Figure 6: Projections of total mortality inferred from scenario changes in only the mean, standard deviation and/or skewness of apparent temperatures.

Annual mean values of mortality (million cases) for rolling 31-year periods were summed at the continental level for the 54 areas. (a) Projections of mortality inferred from observed daily temperatures and observed transfer functions (1998–2003). In this case, however, the climatological mean of each temperature time series was retuned throughout the domain of temperatures and annual projections of mortality were then recomputed and expressed as a function of the new climatological mean (b) Multimodel mean projections of mortality inferred from simulated daily temperatures (1950–2100) and observed transfer functions (1998–2003). Simulated temperature time series for the 1980–2010 period are here retuned according to multimodel mean scenario changes in the mean (M-A1B, blue curve), the mean and standard deviation (MS-A1B, green), or the mean, standard deviation and skewness (MSW-A1B, red) of the temperature PDF, and projections of mortality are then compared with those directly inferred from the transient simulations (A1B, black). The horizontal black line depicts the annual mean mortality for the reference period 1980–2010.