death," Americans should hide their rainy-day funds. Gloomy officials never leave other people's money alone.
Premature death figures prominently in new prophecy from the Obama administration about health-related consequences of climate change. A fact sheet on the administration's "Scientific Assessment on Impact of Climate Change to Human Health in the United States" makes those consequences seem as dire as its assertions of catastrophe are uncompromising.
Vague definition
The fact sheet doesn't bother to report the full assessment's vague definition of "premature deaths"-those "that occur earlier than a specified age, often the average life expectancy at birth." It simply warns, "Extreme heat can be expected to cause an increase in the number of premature deaths, from thousands to tens of thousands, each summer, which will outpace projected decreases in deaths from extreme cold." Does this mean all those folks will expire a day earlier than whatever the benchmark is? A month? Ten years? And how are premature deaths counted?
Even with a tenfold increase, premature mortality related to heat would remain far below actual death rates associated with more-definite causes. During May-September of each year from 2009 through 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, heat was the underlying cause of or contributed to as many as 3.5 deaths/million population and as few as 1 death/million. Calculations based on 2014 data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, adjusted for age, show heart disease caused about 1,700 deaths/million Americans, cancer 1,600 deaths/million, and chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, and stroke 360-400 deaths/million each. Those were genuine fatalities in the five leading categories-not gauzy projections.
Of course, no one welcomes any new increment of preventable death. Even if the increased death rate postulated for extreme heat would be small in comparison with other fatality causes, the assessment wants citizens to worry. In addition to increasing the number of deaths directly related to extreme heat, the fact sheet says, climate changes will aggravate potentially fatal problems associated with outdoor air quality, flooding, vector-born infection, water-related infection, food-related infection, and mental illness. Problems will be most severe for "communities of color," the poor, immigrants, "limited-English-proficiency groups," indigenous peoples, pregnant women, children, older adults, outdoor workers, and persons with disabilities or chronic medical conditions.
Is this not alarming?
Missing from the fact sheet and a joint blog by EPA and other agencies, however, is any mention of what people might do to adapt to climate changes. The full assessment discusses adaptive capacity and resiliency as potentially mitigating phenomena. For example, to its projection about premature heat-related deaths, which the fact sheet highlights, it attaches this qualification, which the fact sheet omits: "Future adaptation will very likely reduce these impacts." Indeed. People do seek shade in steamy weather and use insect repellant when mosquitoes become troublesome. They might even move north and away from waterways if necessary. In fact, they probably would adapt to worst-case climate changes in ways no one, not even authors of the assessment, can predict. Yet neither the fact sheet nor blog-all that will be reported-mentions adaptation.
Also missing from the summaries is acknowledgment that climate change might yield health-related benefits, such as plant growth enhanced by warming and elevation of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. Nor do the summaries report that warming might be substantially weaker than model projections underlying climate-change concern. Until an El Nino event of the past couple of years, the temperature record made model predictions look biased toward dangerous warming. Observations after the El Nino subsides will be instructive.
Case-building
Through distortion and omission, the assessment reports descend into case-building for policies designed to maneuver the US away from fossil energy. They come, after all, from an administration known to have skewed cost-benefit analyses with tricks like the "social cost of carbon."
A premature death has occurred. It's of the credibility of this administration's appeals to science.
