Guest post by Lawrence Hamlin
The Los Angeles Times is at it again with its latest climate alarmist propaganda article warning that “Extreme heat is one of the deadliest consequences of climate change” and claiming that “California undercounts the human toll…even as heat waves become more frequent and more deadly.”
All of this is of course timed to comply with Biden’s latest globally ineffective and irrelevant schemes to push his costly and bureaucratically onerous climate change agenda which will have no impact on either reducing global emissions or temperatures which are completely controlled by the energy use and emissions of the world’s developing nations led by China and India.
The Times article starts with a revisit to the state’s August 2020 heat wave period where California’s government mandated excessive use of unreliable renewable energy led to rolling blackouts (which is unmentioned by the Times) and notes that year 2020 August was the “hottest on record in California” while highlighting individual stories of people dealing with the hot weather as though the state’s residents have never had to deal with such extraordinarily high summer temperatures.
The Times article fails completely to provide a more comprehensive assessment of the state’s top ten summer monthly temperature records which show that the highest summer monthly temperature ever recorded in California was in July of 1931 (95.6 degrees F) followed in decreasing temperature order by July 2021 (94.3 degrees F), July 2006 (94.2 degrees F), July 2018 (94.0 degrees F), July 1959 (93.9 degrees F), July 2003 (93.8 degrees F), July 2017 (93.7 degrees F) and then July 2005 tied with August of 2020 (93.5 degrees F) and then finally July 1933 (93.4 degrees F).
The Times article also fails to address EPA’s annual heat wave index trends of multi-day extreme heat across the United Sates which shows that the U.S. is not experiencing increased intensity or occurrences of heat waves during the period between 1895 through 2020 which directly contradicts alarmists claims of increasing heat waves made by the Times.
The Times then asserts that it has uncovered through its analysis (the details of which are unaddressed and of course the Times would never manipulate information to push a climate alarmist agenda) that the official death certificates citing “heat exposure” as the cause death in California between 2010 and 2019 which showed 599 deaths during this period undercounted the actual deaths which the Times claims should have been 3,900 deaths.
The Times believes that this revelation shows that states must undertake major new efforts to track and protect citizens from extreme heat as proposed by Biden in his latest attempt to justify his useless, costly and onerous climate change agenda.
The Times then notes that “Each year, extreme heat kills more Americans than any other climate-fueled hazard, including hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but it gets far less attention because it kills so quietly” without of course providing any data to support its claim.
One of the most comprehensive and recent global studies of the impact of exposure to cold or hot temperatures on global, regional and national mortality was performed by the Lancet Journal which collected time-series data on mortality and ambient temperatures from 750 locations in 43 countries addressing the period from year 2000 to 2019 using five meta-predictors in established grids sizes across the globe.
The study found that there were 5,083,173 deaths per year associated with non-optimal temperatures accounting for 9.43% of all global deaths equating to 74 temperature related excess deaths per 100,000 residents.
Of that total 4,594,098 were cold-related deaths accounting for 8.52% of all global deaths (67 deaths per 100,00 residents) while 490,075 were heat-related deaths accounting for 0.91% of all global deaths (7 deaths per 100,000 residents). Cold related deaths were 9.4 times greater than heat-related deaths.
The report noted the following breakdown of global regional outcomes:
“Of all excess deaths, 51.49% occurred in Asia, 23.88% occurred in Africa, 16.44% occurred in Europe, 7.70% occurred in the Americas, and 0.48% occurred in Oceania. Most grids with a high density of excess deaths were in large, low-lying, crowded coastal cities in Eastern and Southern Asia and cities in Eastern and Western Europe.”
The report also noted that over the study time period changes in the proportion of heat and cold related death rates changed as follows:
“Globally, from 2000-03 to 2016-19 the cold-related death ratio changed by -0.51 percentage points and the heat-related excess ratio increased by +0.21 percentage points, leading to a net decline of -0.30 percentage points.”
The Times article failed completely to address the huge and overwhelming global dominance of cold related deaths compared to heat related deaths, failed to address the magnitude and scale of global heat and cold related death rates (especially failure to compare millions of deaths each year globally versus California and U.S. thousands of deaths over multiple years) as well as failure to address the disparate geographical global death rate variations.
The Times article is just its usual politically driven climate alarmist propaganda that relies on extensive use of distortion and deception.
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Wiki has an interesting climate table for Cape Town from 1960 to 1990. This city and the surrounding area has a Mediterranean climate like California. While for some six months the city average high is around 25°C/76°F during these years they had record highs of over 37.8°C/100°F. This was never viewed as “extreme heat” but a feature of many a dry summer. Suddenly, in recent years, these temperatures are classified as “extreme heat” and snowflake alarmists are greatly distressed.
In Australia, Queensland was the state with the worst number of deaths due to cold per capita. Out version of Florida. It rarely snows there but the temperatures do sometimes get below freezing, catching people out under prepared.
One major problem is that Australian houses are very poorly designed for combating cold. I hate the winters, even here in the tropics, and usually (when allowed, grrrr!) become a Climate Refugee and escape to southern Europe.
I remember sitting around a kerosene heater as a kid in Brisbane in the 1950s, before going to bed at sundown (6 pm in late July), and getting up at 5 the next morning to help my Dad with his milk delivery run.
Every yard, park, and grass footpath white with frost.
“All of this is of course timed to comply with Biden’s latest globally ineffective and irrelevant schemes to push his costly and bureaucratically onerous climate change agenda which will have no impact on either reducing global emissions or temperatures which are completely controlled by the energy use and emissions of the world’s developing nations led by China and India.”
Can we get a comma or something in there somewhere?
And an ‘allegedly’. CO2 is not yet proven guilty…
LA Times was promised by NOAA and EPA that historical data contradicting their deviance was successfully expunged.
Folks are free to move their locations if they find the climate difficult. This is the amazing thing about America. Those who can’t tolerate heat should go to Chicago, or even move within CA. More people seem to be going the other way though, which suggests they do like the heat. Maybe the Times should ask them?
UPDATE: 10/10/21 Headline…”Heat Waves: A Hidden Killer” LAT has gone and outdone itself. Maybe Trenberth can sneak the heatwaves to the bottom of the ocean!