National Public Radio (NPR), reprinted an Associated Press (AP) report from climate reporter Seth Borenstein titled “Europe’s heat claims 50,000 lives. Climate change blamed for two-thirds of deaths,” which claims that summer heat killed 50,391 Europeans in 2026 and that human-caused climate change killed 32,619 of them. This is false. Modeled numbers are presented by NPR as observed deaths when they are not. The data show that neither number is a count of actual people medically determined to have died from heat or climate change; both are statistical constructs produced by computer models.
Here is the basis of the false headline:
Researchers modeled heat-related deaths for different age groups in 854 European cities during repeated heat waves in June, July and August and found that 50,391 people died from warmer temperatures, and of those, 32,619 died because of the extra heat caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a study in an upcoming issue of Nature Health.
The 50,391 “heat deaths” are imaginary in the literal sense that neither AP nor NPR can produce a list of 50,391 people whose deaths were determined to have been caused by heat. The researchers did not count them, they modeled them. NPR eventually admits exactly that: “The scientific team also had to use statistical modeling to come up with the base count of 50,000 heat deaths.” That sentence demolishes the impression created by NPR’s headline.
There is no observed body count of 50,000+ heat victims. Instead, there are mortality records, temperature records, statistical relationships between temperature and mortality, and a mathematical model that estimates how many deaths might be associated with temperatures above a calculated optimum. The resulting number is merely an estimate. AP and NPR irresponsibly report it as though there is an actual body count.
Then the researchers take that imaginary statistical population of 50,391 heat deaths and run another modeling exercise to determine how many were supposedly caused by climate change. Again, the story admits how this was done: “They ran computer simulations of a world without climate change and compared it to the deaths that happened this summer. The difference is what was caused by global warming.” Except NPR’s wording is misleading even there. The researchers weren’t comparing their imaginary climate with 50,391 individually identified heat deaths that “happened this summer.” The base heat-death number was itself produced statistically.
So, we have a model estimating how many people died from heat, followed by another model estimating what temperatures would have existed in a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change, followed by a calculation estimating how many of the first model’s estimated deaths would not have occurred in the second model’s imaginary world.
Out comes the wonderfully exact number of 32,619 climate-change deaths. Not approximately 30,000 or somewhere around 33,000, but exactly 32,619. That precision is almost comical considering that the people represented by the number were never individually identified as climate-change fatalities in the first place. There are no 32,619 death certificates saying “climate change.” There aren’t even 50,391 death certificates saying “heat.”
That doesn’t mean nobody died during Europe’s heat waves. Of course people died, and some deaths may well have been caused or hastened by heat. Elderly people and those suffering cardiovascular, respiratory, and other illnesses can be especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures. More than half of NPR’s modeled deaths were among people aged 85 and older. But that is very different from claiming, as NPR’s headline does, that “Europe’s heat claims 50,000 lives.”
This distinction becomes even more important because the calculation depends upon assumptions about how mortality responds to temperature. The researchers used mathematical temperature-mortality relationships for different ages and cities, identifying an “optimal” temperature associated with minimum mortality and calculating additional deaths when temperatures departed from it. It makes sense on the surface, but those relationships are not scientific laws. Humans adapt to make themselves safer, like by simply buying an air conditioning unit. Physicians are better at treating heat stress, buildings improve, work schedules change, and vulnerable elderly residents are checked by relatives and social services.
Adaptation works. A 2024 Nature Medicine study estimated that European heat-related mortality during 2023 would have been 80 percent higher without adaptation since 2000. Among people over age 80, estimated mortality would have been more than twice as high without adaptation. It should be obvious that there is a problem with taking temperature-mortality relationships developed from previous years, and treating them as though the conditions remain fixed. The Watts Up With That analysis, “Climate Death Toll: Batteries Not Included,” points directly to this problem. The calculation starts with historical temperature-mortality relationships, extrapolates them to hundreds of European cities, applies them to current temperatures and populations, and then compares the result against an imaginary counterfactual climate. Each stage adds assumptions, yet by the time the number reaches NPR, most of those assumptions have vanished and the model output has become a supposedly real death toll.
There is another glaring omission: cold. A major 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health examined temperature and mortality across 750 locations in 43 countries. It estimated that 8.52 percent of deaths were associated with cold compared with just 0.91 percent associated with heat. By the same sort of statistical reasoning NPR is willing to accept for heat, cold was associated with roughly nine times as many deaths. More importantly, from 2000-2003 to 2016-2019, declining cold-associated mortality more than offset increasing heat-associated mortality. The result was a net decline in temperature-related mortality.
Climate at a Glance discusses the same research and notes that the decline in cold mortality associated with modest warming produced an estimated net reduction of approximately 166,000 premature temperature-related deaths from 2000 through 2019. Curiously, NPR doesn’t produce a headline saying, “Global Warming Saves Thousands of Lives by Reducing Deadly Cold.” That apparently isn’t considered newsworthy.
The broader historical record is even more devastating to the suggestion that humanity is becoming increasingly helpless against climate. Climate at a Glance reports that deaths from weather-related disasters have declined by more than 99 percent during the past century. Average annual deaths from extreme weather disasters fell from approximately 485,000 during the 1920s to fewer than 8,000 around 2020. That is not what an escalating climate mortality crisis looks like.
Indeed, NPR’s own experts call for heat-warning systems, cooling, and neighborhood programs to check on vulnerable residents. Those are sensible measures that can save actual lives during the next heat wave, and they demonstrate something the climate narrative routinely obscures: people adapt.
There is nothing inherently improper about epidemiologists constructing statistical estimates. Such models can be useful tools for identifying risks, allocating resources, and developing public-health policy. But statistical estimates aren’t observational data.
If NPR wants to report that researchers estimate approximately 50,000 excess deaths statistically associated with summer temperatures, say so. If researchers further estimate, using a counterfactual climate model, that anthropogenic warming contributed to some fraction of that statistical mortality, say that too. But don’t tell readers that Europe’s heat “claims 50,000 lives” and that climate change killed exactly 32,619 people when nobody counted those deaths. A model can calculate an estimate, generate a counterfactual, and assign statistical probabilities, but a computer model cannot examine a body, determine a cause of death, sign a death certificate, or count a dead person.
NPR’s dead Europeans are imaginary people generated by a model, and the 32,619 supposedly killed by climate change are imaginary people generated from the imaginary people. Both AP and NPR act is if they are saying a famous movie line, “I see dead people.”
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
