Emma Dornseif ’25, Anthropology

Emma Dornseif ’25

Major

Anthropology

Project Title

Modeling Temperature and Mortality Relationships in a Warming World

Presentation Link

View Emma's Presentation

Minor(s): Environmental Studies

I assessed the claim that more people die in cold temperatures than hot temperatures. Because scholarly and media discourse focuses on global warming and not on cold events, we hypothesized that there would be a stronger correlation between heat extremes and mortality than cold extremes. To measure temperature-mortality relationships and assess extreme temperature events associated with higher mortality, we assessed climate data and associated mortality between 2013-2019 across locations with various climates and temperature seasonalities, including continental Europe and the tropical districts of France, French Guiana and La Reunión. We found that more people died during cold extremes than during hot extremes in continental Europe; however, it is worth noting that the heat extremes only slightly exceeded average temperatures, whereas the cold extremes fell much further below average. We observed almost no correlation between temperature and mortality in the tropical locations, which had very few extreme temperature events, indicating that the temperature-mortality relationships calculated at higher latitudes may not apply in the tropics. I plan to investigate these findings in further detail for my senior thesis. This experience taught me a lot about the physical dynamics of the world and how to model and critically evaluate real world situations.