U.N. Climate-Change Alarms Cast Little Light on Heat

The international body’s warnings are more about demagoguery than data

By Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"In early August, the World Health Organization trumpeted a disturbing figure: In Europe alone, more than 175,000 people die each year because of extreme heat. That was an about fourfold exaggeration. When called out, the organization quietly edited its online publication to remove the word “extreme” from the statement’s title, a concession that these deaths aren’t, as the WHO suggested, the result of a cataclysmic shift in temperatures."

"While seasonal rises in temperature that have been the norm for decades do kill people, it’s a far smaller toll than that taken by cold. In Europe, cold kills nearly four times as many people as heat"

"It [Unicef] published a policy brief claiming that about 377 young people died in 2021 from high temperatures across Europe and Central Asia. Unicef didn’t mention that the data source it cites—“Global Burden of Disease” statistics from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation—shows annual heat deaths of young people have declined by more than 50% over three decades, or that cold causes about three times as many child deaths in these regions each year."

"heat is one of the least significant causes of death for young people. Malnutrition claims 26,000 young lives across Europe and Central Asia every year."

"heat deaths of old people globally have increased 85% over the past 22 years"

"old people are 80% more numerous"

"A landmark 2024 study on extreme heat and its effects on mortality revealed that over the past 30 years the annual global average of days with heat waves has increased from 13.4 to 13.7—hardly a rapid rise."

"most heat deaths are caused by moderate heat. While 334,000 people die each year from moderate heat, according to a 2021 Lancet study, only 155,000 do from extremely high temperatures. Cold deaths are a far larger problem, killing 4.5 million people annually."

"the global death rate from extreme heat has declined by more than 7% a decade over the past 30 years. When researchers adjusted for the increasingly older age distribution of the world population, they found that the global extreme heat death rate has declined by 13.9% every 10 years."