Warming, thermal variability, and the 96% decline in childhood respiratory-infection mortality in China: a national time-series analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 and the C-LSAT high-resolution climate dataset

Childhood lower respiratory infection mortality in China fell 96.3% from 330,194 deaths in 1990 to 12,098 in 2021, alongside warming from 1990–2019.

• Why it matters: Despite large declines during sustained warming, national long-run evidence linking temperature metrics to child respiratory mortality in China has been missing, limiting climate-health inference.
• What they did: The study linked GBD 2021 mortality for China (ages 0–19 for LRI; 0–24 for asthma) with C-LSAT 0.5° gridded temperature (1990–2019), regressing log mortality on mean temperature, diurnal range, seasonal amplitude, and interannual variability using Newey-West errors.
• The result: Although baseline coefficients were sizable, detrended falsification nullified all temperature–mortality associations and the minimum mortality temperature was not identifiable, implying warming is not attributable to the 96% decline.

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