Climate-alarmist reporting obscures inconvenient data

The media give outsize attention to plane crashes. But lots of stories of plane crashes do not provide good insight into transport safety. You need statistics to realise that planes are much safer than cars.

Climate-alarmist reporting is now causing the same problem with everproliferating stories about extreme heatwaves, floods and fires. This gale of ghastly tragedies argues that out-ofcontrol climate change is now causing ever deadlier calamities. Yet this narrative is contradicted by the data.

One of the bestdocumented effects of global warming is more heat extremes, which made headlines across the world this northern hemisphere summer. Yet while rarely reported, the new UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report also tells us “the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased”. That matters because globally many more people die from cold than from heat.

A new study published in medical journal The Lancet shows that temperature rises over the past two decades in the US and Canada mean 7,200 additional heat deaths each year — many more than the widely reported 624 deaths from this summer’s heat dome. But the study also shows that warming means each year we avoid 21,000 cold deaths. We are badly informed if we don’t hear both parts of this story.

The tragic flooding in Germany and Belgium are similarly blamed on climate change. But the data does not support that river floods have increased. Globally, a study of more than 9,000 rivers shows that while some rivers see increasing flood trends, many more rivers see decreasing flood trends. This is also true in Europe, where the new UN climate panel report tallies all rivers and finds most flood less. What matters most for riverine flooding is that ever more people build on flood plains, leaving the water nowhere to go. This highlights the necessity of a wellfunctioning warning system.

Here, Germany failed spectacularly. Since the previous deadly floods in 2002 Germany has built an extensive warning system, but last September, during a “national warning” day, most warning measures did not work. Models warned of flooding up to nine days ahead, but most people were left unaware. The hydrologist who set up the European Flood Awareness System called it “a monumental failure of the system”. But of course, blaming the deadly floods on climate change is convenient for politicians who were responsible for the missing early warnings.

Similarly, US fires frequently get blamed on climate, but the US government’s own statistics belie the hype: the burnt area to date in 2021 is the seventhlowest of the past 20 years. In 2020 just 11% of the annual area burnt compared with the early 1900s. Contrary to climate clichés, globally the burnt area has declined dramatically since 1900 and continues to fall through the satellite era.

The world is vast, and with cameras everywhere there is a daily torrent of new fires, heatwaves and floods vying for attention. Newspapers earn clicks, politicians brandish their virtue and climate campaigners fundraise from these calamities. But just like aircraft crashes, a steady stream of bad news does not inform well.

We have statistics on global deaths from all climaterelated weather disasters such as floods, droughts, storms and fire from the International Disaster Database. In the 1920s these disasters on average killed almost half a million people each year.

The current climatealarmed narrative suggests that climate-fuelled disasters are deadlier, but that is untrue. Over the past century, climate-related deaths have dropped an astounding 96% to about 18,000 in an average year. Because the global population has quadrupled, global death risk from climate in the 2010s dropped more than 99%.

This does not negate that climate change is a real problem that we should fix smartly. But contrary to the current narrative, our adaptive capacity is vastly larger than changing climate risks.

Look at 2021, which seems to be branded the year of climate catastrophes. Add the 624 deaths from the North American heat dome, the 358 dead from floods in Germany and Belgium, the 559 dead from Indian climate-related catastrophes that you may not even have heard about, and 1,378 more fatalities from more than 200 other catastrophes globally. Adjusted to a full year, climate-related weather disasters are likely to cause about 6,000 deaths in 2021.

Each death is a tragedy, yet many more tragedies are being avoided. Globally, The Lancet study shows climate change now causes 116,000 additional heat deaths each year but avoids almost 283,000 cold deaths.

So each year, warming saves 166,000 lives.

For a smart climate conversation, we need to insist on seeing all the data.