[bryanlarsen]

In Europe. World-wide is a very different story.

Heat kills twice as many people as cold in the US, and the US is colder than average. Include Africa and India in your stats and you'll find heat deaths vastly outnumber cold deaths.

[sigmatropic]

There are about 20,000 hypothermia--related deaths a year in Britain, about 25,000--in the USA, 8,000 deaths a year in Canada. There are suggestions that the unofficial number of hypothermia--related deaths is substantially higher, particularity in the elderly.

Some statistical approaches estimate that more than 1,300 deaths per year in the United States are due to extreme heat, compared with about 600 deaths per year in the “underlying and contributing causes” data set shown in Figure 1.

[bryanlarsen]

Now do India or Africa, which each contain 1/6th of the world's population.