Joel D. Schwartz, Mihye Lee, Patrick L. Kinney, Suijia Yang, David Mills, Marcus C. Sarofim, Russell Jones, Richard Streeter, Alexis St. Juliana, Jennifer Peers, Radley M. Horton

Environmental Health

Published date November 4, 2015

Projections of temperature-attributable premature deaths in 209 U.S. cities using a cluster-based Poisson approach

  • Uses Poisson regressions to model temperature-attributable premature mortality as a function of daily average temperature in 209 U.S. cities by month
  • Caclulates future daily average temperatures in each city under Representative Concentration Pathway 6.0
  • Finds temperature-mortality relationships that vary by location and time of year
  • Finds the largest mortality response during colder months (October–March) was at the beginning (October) and end (March) of the period
  • Finds some locations show net reductions in premature temperature-attributable deaths with climate change, due to decreased cold-related deaths
  • Results are consistent with most of the previous studies in projecting that climate change will lead to an increase in heat deaths on the order of thousands to tens of thousands of annual deaths by the end of the century compared to the 1990 baseline, and that the increase in deaths from heat will be larger than the reduction in deaths from cold