The once-venerable UK Lancet medical journal has launched an appeal for “urban green infrastructure” to reduce ambient temperatures, despite its acknowledgement that many more people die from cold weather each year than from heat.
“High ambient temperatures are associated with many health effects, including premature mortality,” the Lancet states in its most recent issue. “The combination of global warming due to climate change and the expansion of the global built environment mean that the intensification of urban heat islands (UHIs) is expected, accompanied by adverse effects on population health.”
The Lancet itself revealed in 2021 that people are almost ten times more likely to die from cold weather than from hot weather. As global temperatures have risen, all weather-related deaths have decreased significantly, suggesting that global warming may actually save lives.
It is noteworthy that the Lancet’s analysis of weather-related deaths deals exclusively with summer deaths and completely ignores the much more problematic phenomenon of winter deaths from the cold.
Despite skyrocketing energy prices in much of the northern hemisphere due to ideologically driven abandonment of fossil fuel production, the Lancet has chided Europe for its failure to fully commit to the ill-conceived European Green Deal, despite Europe’s painful experience of dependence on Russian oil and gas.
The Lancet has called for “immediate action” which should include removing fossil fuel subsidies and “progressively taxing production,” which would be used in turn to subsidize renewable power generation.
This past January, the Lancet made the bogus and unscientific claim that climate change is the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” as part of its stated mission to “drive social and political change.”
In point of fact, over 165,000 people die every single day around the world from myriad causes, including cancer, heart disease, respiratory diseases, suicide, and accidents. Of these 165,000 people, however, not one dies from climate change.
Worldwide, fewer than 10,000 people die each year from all weather-related incidents combined and that number has been dropping steadily every single year. To posit climate change as the greatest threat to global health is therefore ridiculous in the extreme.
As global temperatures have risen, heat deaths have increased but deaths from cold have simultaneously decreased by more than twice as much, producing a significant net drop in weather-related deaths, a welcome trend that seems bound to continue.