National Public Radio (NPR) recently posted an article, “Climate change is deadly. Exactly how deadly?” where they attempt to link deaths due to weather disasters to long-term human-caused climate change. This is false. [emphasis, links added]
It is impossible to tie any particular extreme weather event to climate change, and long-term weather patterns have not significantly worsened during the modest warming of the past hundred-plus years.
In addition, the fossil fuel restrictions that NPR advocates would be disastrous for resilience to natural weather disasters.
NPR hardly even attempts to justify connecting disparate weather events to climate change. Rather, it [asserts that any] extreme weather is a “climate-driven disaster” and goes no deeper.
“The definitive federal accounting of climate change’s impacts in the United States, the National Climate Assessment (NCA), estimates that upward of 1,300 people die in the U.S. each year due to heat and that extreme floods, hurricanes, and wildfires routinely kill hundreds more,” NPR reports.
NPR should have examined the NCA’s accounting skeptically.
It’s bizarre and completely untenable to claim that every death from extreme weather is due to climate change as if people did not die from extreme weather before modern warming trends got rolling. This is obviously absurd, but NPR is utterly unskeptical.
The very first example NPR cites as evidence of the growing threat climate change supposedly poses to human life is the flooding from the summer of 2022 in Eastern Kentucky, where 14 inches of rain fell over 5 days, resulting in between 36 and 45 deaths during flash floods.
They assert that the flooding was due to climate change. Data debunks this connection.
As discussed in the Climate Realism post, “Were Kentucky’s Floods Caused By Climate Change?”, the record-highest single-day precipitation event occurred in 1997.
Although average total precipitation has slightly increased since the early 20th century, there is no significant upward trend in extreme precipitation.
The latter half of the record from the National Centers for Environmental Information state climate summaries seems to be higher than the former when data is averaged over five-year periods, but the raw annual values show that the most extreme instances of rainfall occurred in the 1970s and 1910s. (See figure below)
Flooding and flash flooding are not unusual for Kentucky, not now and not historically, so it is strange that NPR would imply that it is.
With regards to the claim that excessive heat from climate change is killing people in the United States, this is another poorly evidenced claim.
According to a 2021 study published in The Lancet, cold-related deaths in the United States are eight times more common than those from heat. Additionally, heat waves are not worsening in the country.
Not only are [cold-related deaths in the United States eight times more common than those from heat] according to a 2021 Lancet study, but heat waves are not getting worse in the United States, either.
The average high surface temperature anomalies have not been increasing, according to U.S. Climate Reference Network data. (See figure below)
Worse, NPR insists deaths from extreme weather should “spur policies that address the reliance on fossil fuels at the root of global warming.” This shows the story to be purely political, and bad politics at that.
NPR may not be aware, though they should be, that fossil fuel use is among the root causes responsible for the massive decline in weather-related deaths worldwide over the past century and a half.
As such, the anti-fossil-fuel policies NPA is advocating would hinder vulnerable communities’ resilience to natural disasters.
For instance, fossil fuels allow for reliable electricity that can provide air conditioning at an affordable cost, helping to protect vulnerable people like the elderly from heat waves when they do occur.
The medical industry, construction, agriculture, and everything that we depend on for survival rest on the use of fossil fuels and materials made from petroleum byproducts.
NPR reveals itself as foolish, uncurious, and ideologically driven when it blatantly ignores obvious questions and publicly available data, relying instead primarily on the say-so of government officials and anecdotal testimony of people who have been harmed by weather disasters.
Worse, the very policies they promote would do far more harm than global warming to the people whose interests they claim to be promoting; NPR’s preferred policies would cause more weather-related deaths—deaths that fossil fuel use currently makes possible to avoid.
Read more at Climate Realism
So the American Tax Payers is s SRILL having to pay fort his kind of leftists Propaganda they call NPR
It is preposterous for the EPA, NPR, IPCC et al to claim that their advocacy will have a positive effect on the weather. They need to answer difficult, awkward questions, but they aren’t being asked.
Liberals the M.S. Media and the Eco-Freaks blame everything from Hurricanes to Burnt Toast of Global Warming/Climate Change since their such a whole bunch of Nutcases and Screwballs