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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From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Marc Morano

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Related:

The Atlantic Justified ‘Degrowth Communism’ to Fight Climate Change … Yes, You Read That Right

June 5, 2024

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano at least credited The Atlantic for saying “the quiet part out loud” in comments to MRC Business. “Net zero in the climate agenda is really nothing short of Soviet-style central planning. Every sector of our economy is subject to long range planning to meet net zero goals.”

Morano saw right through The Atlantic’s ploy to mainstream psychotic climate change fanaticism and underscored what the real agenda is:

“Every sector of our economy is subject to long range planning to meet net zero goals. This agenda is nothing short of the rationing of energy food and transportation in order to create chaos and give the government more Covid lockdown like controls. After all, what was a Covid lockdown but the governments’ attempt at forcing degrowth on the world. We have truly entered the era of climate communism.”

The Atlantic: Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’? – ‘Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, & your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays’

May 28, 2024

The Atlantic – May 28, 2024: By Christopher Beam –Kohei Saito’s theory of how to solve climate change is economically dubious and politically impossible. Why is it so popular?

Excerpt: The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.

The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.

Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word. As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage. This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies.

I first visited John Brewer Reef on 10^th April 2022, it was being reported in newspapers around the world as badly bleached – part of a sixth mass coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef.

I had expected to find stark white corals, instead I found the most truly colourful coral reef. My favourite section had massive, what are known as plate corals – round and flat, arranged such that they were overlapping, and hanging over a deep crevasse.  The large plates were in different shades of pink with some beige, chocolate brown and green.   And the fish, they were so beautiful; especially the clouds of green Chromis swaying with the current along the reef edge.

This coral reef rises as a block of limestone topped with these most spectacular corals jostling for space across the reef crest.  The limestone platform, that is John Brewer Reef, rises from the sandy sea floor 70 kilometres offshore from Townsville – it is part of the central Great Barrier Reef.

Of course that afternoon of 10^th April there were parrot fish, with their large beaks for scraping and breaking the hard corals – and I swear one of the more colourful parrot fish in shades of green, blue and yellow, I swear it winked at me as it gobbled a morso of coral.

It was a sunny day. The water was warm and crystal clear – everything sparkled.   This was a reef making headlines around the world as badly bleached, and yet it presented as the very best of the Great Barrier Reef.

In fact, it was more colourful than usual, because it was stressed.  Most people expect to see colourful corals at the Great Barrier Reef when in fact at a healthy reef most of the corals, much of the time, are brown to beige in colour.  It is typically the fish, especially the parrots and the yellow butterfly fish – I also saw red damsels, gold spotted sweetlips, orange clowns at John Brewer reef that first day – that give a reef movement, and colour.

It is only when the corals lose some of their symbiotic algae that the more colourful florescent proteins show through.  This was happening at John Brewer Reef in March to April 2022 – at the end of that summer, many of the more usually brown corals, especially along the outer edge of the crest, had lost a lot of their symbiotic algae, their zooxanthellae, and they were now pinker because the more colourful pink florescent proteins usually masked by the algae was showing through.  John Brewer reef not only had colourful fish, but also the pinkest corals I had ever seen.

Because John Brewer reef, like most mid-shelf coral reefs is essentially layer upon layer of dead coral that has built up over the millennia as a hard limestone platform, it is just the top that is alive.  It has just a thin veneer of colour – like the icing on layers of a sponge cake, except the sponge is as hard as concrete.

On that sunny day in April 2022, when I first visited John Brewer reef, most of the snorkelers were concentrated over this area: inspecting the colourful top of the platform, this special reef habitat where the coral is concentrated: the reef crest.  And I especially liked that area of this hard top where there was some cracking – some cracking so I could see down between the plate corals into the crevasse.

Of course, it is this most exposed top – the reef crest – that is also that section of reef that will receive the full force of crashing and pounding waves during storms and cyclones.

So, when Tropical Cyclone Kirrily hit John Brewer reef as it did on that afternoon of Thursday 25^th January 2024, as a severe tropical cyclone with 224 km per hour winds and huge waves, it was the reef crest, where the tourists take so many photographs as memories, that was most affected, that was pummeled.

While it is the reef crest that is always the focus of the tourist camera, where the fish swim amongst the highest density of coral – before the cyclone – as I will explain, this section of reef was never surveyed as part of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) Long Term Monitoring Program – so there is no record of coral cover before TC Kirrily, at least no record that was ever contributed to the calculation of total coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef.

Indeed, while so many of the rumpled like to reduce the Great Barrier Reef to the magical number of 32.7 and claim record coral cover – this number has never included the reef crest, not at John Brewer or any of the other 3,000 coral reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef.

To be continued.

This is part two of a new series, ‘Denying the Most Precious – Natural Cycles’. You can read Part 1 by CLICKING HERE.  In this series I will explain why I have come to despise the rumpled, those who engage in premediated ignorance.

All photographs are mine, taken at the reef crest with an Olympus TG6.