Essay by Eric Worrall
The desperate Lancet search for climate related deaths.
Climate change fuels disasters, but deaths don’t add up
3 min read
January 21, 2026 – 3:53PMClimate change is turbocharging heatwaves, wildfires, floods and tropical storms, but how deadly have extreme weather events become for people in their path?
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Experts warn that rising global temperatures are bringing hotter summers, more frequent flooding, stronger storms and increasingly devastating wildfires and droughts.
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Overall, mortality from extreme weather disasters has fallen over recent decades.
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“It’s not because the events haven’t become more dangerous. It’s because we have become a lot better at coping with them,” Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a climate-health monitoring programme, told AFP.
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According to the Lancet Countdown, global heat-related mortality reached an estimated 546,000 deaths on average per year between 2012-2021, up 63 percent from 1990-1999.
…In an annual report last week, Munich Re said deaths from floods, storms, wildfires and earthquakes rose to 17,200 last year, distinctly higher than the 11,000 fatalities recorded in 2024.
…There is “no clear trend” when it comes to deaths from natural disasters, Grimm said.
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Read more: https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/climate-change-fuels-disasters-but-deaths-dont-add-up/news-story/faf1c7fae883f9017446dacfe88c3c18
This desperate attempt to make heat seem more dangerous is ridiculous. Every nation, even hot countries like India, experience a surge of deaths in Winter.
If global warming were to abolish winter, the chances are people would live significantly longer. There is substantial paleo evidence to support my claim. During the PETM, a brief spike of extreme global warming which occurred 57 million years ago, the species which did notably well was monkeys.
CO2 levels during the PETM may have been as high as 2520ppm – 6x higher than today. There is no evidence life suffered during the PETM, quite the opposite. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our mostly fruit eating monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned.
We’re never going to experience that much global warming. For the last 34 million years, powerful geological forcings have kept our world locked in the Late Cenzoic Ice Age.
But millions of people each year choose to abolish winter in their personal lives by relocating somewhere warm.
The reason is simple – as you get older, cold weather causes more health problems. Our monkey ancestors evolved in the extreme tropics, our bodies are built for hot weather, not cold weather. My asthma gets worse in cold weather. Cold weather stresses your body. Cold weather is more likely to kill you. By relocating somewhere warm, you improve your odds of experiencing fewer health problems.
The feeble global warming the world has experienced to date provides nowhere near the health benefit that relocating to warm places like Florida provides. But the evidence is clear that cold weather is bad for our health. Even a few degrees of warming might make a substantial difference. And with polar amplification, the tendency of global warming to manifest more strongly in polar regions, even a few degrees of warming could bring enormous health benefits to high latitude regions.
“Experts warn that rising global temperatures are bringing hotter summers, more frequent flooding, stronger storms and increasingly devastating wildfires and droughts.”
And yet global food harvests keep going up. Hmmmmm…….
Unnamed experts are always warning about something.
Remember, Calvin Coolidge Jr. died from a blister on his foot.
and global population also keeps on growing
and beach front properties are getting more and more expensive and their numbers are increasing,
same with polar bears.
Seems the climate catastrophy(or whatever the current term is) is only happening where it can not be observed by the peasants.
Or maybe The Lancet gave us already the answer 22 years ago in an article called
” Lies, damn lies , scientific research( and climate models “),
and later on the Lancets Editor Richard Horton admitted in
” The case against Science” – that
” much of scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue “
Polar bears are getting more expensive? 😉
“… their numbers are increasing;
same with polar bears.”
….but according to free market laws they should be getting cheaper when their numbers are increasing.
I could have bought one recently for 30 dollars,
but they all had the same color, and I could not baer the lack of diversity and owning a racist animal.
It’s the warmening Arctic wots doing it-
‘Exceptionally cold’: How a warming Arctic is pushing the US and Eastern Europe into a deep freeze
Expert = drip onder pressure.
Professional = someone who makes a living by working but occasionally makes a mistake.
Absolutely, the cold kills more than the heat. But the heat does also kill and more so than it did before (although this is hard to judge alongside other factors). Climate related deaths are on a downward trajectory because technological advances have mitigated to an extent both extreme heat and extreme cold….. plus winters have been generally a little less harsh in recent decades.
That all may change very soon, as we see winter storms about to bite in both Europe and N America. New age renewable grids will be tested. So it might become very evident how much more impactful cold events actually are.
No doubt the cold on both sides of the Atlantic will be blamed on a “relatively” warm Arctic…..and by extension, AGW, aka Climate Change. This might be true or it might not. But whatever the case, there’s only a certain amount of warm narrative that people will accept, when cold events continue to take a toll. Most people just feel cold or warm but it requires a fairly big quantum leap in understanding for us average Joe Blogs to accept that global warming = extremely cold weather!
“But the heat does also kill and more so than it did before (although this is hard to judge alongside other factors)”
What agricultural science has found is that most of the temperature change is in Tminimum. A degree or so higher minimum temperature is highly unlikely to kill more people. The increased food production from longer growing seasons will result in fewer starvation deaths which should outweigh any small number of deaths due to higher minimum temperatures.
“…Climate related deaths are on a downward trajectory because technological advances…”
Climate related deaths have been on a downward trajectory since man discovered fire.
And after technological development of stone/bone/wood weapons good enough to take down larger animals that have hides and pelts suitable for warm body coverings and footwear.
But, but, but, CO2 “traps heat” and warms the atmosphere and CO2 is “well mixed.”
So the question is, why is not the whole planet stabilized at the global mean temperature?
I love models, especially those on the runway wearing skimpy clothing.
Technology has decreased deaths in extreme hot or cold but the fact remains we are not experiencing extremes beyond what the world has seen before during man’s reign on earth.
If technology has decreased deaths, and it has,
and when even Lancet’s admitts that ” We have become better at coping with Disasters”
– then : What’s the problem?
Even the craziest climate change zealot has to admitt that we have all it takes to counter climate related anomaly.
Exactly.
We have become better at coping with ______. Fill in the blank.
Isn’t this the way civilization works?
Isn’t “civilization” mostly about diminishing the power of would-be thugs ?
Change climate related anomaly to weather related anomaly and you will have it.
There is no more weather – everything is climate now; especially all the bad stuff that is happening.
“The feeble global warming the world has experienced to date provides nowhere near the health benefit that relocating to warm places like Florida provides.”
Even northern Florida received some snow recently. Feeble “warming” indeed, as the U.S. is bracing right now for a large winter storm and frigid Arctic temperatures.
But here in rural NY, we would be happy to welcome some climate refugees from the South to reverse the long-term population drain toward warmer states. It would help to preserve the tax base. But this is not likely, now that NYC has gone with an openly collectivist mayor.
Experts warn, they hardly ever name them or their credentials.
Meanwhile, 60 feet of snow in Russia, the most for 146 years.
Kamchatka Peninsula got seven feet, the most in 60 years. The open Sea of Okhotsk is a giant snow-making machine.
Erm, 6.5 feet in January on top of 12 feet in December.
60 feet is a 6 story building. That would be newsworthy complete with pictures.
“global heat-related mortality reached an estimated 546,000 deaths on average per year between 2012-2021, up 63 percent from 1990-1999. “
The estimates are highly questionable (I.e., what is defined as heat-related mortality?). Moreover the asserted increase is not normalized for population, which increased by about 35% over the comparative timeframe. That could be parsed further based on where population grew the most, where heat events occurred, and the socioeconomic status of high-growth areas.
Well, it’s the Lancet. You just have to take their word for it. Global warming bad. mRNA good.
I suspect M.Mann prepared the statistics for them.
So we’re spending trillions on mitigation that has had zero effect on CO2 increases while adaptation has saved millions of lives as a side effect of every day home building.
Adaptation trumps mitigation without even trying.
Poverty is the fundamental cause of premature death … period.
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And a major factor in poor countries is infant and early childhood deaths.
Strongly agree with CH chart and interpretation. However chart uses circle-size as a population metric and shows China bigger than India. Other data sources disagree.
“India’s population is over 1.4 billion, making it the world’s most populous country, with estimates for 2025 around 1.45 to 1.46 billion people, surpassing China. This growth is significant, with a projected increase towards 1.68 billion by 2050, though the rate of growth has slowed.”
“China’s population is over 1.4 billion but shrinking, ranking second globally after India, with recent trends showing continued decline due to low birth rates and increased deaths, falling for the fourth consecutive year as of early 2026, with projections suggesting significant future drops.”
True, India did pass China.
The dates for the data are not all the same year. Read the fine print.
Story tip
Labour donor Dale Vince pulls plug on net zero airline
Green energy tycoon withdraws all investment from electric-powered planes project
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/22/labour-donor-dale-vince-pulls-plug-on-net-zero-airline/
The rats are leaving the sinking ship in increasing numbers.
It ain’t the heat, it’s the stupidity.
Lancet says an average of 546,000 over the last decade, while Munich Re reports under 20,000 in each of the last 2 years. There must be a whole lot of natural variability in the data.
Hawaii with its mild climate has longest average lifespan in the United States at about 80.7 years however Sweden with its cold climate has an average lifespan of 83.6 years. Florida? 78.6
Climate isn’t that big of a factor in life expectancy. Compare Australia and Singapore to Russia.
All of what Eric says is true the most important point however is that CO2 can’t cause catastrophic runaway global warming. This has to be repeated over and over, the lying and cheating must stop.
It seems to me that at least once before The Lancet has published studies proving that extreme cold was far more dangerous and deadly than extreme heat. Now it’s changing its tune. Could it be that it’s being pressured by alarmist entities like the British government, the BBC, and all the rest of the leftist sky-is-falling organizations so abundant in the UK?
And somehow the global population has quadrupled since 1900, around the time when the current increase in industrialization and fossil fuel use began. So once again we’re seeing how resilient, resourceful, and creative humans are despite all their supposed faults.
Perhaps management needed some additional hyperbole to augment ad click revenues.
People who are likely to die from heat are those trapped in an electric vehicle which has started a self-generated fire and whose door locks have failed to release.
Early MSM reports mentioned it could be the curry house but you know how it is with the net-
Fire in solar panel and home battery warehouse in Adelaide under investigation
Soon Willie soon you’ll see it just you wait and see-
Most coral reefs “will soon stop growing due to climate change” | Watch
Whoever wrote that hogwash knows next to nothing about coral.
“According to the Lancet Countdown, global heat-related mortality reached an estimated 546,000 deaths on average per year between 2012-2021, up 63 percent from 1990-1999.”
It’s not like the global population has gone up during that time or anything. You guys make it sound like we have over eight billion people now or something…🙄
Whenever I read or hear “Expert(s) blablabla” my common sense tells me that everything before or after it is BS.
When I see “Scientists say…” I know it is time to turn the page and read something else.
Taking the old used car salesman joke….
How can you tell a “Climate Scientist” is lying? His lips are moving.
What is your best option when he says, “Trust me”? Grab your wallet and run like hell.
Also applies to politicians and just about any UN official one can name.