Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 25 June 2024 — 1400 words

In a recent News Brief I pointed out that the major climate alarm propaganda cabals [CCNow, Inside Climate News]  would be flooding the main stream media outlets all around the world with the news that in the Northern Hemisphere, where the majority of humanity lives, it is Summer and summers tend to be hot.

One of the talking points in common usage is this:

“Heat is the leading weather-related cause of mortalities in the US, outpacing deaths from hurricanes by a factor of eight to one, and this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, worsened by the human-caused climate crisis, have led to fears a new annual high death toll will be set in 2023.”  [The Guardian] 

Many mainstream media outlets are pointed to the NOAA data set “Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics”.   And, there it is, irrefutable proof from a gold-standard source, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service, that heat kills far more than cold.

Only, of course, they are not counting what you or I would consider “heat deaths” and “cold deaths”, but something else.  (I will expand on this later on.)

Further, encouraged by the Climate Propaganda Cabals, news outlets rely on a report from world newspaper-of-record like The Guardian [a co-founder of the climate propaganda outlet Covering Climate Now – CCNow]:

Extreme temperatures kill 5 million people a year with heat-related deaths rising, study finds [The Guardian]

Selectively quoting from that piece is common practice, despite the fact that there is a sub-headline that reads:  “More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years but climate change is shifting the balance.”  One has to read the piece very carefully to find that it reports on Zhao et al. 2021, which did, in fact, find that heat related deaths were rising (as population also rises) and to discover that the gentle warming of the climate is preventing more cold deaths than the increase in heat deaths —  resulting in a net reduction in extreme temperature deaths.

More exactly:   9.43% of all deaths were related to non-optimum temperatures.  Of the same 5 million, 8.52% were cold-related and 0.91%  were heat-related.  Again, over 8.5 percent of deaths are cold-related and only 0.9 were heat related — that is almost 10 times as many cold-related deaths than heat related deaths. 

Oh, and the shift in death?  That increase in heat-deaths?  Here I quoted the paper’s Findings:

“From 2000–03 to 2016–19, the global cold-related excess death ratio [defined as “the ratio between annual excess deaths and all deaths of a year” – kh] changed by –0·51 percentage points (95% eCI –0·61 to –0·42) and the global heat-related excess death ratio increased by 0·21 percentage points (0·13–0·31), leading to a net reduction in the overall ratio.”

[Aside:  There seems to be some statistical chicanery involved in reporting “excess death ratio” in place of something simpler like “change in deaths per million” or “lives saved by warmer temperatures”.  What I read in this study of deaths from “non-optimal ambient temperatures” (the subject of this study),  we have a comparison between half a percentage point improvement in a large number of deaths (~471,000 cold deaths) being compared to two-tenths of a percentage points worsening of a much smaller number of deaths (~45,000 heat deaths).  I could well be mistaken, there maybe some Public Health reason for doing this,  so, some smart guy or gal could sort this out for the readers in comments?]

This lying about heat and cold deaths is subject to a pretty good debunking by Joshua Cohen  at Forbes, in his July 2023 piece Excessive Heat Can Kill, But Extreme Cold Still Causes Many More Fatalities.

[quoting below from that Forbes piece – note the author is writing about Zhao et al. 2021]

“Between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased globally. The 20-year period coincided with the earth warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat-related fatalities disproportionately impacted Asia, Africa and Southern parts of Europe and North America.”

“Interestingly, during the 2000-2019 period examined in the study, while heat-related deaths rose, deaths from cold exposure fell. And they decreased by a larger amount than the increase in heat-related fatalities. Overall, researchers estimated that approximately 650,000 fewer people worldwide died from temperature exposure during the 2000-2019 period than in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Bluntly, in the recent twenty years studied, about 650,000 lives were saved by the slow and steady warming of the climate 2000-2019.

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Let’s head back to the first point:  The NOAA and NWS (National Weather Service) graphic of “Weather Fatalities”.  Here again, Forbes’ Joshua Cohen tries to set the record straight:

“Moreover, the two U.S. government agencies that track heat and cold deaths—National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—are diametrically opposed in their estimates.”

Say what?  Aren’t facts, well….facts?  How can two major U.S. Federal agencies that track weather fatalities and a wider range of deaths be “diametrically opposed” in numerical estimates?  I mean, dead people are pretty easy to count, they don’t move around and try to hide, do they?  (Note: But, it is tricky:  see my Cause of Death and its Follow-up.]

“The NOAA’s account of what it calls “weather-related deaths” suggests that during the 30-year period 1988 to 2017, an average of 134 heat-related deaths occurred annually, while 30 per year were cold-related.

“Contrary to the NOAA, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality Database, which is based on actual death certificates, indicates that roughly twice as many people die of cold in a given year than of heat.”

[The link is to the CDC Database tool, it is incredibly complicated to use and it is difficult to extract the deaths by heat and cold. – However, Anna Skinner, at Newsweek, managed to dig out a figure. See Late Additions section below. — kh]

Cohen offers a reasonable and possibly-right explanation:

“It wouldn’t be the first time that organizations’ estimates of what are seemingly the same observable events are so far apart. Discrepancies in definitions and assumptions around measurement underlie each organization’s calculations of cold- and heat-related deaths.”

“All things considered, it is very likely in a given year that cold causes more deaths than heat. As the planet heats up, the number of heat exposure deaths increase and fatalities due to cold decrease. The rate of decrease in deaths owing to cold is faster than the rate of increase in deaths due to heat. And so on balance there then appear to be fewer temperature exposure deaths.”

Read Cohen’s piece, he wraps up hedging his bets so he can’t be called a Climate Denier.

Then there is the European data on heat deaths vs. cold deaths, in another 2023 Lancet paper: Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study in 854 cities in Europe and its infamous graphic.  On the left is as published, copied directly from the original paper, on the right, with the numerical axes equalized, courtesy of Bjorn Lomborg:

But like I often do, Cohen wrote too soon.  He should have waited a year until Zhao et al. wrote their most recent (May 2024) paper, specifically on heat-wave deaths,  on :  “Global, regional, and national burden of heatwave-related mortality from 1990 to 2019: A three-stage modelling study”   Their findings are summarized in this simple statement:

“During 1990 to 2019 warm seasons, 153,078 deaths were associated with heatwaves (nearly half in Asia), which accounted for 0.94% of all deaths and equated 236 deaths per 10 million residents. The global heatwave-related excess death rate declined by 7.2% per decade in comparison to the 30-year average.”

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Late additions:

Judith Curry re-tweets (can’t say re-Xs) Andy Revkin, who laments the demise of journalistic integrity of The Guardian headline and story featured in this essay — here and here.

A story in Newsweek reports that “California Water Temperatures Drop to Dangerous Levels”, 47.3 degrees Fahrenheit (8.5°C). Included in the piece is the statement: “National Institutes of Health data revealed that 1,330 people in the U.S. die from cold exposure every year.” And that’s only direct cause of death….

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Author’s Comment:

I know I didn’t answer the question asked in the title: “Why Do They Lie about Extreme Temperature Deaths?”    I don’t answer because I don’t know.  There is overwhelming publicly available data and published in-depth peer-reviewed studies, published even in journals known for their pro-climate-alarmist bias, that establish that cold, low temperature,  even moderate cold, kills far many more people than high temperature. 

This is true in the United States, in the United Kingdom, Europe and the world in general. 

But, rank propaganda is based on the simple process of repeating the same lie over and over and over until it is accepted as truth. 

Here are the links for use in defeating this lie:

Zhao et al. [2021]

Zhao et al. [2024]

Joshua Cohen in Forbes

Masselot et al. 2023 (European deaths)

Thanks for reading.

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