Are more people dying in heat waves?

I blame Marth Reeves for this!

By the way what's up with the hair? And the lip syncing?

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

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

By Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ

Aug. 29, 2024 11:58 am ET

A billboard reports the temperature in Palm Desert, Calif., July 3. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The reason you’ve heard a lot about extreme heat deaths this summer has more to do with demagoguery than data. Alongside the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’s “call to action” on the topic in late July, mandarins across U.N. organizations have issued warnings that are heavy on emotion and light on facts.

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.

Unfortunately, the media had already spread the WHO’s original, mistaken claim far and wide. Moreover, the edited version left out other important context: 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—a danger that a warming climate helps ameliorate.

Unicef—the U.N.’s dedicated child-welfare organization—also rang a false alarm in late July. It 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.

The brief also neglected to mention that 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. In a world of limited resources, you’d think that would be Unicef’s priority.

The overwrought tone of the WHO and Unicef claims matched Mr. Guterres’s alarmism. In his call to action, he emphasized that heat deaths of old people globally have increased 85% over the past 22 years. He left out that almost all of this increase is because old people are 80% more numerous.

Mr. Guterres declared that “extreme heat is increasingly tearing through economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and killing people.” He claimed there has been “a rapid rise in the scale, intensity, frequency and duration of extreme-heat events.”

This is misleading to say the least. 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. While Mr. Guterres blames climate change for extreme heat deaths, this makes clear that high temperatures are mostly a result of seasonal changes that have long existed. Only perhaps a third of a day of yearly heat waves is likely attributable to climate change over the past three decades.

Mr. Guterres’s image of a fire-blasted planet is further belied by the fact that 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.

Most important, even though the planet is warming, that groundbreaking 2024 study found that 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.

Falsely attributing heat deaths to global warming is likely to lead to more heat deaths. The recent decline in heat mortality is largely thanks to greater access to electricity and therefore to air conditioning. The best policy to avoid extreme heat deaths—or cold deaths for that matter—is to ensure that more people can afford technology to control the temperature in their homes. That necessitates economic growth and cheap, reliable energy.

The WHO’s four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat suggests that people rely on “blinds or shutters” and “night air.” The closest it comes to mentioning air conditioning is its recommendation to cool off by spending a few hours in the supermarket.

Mr. Guterres is pushing policies that would jack up energy prices and undercut economic growth. He insists the world’s “disease” is an “addiction to fossil fuels” and demands that governments keep the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That would cost quadrillions of dollars, spike electricity costs, and spread poverty.

All this raises the question whether Mr. Guterres and his cohort are more interested in stopping heat deaths or ginning up support for climate activism. At the very least, they should get their numbers right.

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”