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Lomborg: Climate Change And The Lancet’s Duplicitous ‘Heat Death’ Study

by Bjorn Lomborg
November 05, 2022, 11:27 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
7

climate protestAs the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies.

Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive. [bold, links added]

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades.

That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

The climate crisis is killing us.#COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.https://t.co/LhoXfrBZhD pic.twitter.com/cRn5gYOeQL

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) October 26, 2022

But while their model for heat deaths is based on solid academic research, the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older worldwide. The average [number of deaths] per year increased by 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s.

But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer.

Measured across the same timespan the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60% or almost as much as heat deaths.

When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

It is hard not to see the Lancet study’s failure to adjust this figure as a deliberate act of deception. Any academic who works with statistics would know to adjust the deaths to account for population growth.

I’ve actually raised this issue to the Lancet before. Last September, the journal published a study with the same fallacious argument, and I sent the editor a detailed letter explaining the problem. The Lancet never corrected it and here it is, over a year later, committing the same error.

This year’s study also cherry-picks data by discussing only heat deaths. Around the world, far more people die each year from cold than heat.

In the U.S. and Canada between 2000 and 2019, an average of 20,000 people died from heat annually and more than 170,000 from cold.

This omission matters even more because cold deaths are decreasing with rising temperatures.

Modeling from the Global Burden of Disease replicates the relatively small increase in heat deaths shown by the Lancet, but shows a much larger decline in cold deaths from rising temperatures.

Based on today’s population size, the current temperatures cause about 17,000 more heat deaths in older people but also result in more than half a million fewer cold deaths.

Reporting one finding without the other is misleading about the true effect of climate change.

This dishonesty leads to worse policy outcomes. While activists push for extreme and expensive climate policies that threaten economic growth, those aren’t the only or even the best ways to help.

Temperatures rose throughout the 20th century, but the U.S. nonetheless saw a decrease in heat deaths, largely thanks to air-conditioning.

Policies that focus on lifting people out of poverty and providing affordable, reliable sources of energy would allow the rest of the world to reduce heat deaths and live more comfortable lives.

They would also help stave off the much greater threat of cold deaths.

Climate change is a real problem, but academics do themselves and their readers a gross disservice when they put activism above honest scientific inquiry.


Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

h/t Runar O.

Read more at WSJ

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Comments 7

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    3 years ago

    The claims that the Earth is Fragile a whole load of Malarkey and the Delicate Balance of Nature the biggest lies from the Eco-Freaks and not one of Paul Ehrlich’s idiotic predictions has ever happened the earth is not dying its our Freedoms and Liberty at stake

    Reply
  2. schutzhund says:
    3 years ago

    Doomster Divers

    Reply
  3. Barry Bateman says:
    3 years ago

    Exactly, Bjorn Lomborg. Without CO2, all life dies. Because life on earth is composed entirely of long-chain carbon fat (lipid) molecule sacks of water we call cells. That carbon ALL COMES FROM CO2. And life essential CO2 has been dangerously and inexorably DECLINING since life’s birth. Declining from life luxuriant levels more than twenty times those of today. The ONLY green energy – fossil fuels – comes from life! And when we use that coal, oil, and gas to make us the best-fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed, we make the environment greener, stronger, more drought tolerant, and abundant by recycling the two most important molecules in life on earth – CO2 and H2O. The Climate kills one-tenth the number of people it did a century ago. A century of energy-driven progress has improved safety from climate-related deaths by a factor of ten! A lack of energy kills 300 times the number of people worldwide that climate does. 300 times! And that’s just the number of people that die from indoor cooking over open fires. There is a crisis of climate ignorance, NOT A CLIMATE CRISIS. We are in the Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age. The coldest natural, normal 12°C range of temperature since multicellular life began nearly 600 million years ago. Climate moves in 12°C, one hundred thousand year, interglacial/glacial cycles. Fifteen thousand years in the warmest interglacial 4°C end of the cycle. 85 thousand years in the coldest 8°C glacial end of the cycle. During glacial phases ice sheets thousands of feet thick advance as far south as NYC. During more circular orbits, ice sheets retreat to current levels. Climate during interglacials, like our current ongoing Holocene, moves in a much shorter nine hundred year, 4°C cycles within a cycle. Dr. Judith Curry calls them “Eddy” cycles. Earlier Eddy cycle’s peak temperatures during the Roman warm period and the Minoan warm period were warmer than today. The latest iteration of today’s Modern warm period has had us warming since the 1600s “Little Ice Age”. A hundred years before the invention of the thermometer. When you could ice skate on the Thames. Sometime this century temperatures will turn colder for the next 450 years. And life essential CO2 doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.

    Reply
    • Colin Harkin says:
      3 years ago

      Thank you Barry. I enjoy reading your comments. They are interesting and always educational.

      Reply
    • Allan Shelton says:
      3 years ago

      I too, like your summary.
      Thanks. I will be sending it along to others, including politicians.

      Reply
  4. Dai Davies says:
    3 years ago

    “Climate change is a real problem”
    The real problem is attribution, and the assumption of a greenhouse cause.
    1: There is no basis in physics for the assumption of a significant GHE.
    2: The moon also has a surface temperature above the black body reference temperature but no atmosphere. This is readily understood and modelled because of the moons relatively simple surface.
    3: the GHE has been estimated for a typical location on the Earth’s surface and these calculations show it to be less 1/200th of the assumed 33C.
    For details see dai_davies on Gab
    cheers,
    dai

    Reply
  5. Rowan Parmiter says:
    3 years ago

    The UN seems to be motivated by $$$$$ more than Climate…. how strange

    Reply

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