Lancet Won’t Defend Climate Statistic It Hyped

The misleading claim about heat deaths comes first in its summary and was central for the stories in the press

Letter to WSJ.

"A poor Lancet study made climate headlines across the world by telling us that rapidly rising temperatures now kill 68% more older people (65+) than they did in the early 2000s. This claim is misleading, as I demonstrate in my op-ed “Climate Change and the Lancet’s ‘Heat Death’ Deception” (Nov. 5). Almost the entire heat-death increase is due to the number of older people increasing by 60%.

The Lancet’s reply (Letters, Nov. 12) delivers lots of sciency-sounding verbiage but, surprisingly, offers no effort to numerically defend its claim. It handwaves that it “disaggregates the effect of demographic changes,” but this is clearly untrue for its central claim: the 68% is an increase in the total, global number of heat deaths in older people. It remains unadjusted for a rapidly expanding, older population. Yet the Lancet’s 68% claim comes first in its summary and it was central for all the climate stories everyone read in the press.

Claiming that temperature rises kill 68% more is based on an amateur statistical error. But with the Lancet’s failure to even remotely defend—or apologize for—its claim, it appears the 68% is not only misleading but, unfortunately, intended to deceive.

Bjorn Lomborg

President, Copenhagen Consensus

Malmö, Sweden"