There's a reason we hear about so many extreme heat deaths during the summer: U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a “call to action” on extreme heat, prompting officials across the organization to take action without letting the facts get in the way A good story to give a warning. [emphasis, links added]
The World Health Organization trumpeted the disturbing finding that heat kills more than 175,000 people in Europe every year. This is really an exaggeration four times.
When called out, the group quietly edited their online publication to remove the word “extreme” – until the media reported the devastating news.
While it fixed the bug online, no space was found to mention that extreme heat is the smallest temperature risk in Europe, with cold causing 13 times more deaths.
This is inconsistent with the Secretary-General’s call to action.
Unicef, an organization dedicated to child welfare, next sounded the alarm. It published a policy brief claiming that 377 young people died in 2021 due to high temperatures in Europe and Central Asia.
It doesn't mention that their data shows that annual heat-related deaths have more than halved over three decades, that each year cold causes about three times more deaths in these areas, or that heat is the least important cause of death in this age group One of the reasons.
For an organization dedicated to child welfare, perhaps even more important is the fact that malnutrition kills 26,000 young people in the region every year.
In using erroneous data and telling stories that distort the truth, The World Health Organization and UNICEF prioritize political messaging over data integrity to accommodate the Secretary-General’s office’s narrow focus on climate.
Guterres is simply alarmist. He pointed out that over the past few decades, the number of heat stroke deaths among the elderly has increased by 85% globally. But he did not disclose that this increase is almost entirely due to the fact that there are now 79% more elderly people in the world.
In an exciting call to action, Guterres declared that “extreme heat is increasingly tearing economies apart, widening inequalities, undermining sustainable development goals and taking a toll on lives.” He claimed that “extreme heat events are rapidly increasing in size, intensity, frequency and duration.”
This is not only shocking, but misleading.
A landmark 2024 study on extreme heat and its impact on mortality shows that the number of heat wave days globally has increased from 13.4 to 13.7 days in the past 30 years, which is not a rapid increase.
More importantly, the global death rate from extreme heat has not increased, but has declined by more than 7% per decade.
Guterres explicitly blames climate change for all extreme heat deaths, but that's not the case This is patently untrue, as nearly all deaths from extreme heat were caused by the 13.4-day heat waves we would have experienced 30 years ago.
Since then, climate change has increased the time it takes for mortality to decline by 0.3 days. It would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
In fact, if we were to freeze the world's age distribution, correcting for the increasing number of older people, Over the past 30 years, extreme heat deaths have declined by 13.9% per decade. The main reason for the decline is that people have become wealthier and have more air conditioning and electricity.
This is the deeper problem with Guterres’ remarks.
It’s hard to avoid the implication that tragic heat deaths are simply a tool of the Secretary-General’s climate alarmism.
The best policy to avoid deaths from extreme heat—something the world has done remarkably well in recent decades—is to ensure that more people can afford to live in cooler, air-conditioned environments.
Strangely, the United Nations balked at the idea of saving lives. The World Health Organization's four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of heat does not mention “air conditioning.”
it shows People rely on “blinds and blinds” and “The night air,” and Go to the supermarket to cool off for a few hours.
Lowering energy prices to make air conditioning more affordable is the opposite of what Guterres is pushing for.
He insists the world's “disease” is “dependence on fossil fuels”.
He demands that we limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which will cost trillions of dollars, send electricity costs soaring and impoverish lives.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Guterres’ “call to action” is this: He focuses specifically on extreme heat, which kills 155,000 people around the world each year.
The Secretary-General rarely talks about freezing temperatures (except to advance the dubious argument that extreme cold is also caused by global warming).
Cold kills 4.5 million people every year, almost 30 times more likely than heat. In a smarter world, Guterres would focus 30 times more firepower on this larger problem. (He will find lower energy prices to be the biggest help.)
It’s hard to avoid the implication that tragic heat deaths are simply a tool of the Secretary-General’s climate alarmism. At the very least, he and the United Nations should get their numbers right.
Bjorn Lomborg is the Chairman of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First”.
Read more at the Fountain Hill Times
