I'd be surprised if this study wasn't heavily fudged to give the favorite (heat and DROUGHT) a narrow "win" over winter weather

Reuters AlertNet - 'Death map' alleges heat a big hazard to Americans

Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, the team at the University of South Carolina found.

Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined were responsible for fewer than 5 percent of all hazard deaths.

Writing in BioMed Central's International Journal of Health Geographics, they said they hoped to dispel some myths about what the biggest threats to life and limb are.

"According to our results, the answer is heat," Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of the University of South Carolina wrote in their report, which gathered data from 1970 to 2004.

Oddly, the graph below appears on a page related to the above study: Abstract | Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States

The complete article is available as a provisional PDF.

Sept '07: Outside the Box - WSJ.com

Global warming is supposedly killing people. The 35,000 deaths from the August 2003 European heat wave were, in Al Gore's view, an example of what "will become much more common if global warming is not addressed." But the actual data put things in perspective. Whereas 2,000 people died in the United Kingdom in that heat wave, last year the BBC reported that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales were about 25,000 each winter, and 47,000 a year, in the winters of 1998 to 2000. Similarly, in Helsinki, Finland, 55 people die each year from heat and 1,655 from cold. In Athens, Greece, a much warmer place, the deaths from excess heat are 1,376 each year and the deaths from cold 7,852. All told, Mr. Lomborg calculates that about 200,000 people die in Europe each year from excessive heat, and 1.5 million from excessive cold.

So global warming will save human lives. "While cutting CO2 will save some people from dying from heat," Mr. Lomborg concludes, "it will simultaneously cause more people to die from cold."