Jesuit Father Thomas Reese has asserted anyone who doubts the climate crisis “is so deep in denial they would not flee a burning house if their clothes were on fire.”
Despite a growing number of prominent scientists who deny the existence of a so-called “climate emergency,” Father Reese suggests a hot July should convince any reasonable person of the truth behind climate alarmism.
“We are like frogs in a pot of water being slowly cooked as the temperature rises,” the priest writes. “We don’t have the sense to get out of the pot, let alone turn off the heat.”
In his article, Father Reese makes the incredible claim that globally, “5 million people a year die from the heat.”
One hopes Father Reese is better at administering the sacraments than doing research, since the study he references to back up that statement makes no such claim.
The 2021 study published in the Lancet medical journal declared that 5,083,173 deaths were associated with “non-optimal temperatures per year,” but then went on to explain that the vast majority of these were “cold-related” rather than “heat-related.”
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According to the Lancet, people around the world are 9.4 times more likely to die from the cold than from the heat. It added that over the past 20 years, the death rate from heat has slightly increased due to global warming (+0.21 percent), but that the death rate from the cold decreased more significantly still (-0.51 percent) during the same period.
An unbiased reader could reasonably infer that global warming has actually lowered the overall death rate from “non-optimal temperatures.”
Undeterred, Father Reese goes on to rail against air conditioning before lamenting the “billions of dollars in damage” caused by flooding, which he believes is related to global warming.
What the priest fails to mention is that global deaths from weather-related incidents have been steadily decreasing year by year and are now a tiny fraction of what they were a century ago, in part due to better heating and — yes — air conditioning.
A century ago, nearly half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures, whereas in 2020, the number declined to just 14,000 and in 2021 dropped below 10,000 for the first time on record.
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“Millions will die in the coming catastrophe, perhaps half the world’s population,” Reese trumpets apocalyptically. “Billions more will suffer privations on an impoverished planet for centuries to come. Governments will collapse into chaos; the whole world will look like Haiti does now.”
Such ridiculous hyperbole is expected from third-world dictators but is unbecoming a man of the cloth.
If in Father Reese’s over-heated imagination we are all becoming boiled frogs, one can only hope that he will spend less time in the sun.