The Next Big Climate Scare: Counting Climate Change Deaths
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Washington Examiner.
The next big climate scare is on the way. Advocates of measures to control the climate now propose that we begin counting deaths from climate change. They appear to believe that if people see a daily announcement of climate deaths, they will be more inclined to accept climate change policies. But it’s not even clear that the current gentle rise in global temperatures is causing more people to die.
In December, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at COP28, the 28th United Nations Climate Conference, and mentioned climate-related deaths.
“We are seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate,” she said. “And by far the biggest killer is extreme heat.”
According to Ms. Clinton, Europe recorded 61,000 deaths from extreme heat in 2023, and she estimated that about 500,000 people died from heat across the world last year.
Global temperatures have been gently rising for the last 300 years. Temperature metrics from NASA, NOAA, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom estimate that Earth’s surface temperatures have risen a little more than one degree Celsius, or about two degrees Fahrenheit, over the last 140 years. But are these warmer temperatures harmful to people?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most cases of influenza occur during December to March, the cold months in the United States. Influenza season in the southern hemisphere takes place during the cold months there, April through September. The peak months for COVID-19 infections tended to be the cold periods of the year. More people usually get sick during cold months than in warm months.
More people also die during winter months than summer months, according to many peer-reviewed studies. For example, Dr. Matthew Falagas of the Alfa Institute of Medical Sciences and five other researchers studied seasonal mortality in 11 nations. The research showed that the average number of deaths peaked in the coldest months of the year in all of them.
The late Dr. William Keating studied temperature-related deaths in six European countries for people aged 65 to 74. He concluded that deaths related to cold temperatures were nine times greater than those related to hot temperatures. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has pointed out that moderate global warming will likely reduce human mortality.
Yet, on January 30, Dr. Colin J. Carlson of Georgetown University published a paper in Nature Medicine titled, “After millions of preventable deaths, climate change must be treated like a health emergency.” Carlson claims that climate change has caused about 166,000 deaths per year since the year 2000, or almost four million cumulative deaths.
Carlson admits that most of these deaths have been due to malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, or malnutrition and diarrheal diseases in south Asia. But he goes on to claim that deaths due to natural disasters and even cardiovascular disease should also be attributed to climate change. If death from cardiovascular disease can be counted as a climate death, almost any death can be counted.
The evidence doesn’t support these climate death claims. Malarial disease has plagued humanity throughout history, even when temperatures were colder than today. Dr. Paul Reiter, medical entomologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that malaria was endemic to England 400 years ago during the colder climate of the Little Ice Age. The Soviet Union experienced an estimated 13 million cases of malaria during the 1920s, with 30,000 cases occurring in Archangel, a city located close to the frozen Arctic Circle.
Malnutrition has been declining during the gentle warming of the last century. During the early 1900s, as many as 10 million people would die from famine each decade globally. Today, world famine deaths have been reduced to under 500,000 people per decade. About 10% of the world’s people are malnourished today, but this is down from about 25% in 1970.
The number of deaths from natural disasters has also been falling during the warming over the last century. According to EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, the deaths from disasters, including storms, famines, earthquakes, droughts, and floods, are down more than 90 percent over the last 100 years.
With deaths from natural disasters and famine declining, and since fewer people die in warmer temperatures, the case for counting deaths from global warming is poor at best. But don’t underestimate the ability of climate alarmists to create fear by exaggerating the data.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Perhaps we should start with the depopulation of Europe during the little ice age when crop failures, malnutrition and infectious plagues caused the European population to fall possibly by more than half. And while we are at it let’s count the number of deaths avoided by rising crop yields and greening of the earth during the recent period of rising atmospheric CO2 and mild climate warming. And we should also add in the number of living humans on Earth today who are only in existence because of the energy, safety, nutrition and security that the Industrial Revolution provided using fossil fuels as the feed stock.
Perhaps we should also include on our life-death spread sheet the experience of countries like Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia where tens of millions perished prematurely because of government policies based on ideologies rather than true science and objective facts.
Hilary Clinton should stick to focusing on the deaths of American diplomats under her management and stay away from contributing to the destruction of systems that keep over 8 billion people alive and thriving globally.
Simple. Is he dead? Is the body colder now than when he died? Must have ben climate change.
As we can see, the pandemic response propaganda model developed using deep learning at John’s Hopkins in July 2019 solved for pattern to address two problems: 1) potential lack of fear of the pandemic threat, 2) the lack of fear of Climate Change threat. This is the reason that the pandemic threat was piggy backed by the climate threat. Of course this points to a political impetus doesn’t it. Imagine the psychological damage?
Yet even now we still don’t have a unequivocal assessment of pandemic deaths. Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, it’s not clear how to assess it. Go to CDC data base (it was there is 2020 if it’s gone now then there you have it ..censorship) and compare 2016 or 2009 or 2018 deaths due to viral respiratory infections and deaths due to respiratory viral exacerbations of chronic lung disease and you get close to the same number of deaths in 2020. Some one needs to do a deep dive and unequivocally lay out a truly expert peer reviewed epidemiolocal analysis without all the political BS.
Dream big but don’t hold your breath.
Since the green meanies are predicting increasingly horrific magnitudes of seasonal storms, I assume that my likelihood of dying from a respiratory virus in my old age (which if you live long enough is how most people die) is now replaced by flood, hurricane, hail, tornado, fire that can come at anytime and if I live long enough it will happen to me and every one else I love. Oh No the dread of it!
Is the solution to run out an buy a EV and pay through the nose or to vote yes to a carbon tax, anti-off grid laws and new nuke plants? Or to wear masks, constantly slathering myself with alcohol and never touching my face and avoid all the places I loved to go and be constantly monitoring myself for the sniffles…….nuts to all that crazy. I live like before the crazy was unleashed on us… no fear.
See how fear deforms reality! Fear turns people into self righteous individuals with diminished intellectual capacity and reduced capacity to live in reality and function productively in reality. Churchill, “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” We all die, get over it. It’s what we do until then that matters….which is life limb and the pursuit of happiness…. with dignity and honor seeking to serve my neighbor… .even when I am a little under the weather.
If it wasn’t for libraries, Planet Fitness (great place to build free immunity LOL) old books and movies from the 30’s and great cigars, I ‘d likely die of boredom which is far worse experience than a virus or hurricane.
Since Climate Polcy-Caused destruction and widespread deaths in Sri Lanka, I’ve been cautioning that some knowledgeable sceptic group should be tallying C Policy-Caused deaths as this genocide spreads. Predictably, the elite totalitarians are using ‘climate deaths’ as a cover for the program to pare us down to a population of a billion.
The graph seems intentionally misleading in that it plots the Australian data in Red (HOT!) and with the reduced Y axis it seems disproportionately greater. A quick check on per capita ( Aus ~27 million, Sweden ~10.5 million) shows Aus has a range of 12.4 deaths per million in summer to 15.2 in winter while Sweden ranges from 22.4 to 27.6 per million, about 1.8 times the per capita rate of Australia.
Lets face it while the summer in Oz can get very hot in places Sweden gets a bloody sight colder all over in winter. The graph is clear evidence that it is colder climates that have higher death rates both year round and in winter.
How the heck does this sort of flimsy junk get published?
I have a big problem with attribution “science” particularly with climate change related deaths.
Both my parents died a couple of years ago of cardiovascular disease at very advanced ages. Their cardiorespiratory slowly degradated until they died, as is very often the case. That hotter or colder days impose more demand in a failing cardiorespiratory system is a fact, so indeed, that might accelerate days or weeks an otherwise inevitable event, and undoubtedly show in statistics relating death vs. temperature, but it is deeply wrong to confuse the acceleration of an event otherwise “inevitable” with the (main) cause of a death. In the case like my parent’s, death would not be prevented without climate change, and it is absurd to state that the death spikes when temperatures peak are attributable to temperatures due to climate change. That is, though, what many wrongly assume to reach the desired outcome.
I wonder how many of the circa 60 million ‘death certificates’ from around the World annually highlight CC as the cause of death? I will hazard a guess – nada, nichts, rien, zero!