Don’t Lose Sleep Over Research On “Climate Change” & Sleep Apnea

Here’s the propaganda headline: “Climate change is making it harder for us to sleep: Study”. Which cannot be believed.

Yet if they would have said “Climate change research making it harder to sleep”, I would have bought it. Because why? Because thinking about how rotten science has become since it began chasing after climate chimera boils my blood, murdering sleep.

The peer-reviewed paper is “Global warming may increase the burden of obstructive sleep apnea” by Bastien Lechat and a bunch of other wide-awakes in Nature Communications.

Sharp-eyed readers will have already caught the escape word in the title: may. Which means “climate change”—though they are to be congratulated for using the old term global warming—may not have anything to do with sleep apnea or sleep disorders.

Here’s their claimed results:

There was a non-linear dose-response association between 24h daily average ambient temperatures and the risk of having OSA [obstructive sleep apnea] on the following night (Fig. 2a). Globally, the probability of having OSA was 45% (risk ratio (RR) [95%CI]; 1.45 [1.44, 1.47]) higher during days with high temperatures (99^th; 27.3°C) vs. during days with lower temperatures (25^th; 6.4°C). Similarly, the probability of having severe OSA was 49% (1.49 [1.46, 1.52] higher in high vs. low temperature days. 

We see below claims OSA is much higher than anybody actually sees. But about half of all people “globally” have OSA at least sometimes? This cannot be believed, or it is a malady which isn’t a malady. They also say in their Introduction:

High ambient temperatures are also associated with considerable reductions in sleep duration and quality^15,16,17, including a near doubling of short sleep (<6h) prevalence¹⁸. Sleep loss due to global warming in 2023 was recently estimated to incur a loss of 3.9 million years of life because of disability or death¹⁸.

Pause a moment and reflect on these items before reading farther. See if you think of what I thought of.

If it’s true the hotter a place is, the less sleep people are getting, from sleep disorders or OSA, then the hotter areas of the globe must have a lot more insomniacs. Here’s their very own picture of OSA prevalence, by country (severe is dark blue). None are 45%.

Singapore is hot all year around, and has one of the lowest OSA rates. Thailand, too. Germany is not so hot, and has one of the highest rates. Ireland hot? No, sir. Indeed, there seems to be no signal at all with temperatures and OSA rates.

I couldn’t find OSA rates by State, but I did find some on insufficient sleep by state:

New York and Ohio, which are cool, have much higher rates than Arizona and New Mexico, which are hot. Et cetera.

What seems to be a better correlate is fattness. Fatter folks have more OSA and sleep worse, and generally have poorer health. But that’s not conclusive. One paper said, “Surprisingly, China, where the prevalence of obesity is low, also has a high prevalence of OSA, with 24.2% of males and females affected (with no gender difference)”. Yet even that might be due to increased measurement zeal.

Important: You see lots of complaints OSA is under-diagnosed, which if true means as studies about it increase, rates will increase. It’s at that point researchers will show up and correlate those increases with something like temperature, and then hint-hint wink-wink imply temperature is the cause of the apnea. One despairs at this.

Anyway, even though there does not appear any base signal tying temperature with OSA or sleepiness, it might still be the case that those with OSA have more episodes when it’s hotter. Passing by forgetting the benefits and joys of air conditioning, which all these researchers do, we return to the strange way the researchers stated their result.

I won’t bother to say much about how they measured OSA, except that it was from devices inside or under mattresses, from people all over the world. Good luck with that being quality controlled and accurate and identical in all places. Never mind.

Focus instead on how they stated their results, which was only for temperatures in the 99th percentile compared with those in the 25th. Not 50th, the most usual temperatures experienced, and instead a low one with which the highest will make the findings seem more important? Curiously, they state only a single value for each of these: 27.3 and 6.4 C, or 81 and 44 F in civilized units. That’s odd, because the 99th percentile, describing temperatures that are exceeded on only 1% of days, varies a great deal from location to location and from season to season.

Here in northern Michigan, the 99th is maybe 50 F for the year. I joke. It’s about 87 F, a number people who live in northern Thailand or Texas would not consider especially hot. Their 99th is some 100 to 103 F.

Point is, 81 F is not that hot, and is a temperature experienced in many places frequently, and in Singapore and Thailand, nearly daily. Which means that people with OSA in those hot places should have the biggest signal if hot temperatures are driving more episodes. Here are their results per country (see the paper itself for a better version):

India, Israel, Brazil, UAE, Singapore and Thailand, which are all hot, according to our authors, have no signal. Japan and the other top spots aren’t hot. There is no clear heat signal, not with 81 F.

Best you could hint is that in those places that aren’t routinely hot, when it gets hot people have more OSA attacks. But even this is far from clear in the data. It’s just as likely, in my eyes, that Japanese and Dutch are much more careful about using their devices and recording data (many similarities between these races!).

Worst, once “climate change” hits, it’s supposed to increase, slightly, night wintertime temperatures most. That was the original “global warming” theory. In other words, there would be fewer extremes, i.e. a tighter average. Of course, when that didn’t happen, it was declared “extremes” would be more common. Including more cold extremes.

What a dismal field.

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