NYTimes and Nature falsely claim one-third of heatwaves due to climate change

Credit: airbus.com

As this article says: ‘The wealth of scientific evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that cold, not heat, kills.’ But anything alarmist, however tenuous, seems to get a free pass from so-called ‘fact checkers’ who want humans to be blamed for any real or imagined climate variation.
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Recently, there have been a number of media stories claiming modest global warming has caused more than a third of heat-related death around the world between 1991 and 2018, says H. Sterling Burnett @ Climate Change Dispatch.

These stories all reference a single study published in Nature Climate Change to support their claims. This study is purely speculative, based on climate model projections and epidemiological studies that don’t control for significant confounding factors.

By contrast, numerous studies show, a modestly warmer world should result in fewer temperature-related deaths overall, not more.

The New York Times story, titled “More Than a Third of Heat Deaths Are Tied to Climate Change, Study Says,” is typical of the mainstream media’s uncritical, fawning coverage of the Nature Climate Change study.

“More than a third of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to the extra warming associated with climate change, according to a new study that makes a case for taking strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to protect public health,” writes the New York Times.

“The sweeping new research, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by 70 researchers using data from major projects in the fields of epidemiology and climate modeling in 43 countries. It found that heat-related deaths in warm seasons were boosted by climate change by an average of 37 percent, in a range of a 20 percent increase to 76 percent.”

Rather than “sweeping” and “new”, the study should be referred to a speculative and untested. One of the researchers asked by the Times to comment on the study referred to it as “clever,” which seems apt, but that’s not a compliment.

It is unclear how much of the modest 1℃ warming of the past 150 years is due to human greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result, directly attributing any individual heat-related death or any percentage of heat-related deaths to the portion of the heat supposedly enhanced by human influences is purely speculative at best, and impossible at worst.

Full article here.