Two hundred people, most of them elderly, will die in Britain of cold-related diseases every day this winter, according to calculations by Britain\’s leading advocacy group for old people, Age UK.
\”The fact that these \’excess\’ deaths occur in winter makes it clear that they are due directly to cold,\” the organisation\’s research manager, Philip Rossall, said. \”And the fact that other, colder countries have lower excess winter deaths means that there is no reason that they are not preventable.\”
Age UK\’s special adviser for policy, Mervyn Kohler, asked: \”Why is this not a national scandal?\” There were 26,156 excess winter deaths during 2009-10, with figures for 2010-11 to be published next month. \”There is no reason to suppose that the worsening trend will not continue,\” said Kohler.
If you deliberately push up fuel prices to save Gaia then you\’ll be killing some poor people through the higher fuel prices.
Inevitable *only if* the pension system is arranged in such a way that a significant proportion of old people were, before green energy price rises, right on the ‘freezing/not-freezing’ margin with no spending on luxuries at all. Otherwise, absolutely not inevitable.
(obvious parallel: if UK food prices doubled overnight, nobody would starve, because nobody would be stupid enough to maintain their current consumption of other goods and halve their food consumption…)
I wonder how many of these pensioners are living in one-bedroom flats that are cheap to heat. I wonder how many of them are living alone in family sized homes where their fuel costs include heating a number of empty bedrooms. This “fuel poverty” lark is just a way to get young taxpayers to further subsidise old peoples’ cheap land costs. The UK is no country for young men.
““The fact that these ‘excess’ deaths occur in winter makes it clear that they are due directly to cold,” the organisation’s research manager, Philip Rossall, said. “
Does it? Oh, I guess correlation does indeed now prove causation, then.
I suppose they are correcting for the well known ‘blip’ of elderly people dying in Jan, having hung on until Christmas, or dying in Dec because they can’t bear another Christmas?
Yet another charity decides that it doesn’t want my pennies. Apart from the lifeboats, is there an honest one left?
Excess deaths does not necessary follow from more expensive heating. There are a lot of ways for old people to die that may be associated with the cold, but not necessarily from the costs of heating. Think of the number of old people who slip on ice outside for instance. It doesn’t matter how warm they heat their house if they slip on the pavement on the way to the corner shop. Nor does it matter if they catch a cold from going outside and getting wet. In Britain that just sometimes happens no matter how careful you are – or how warm your house is. If everyone else is getting the flu, old people will too regardless of the price of gas.
Which is why we should embrace global warming. Those opposed to it clearly want old people to die, right?
“I suppose they are correcting for the well known ‘blip’ of elderly people dying in Jan, having hung on until Christmas, or dying in Dec because they can’t bear another Christmas?”
The even better thing about this stat group is that the instance is purely European-descent Christian. Down under, where it is warm at Christmas – they die in the same way. Look at the Jewish or Muslim population and you get the same effect, but correlated to their significant religious festivals. For the latter group, these moving against the seasons, of course, due to the lunar calendar link.
Dying after Christmas is just a way of escaping paying the credit card bills.