Don’t Be Alarmed About Unusually Warm Temperatures

Myth: Recent, unusually warm temperatures show that fossil fuels are making our climate more and more dangerous.

Truth: Even with recent temperatures, which are a temporary anomaly, not the new normal, cold is a bigger problem than heat and fossil fuels keep us safer from both. [emphasis, links added]

Leading outlets are portraying the recent streak of warmer-than-expected months as ominous and deadly, and offering anti-fossil-fuel policies as a solution.

In reality, cold is a far bigger problem than heat—and anti-fossil-fuel policies will make us more endangered by both.1

• Anyone commentating responsibly on warm temperatures must acknowledge four facts:

1. Cold-related deaths > heat-related deaths
2. Earth is warming slowly, and less in warm places
3. Fossil fuels make us safer from dangerous temperatures
4. Anti-fossil-fuel policies increase danger from cold and heat

1. Cold-related deaths > heat-related deaths

When our leaders discuss the warming of the planet, they treat warming as obviously bad. But while they portray the planet as already “too hot,” the fact is that far more human beings die of cold than of heat.

• Study after study has found that deaths from cold outnumber deaths from heat by 5-15 times. On every continent cold is more dangerous than heat. Even in many countries we think of as especially hot, such as India, cold-related deaths significantly exceed heat-related deaths.2

The fact that far more human beings die of cold than of heat means that for the foreseeable future, even without accounting for the heating and cooling benefits of fossil fuels, fossil-fueled global warming will save more lives from cold than it will take from heat.3

• Every story about warming and human mortality should mention that deaths from cold are the biggest source of temperature-related mortality.

But almost no story about warming mentions this!

This level of ignorance and/or dishonesty cannot be tolerated.

• Much of the medical community has been particularly shameful in treating warming as catastrophic.

Observe how the prestigious journal The Lancet drastically exaggerated the threat of heat death by making each heat death show up five times larger than each cold death on this bar chart!4

2. Earth is warming slowly—and less in warm places

So far we’ve had ~1°C of warming from a cold starting point in Earth’s history 150 years ago. And future warming will be limited by the diminishing nature of the greenhouse effect—as well as being concentrated in colder places.5

• If we remember that cold kills more than heat, and we compare the ~1° C average warming that has occurred over the last 150 years with the wide range of temperatures we deal with every day, month, and year, we will not be scared at all.

So climate catastrophists use deceptions to scare us.6

• The “treating El Niño warming as global warming” deception

An important contributor to recent temperatures is a shift in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, from a prolonged La Niña configuration to strong El Niño conditions.

This is a temporary phenomenon, not a climate trend.7

• Factors like the massive Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in late 2021 to early 2022 might have amplified recent warming in the short term by temporarily increasing atmospheric water vapor—a strong greenhouse gas—by about 10%.8

• Whatever the exact combination of factors leading to the recent unusually warm temperatures, they are, by everything currently known about climate science, a temporary phenomenon apart from the slow, long-term warming contributed to by human greenhouse gas emissions.

• The “compressing the Y-axis” deception

To make the slow warming we have experienced look scary, climate catastrophists like to show warming, not on a human temperature scale but on a compressed Y-axis where 1°C is huge. This is like measuring weight gain on a scale where one pound is huge.9

• The “hottest on record” deception

We hear constant alarming-sounding claims that we are in or near “the hottest year on record.”

But given that records began at a cold time and we’re experiencing slow warming, of course, any given year we can expect a new record. So what?10

• Given our limited temperature records, alarming us about a “hottest year on record” during a slow warming period is like a doctor alarming a patient who gains one-tenth of a pound of muscle that it’s his “heaviest year on record.”

• The “hottest ever” deception

Climate catastrophists often absurdly equate a month or year being “the hottest on record”—which refers to the fewer than 200 years we have detailed temperature records—with being “the hottest ever.”

Even though Earth was 25°F warmer for millions of years!11

• The “treating local extremes as global” deception

Given the slow pace of global warming, local temperature changes tend to be much larger than global ones. To scare us, catastrophists take the hottest local temperatures and portray them as global so we think everywhere is very hot.

• For some true perspective on heat waves, look at the US Annual Heat Wave Index from the EPA, which says “Longer-term records show that heat waves in the 1930s remain the most severe in recorded U.S. history.”

Today’s “reporting” would give you no indication this is the case.12

• Warming so far has been slow and benign. But will future warming make the world unlivably hot?

No, given two facts almost universally acknowledged by climate scientists: 1) the diminishing warming impact of CO2, and 2) the concentration of warming in colder places.

Read rest at Energy Talking Points