OPINION:
There’s a reason we heard so much about extreme heat deaths over the summer: the U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a “call to action” on extreme heat that prompted mandarins across his vast organization to issue warnings without letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
The World Health Organization trumpeted the disturbing finding that in Europe, more than 175,000 people die yearly because of extreme heat. That was a fourfold exaggeration. When called out, the organization quietly edited their online publication to remove the word “extreme” — only after media outlets had carried the catastrophic news. While it fixed the error online, it didn’t find room to mention that extreme heat is the smallest temperature risk for Europe, with cold killing 13 times more people. That wouldn’t fit the secretary-general’s call to action.
UNICEF, the organization dedicated to child welfare, was next to ring the alarm. It published a policy brief claiming 377 young people died in 2021 because of high temperatures across Europe and Central Asia. It didn’t mention that their data show annual heat deaths have more than halved over three decades, that cold causes around three times more deaths in these regions annually, or that heat is one of the least significant causes of death among this age bracket. For an organization devoted to child welfare, it should perhaps matter more that malnutrition claims 26,000 young people’s lives across the region yearly.
In using faulty data and telling skewed stories, WHO and UNICEF put political messaging ahead of data integrity to fit the narrow focus on climate from the secretary-general’s office.
Mr. Guterres could hardly be more alarmist. He pointed to the increase in the number of heat deaths of old people globally, which has increased 85% over the past decades, but he didn’t reveal that almost all of this increase is because the world now has 79% more old people.
In his emotional call to action, Mr. Guterres declared, “Extreme heat is increasingly tearing through economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and killing people,” and he claimed there is “a rapid rise in the scale, intensity, frequency and duration of extreme-heat events.”
This is not only alarming but also misleading. A landmark 2024 study on extreme heat and its effects on mortality reveals global heatwave days have increased over the last 30 years from 13.4 to 13.7 days — hardly a rapid rise. More importantly, the global extreme heat death rate is not increasing but has actually declined by more than 7% per decade.
Mr. Guterres explicitly blamed all extreme heat deaths on climate change, but this is blatantly untrue because almost all deaths caused by extreme heat are driven by the 13.4 days of heat waves that we would have endured 30 years ago. Since then, climate change has added 0.3 days and a fraction to the declining death rate. Suggesting otherwise is disingenuous.
In fact, if we were to freeze the world’s age distribution, correcting for ever-increasing numbers of old people, extreme heat deaths would have declined by 13.9% every decade over the last 30 years. The decline is largely due to people becoming richer and having more access to air conditioning and electricity.
This is the deeper problem with Mr. Guterres’ rhetoric. The best policy to avoid extreme heat deaths — which the world has done very well over recent decades — is to ensure more people can afford to live in cool environments with air conditioning. Strangely, the United Nations balks at such life-saving ideas. The WHO’s four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat doesn’t mention “air conditioning.” It suggests that people rely on “blinds and shutters” and “night air,” and spend a few hours in the supermarket to cool off.
Lowering energy prices so more people can afford air conditioning is the opposite of what Mr. Guterres is pushing. He insists the world’s “disease” is an “addiction to fossil fuels.” He demands that we keep global temperature rises under a 1.5 Celsius temperature limit, which would cost thousands of trillions of dollars, spike electricity costs and impoverish lives.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Mr. Guterres’s “call to action” is that he exclusively focuses on extreme heat that kills 155,000 people globally each year. The secretary-general rarely talks about cold temperatures (unless it is to make the questionable argument that extreme cold is also caused by global warming). Cold kills 4.5 million people yearly, almost 30 times as many as extreme heat. In a more sensible world, Mr. Guterres would focus 30 times as much firepower on solving this bigger problem. (He would find that lower energy prices would help most.)
It is hard to avoid the implication that tragic heat deaths are simply a tool for the secretary-general’s climate alarmism. At the very least, he and the United Nations should get their numbers right.
• Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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