UN Chief Overstates ‘Extreme’ Heat Deaths, Cold Kills 30X More

Written by Bjorn Lomborg on December 2, 2024. Posted in Current News

There’s a reason we heard so much about extreme heat deaths over the summer: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a “call to action” on ‘extreme’ heat that prompted mandarins across his vast organization to issue warnings without letting the facts get in the way of a good story

The World Health Organization trumpeted the disturbing finding that in Europe, more than 175,000 people die yearly because of extreme heat.

That was exaggerated by 400 percent.

When called out, the WHO quietly edited their online publication to remove the word “extreme” — but only after media outlets had carried the news.

While it fixed the error online, it didn’t find room to mention that ‘extreme’ heat is the smallest temperature risk for Europe, with cold killing 13 times more people.

That wouldn’t fit the secretary-general’s call to action.

UNICEF, the organization dedicated to child welfare, was next to ring the alarm. It published a policy brief claiming 377 young people died in 2021 due to high temperatures across Europe and Central Asia.

It didn’t mention that their data show annual heat deaths have more than halved over three decades, that cold causes around three times more deaths in these regions annually, or that heat is one of the least significant causes of death among this age bracket.

For an organization devoted to child welfare, it should perhaps matter more that malnutrition claims 26,000 young people’s lives across the region yearly.

In using faulty data and telling skewed stories, WHO and UNICEF put political messaging ahead of data integrity to fit the narrow focus on climate coming from the secretary-general’s office.

Guterres could hardly be more alarmist. He pointed to heat deaths of old people globally increasing 85% over the past decades, but he didn’t reveal that almost all of this increase is because the world now has 79 percent more old people.

In his emotional call to action, Guterres declared, “Extreme heat is increasingly tearing through economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and killing people,” and he claimed there is “a rapid rise in the scale, intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme heat events.”

This is not only alarming but also misleading.

A landmark 2024 study on extreme heat and its effects on mortality reveals global heatwave days have increased over the last 30 years from 13.4 to 13.7 days — hardly a rapid rise.

More importantly, the global extreme heat death rate is not increasing and has actually declined by more than seven percent per decade. 

Guterres explicitly blamed all extreme heat deaths on ‘climate change’, but this is blatantly untrue because almost all deaths caused by extreme heat are driven by the 13.4 days of heat waves that we would have endured 30 years ago.

Since then, we have seen an extra 0.3 days and a fraction to the declining death rate. Suggesting otherwise is disingenuous.

In fact, if we were to freeze the world’s age distribution, correcting for ever more old people, extreme heat deaths have declined by 13.9 percent every decade over the last 30 years. The decline is largely caused by people being richer and having more air conditioning and electricity access.

This is the deeper problem with Guterres’ rhetoric.

The best policy to avoid extreme heat deaths — which the world has done very well over recent decades — is to ensure more people can afford to live in cool environments with air conditioning.

Strangely, the U.N. balks at such life-saving ideas. The WHO’s four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat doesn’t mention “air conditioning.”

It suggests that people rely on “blinds and shutters” and “night air,” and spend a few hours in the supermarket to cool off.

Lowering energy prices so more people can afford air conditioning is the opposite of what Guterres is pushing.

He insists the world’s “disease” is an “addiction to ‘fossil fuels’.” He demands that we keep global temperature rises under a 1.5 Celsius temperature ‘limit’ (by some as yet undefined magical method – Ed).

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Guterres’s “call to action” is that he exclusively focuses on extreme heat that kills 155,000 people globally each year.

The secretary-general rarely talks about cold temperatures (unless it is to make the questionable argument that extreme cold is also caused by global warming).

Cold kills 4.5 million people yearly, almost 30 times as many as extreme heat.

In a more sensible world, Guterres would focus 30 times as much firepower on solving this bigger problem. (He would find that lower energy prices would help most.)

It is hard to avoid the implication that tragic heat deaths are simply a tool for the secretary-general’s climate alarmism.

See more here climatechangedispatch

Header image: Birmingham Mail

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