Extreme cold kills more people than leukemia, homicide and liver disease

The bitter chill isn't just an inconvenience. It could kill you. A 2007 study by Olivier Deschenes and Enrico Moretti found that "the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US."

Extreme cold turns out to be deadlier  than extreme heat. Hot weather kills, but digging deep into the data, Deschenes and Moretti find that it mostly kills people who were already close to death. After the heat wave ends, the death rate drops so sharply that it totally offsets the weather-related spike. "The only effect of the weather shock is to change the timing of mortality, but not the number of deaths," they write.