A man rests along the the Coney Island boardwalk on one of the hottest weeks in recent New York City history in July 2013. A new study says hotter-than-average summers, especially those with big temperature swings, are linked with higher death rates.

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Hotter-than-average summers, especially those with wide temperature swings, will lead to more deaths among older Americans, according to a newly published report.

The , released Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, examined the impact of temperature on death rates among the entire Medicare-age population of New England between 2000 and 2008.

For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)rise in the average summer temperature, scientists found the death rate climbed by 1.8 percent.

The opposite was true in winter, as warmer-than-average temperatures during that season led to 0.6 percent decrease in the death rate.

But what really caused the big changes in the death rate wasn't just how hot or cold it got; it was how much temperatures changed from year to year, and within the season from week to week and day to day.

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"So while warmer winters reduce mortality rates, more variability from day to day in the temperature within the winter increases mortality rates," said Joel D. Schwartz, a professor of environmental health at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health and a senior author on the study, in an .

Schwartz and his fellow study authors found that a 1 degree increase in the standard deviation of temperature -- a phrase used to describe how much the temperature swings up or down -- was linked to a 1.3 percent increase in deaths in the summer, and just over a 4 percent rise in deaths in the winter.

"People do not adapt well to changes in temperature," he added. "And so if it gets more variable, more people die."

While the percentages mentioned in the study may not sound like big numbers, Schwartz encouraged readers to look at it this way: "If you think about it, AIDS is responsible for one percent of the deaths in the United States," he pointed out in his WBUR interview. "Something that increases total deaths by one percent is ."

Why is temperature change so difficult to adjust to? Schwartz told WBUR about a study that looked at exercise tolerance among two groups of people. While those in the first group exercised every day in a room that was kept at the same hot temperature, the second group's room was hot one day, cooler the next, and then hot again.

"If the climate keeps bouncing around -- going from 90 one day to 70 and then back up to 87 -- that is what puts the most stress on people’s bodies because they just don’t have time to adapt to the new temperature before it changes again," he said.

The impacts of climate change as the world becomes warmer still very much remain to be seen. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted, the world can expect average temperatures to rise by Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

What this study suggests is that it's not just rising average temperatures, but big temperature swings as the world gets warmer, that will have a huge impact on lives and death rates in the decades ahead.

See the full report (subscription required) at .

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