Posts Tagged ‘Global warming saves thousands of lives’
Global warming saves thousands of lives
GLOBAL warming saves lives. The New York Times has news:
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this January was the fourth warmest in the documented history of weather in the contiguous United States.
If anything, the exceptional snowstorms of last winter and the uncommon gentleness of this one are further evidence of global warming, which is characterized by extreme and erratic weather patterns rather than an unceasing rise of the planet’s temperature.
The long-term troubles this sort of weather predicts are alarming. In the short term, however, our warm winter may have one unforeseen and felicitous consequence: a drastic reduction in the incidence of influenza.
…There has been a wide variation in the number of deaths attributable to influenza in past seasons — it has reached as high as 49,000 — but the average is around 12,000….it is likely that no more than a few hundred people in America, and possibly far fewer… For every individual who has been hospitalized this season, 22 people were hospitalized in the 2010-11 flu season. Even more strikingly, 122 children died of flu last season and 348 during the flu outbreak bvcof 2009-10 — while this time around that number is 3.
Read the rest of this entry »
