DID you know that increasing global temperatures now saves 166,000 lives each year?
While true, here’s why nobody dares tell you.
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Climate change is a real problem, but increasingly it is being portrayed in ever more extreme terms. Many media houses and politicians have turned into activists, swapping the term with the unscientific but scary term “climate crisis” or even “climate apocalypse”.
Although extreme narratives will garner more clicks, the science often doesn’t support them. Stories are less likely to provide information when they don’t make for good headlines. That leaves us less informed and more likely support expensive and inefficient climate policies.
Think about temperature-related deaths. It is not uncommon to hear about heat-related deaths.
It is not only heatwaves that can cause death. As soon as temperatures rise above the local, most comfortable temperature — the so-called minimal mortality temperature — deaths increase. As global temperatures rise, more people are likely to die from heat. This story is familiar and well-known.
However, we seldom hear about cold killings. Even more rare is the tale of cold that kills many. In England and Wales, heat kills around 1,500 people each year. However, cold is more deadly than heat.
This is true in both the USA and Canada. You heard about the about 600 deaths from the heat dome earlier this summer, but this is only a smaller part of the 2,500 people that die from too much heat. And you are certainly not told that every year more than 140,000 people die from too much cold.
Indeed, globally, a July 2021 study in the renowned medical journal The Lancet shows that heat currently causes just over one percent of all global deaths, or almost 600,000 people each year.
It also showed that cold kills more than eight times more — more than 4.5 million people each year. Not only are cold deaths more common in cold regions, but they are also more prevalent around the globe.
Cold is expected to decrease in number as temperatures rise. According to the Lancet, climate change has caused an increase in heat deaths of 0.21% and a decrease in cold deaths of 0.51% over the past 20 years.
Global warming can actually prevent 166,000 deaths from temperature-related causes every year, given the current population.
We must pay attention to both cold and heat-related deaths. With better information, fluids, and access to cool areas during heat waves, adaptation is relatively simple.
This is why heat deaths in rich countries — despite climate change — have generally declined in the last decades, because air conditioning is a straight-forward option.
Cold is more difficult to deal with, as adaptation requires well-heated homes for several months. This is often prohibitively costly for poorer households. According to one study, fracking allowed for lower gas prices in the US around 2010 which enabled poorer households to have better heating. This saved an estimated 11,000 lives every year.
This is something you should hear. But often, you don’t. It is because this story doesn’t fit the climate narrative. This is why such facts are being increasingly deemed dangerous.
I should know, because I am currently at the receiving end of this censorship for pointing out that it’s not all doom and gloom in climate news and daring to inform you that currently, while we see more heat deaths, we see even fewer cold deaths.
‘CENSORSHIP’
For instance, a group of climate activists, who do not want you to see this information, pose as fact-checkers, ineptly and comically accusing me of making “unsupported” claims.
However, the fact that there have been fewer deaths due to temperature increases is not something they want to acknowledge. They instead fabricate an absurd quote that is contradicted by the article they claim to fact-check.
These climate-campaigners have been given the power to censor any information posted on Facebook, the most widely used social media platform. They are effectively deciding what information is allowed to be seen. Anything that isn’t to their liking such as the facts from the science journal The Lancet will be labelled false.
This is extremely disturbing and shameful. Censoring facts does not help us make better policies, it only supports poor decisions and social fears. While Facebook’s attempt to stop the spread of ‘fake news’ is principally laudable, the platform has a big question to answer: who guards the guardians?
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