An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal published Thursday scolded United Nations chief António Guterres for spreading climate alarmism based on phony data.
In his article titled “U.N. Casts Little Light on Heat,” climate expert Bjorn Lomborg observes Guterres’ notoriously hyperbolic language on global warming and its effects ignores the fact that high temperatures are “mostly a result of seasonal changes that have long existed,” rather than of climate change.
The U.N.’s “latest climate-change alarms are more about demagoguery than data,” Lomborg writes.
A groundbreaking 2024 study found that “the global death rate from extreme heat has declined by more than 7% a decade over the past 30 years,” he states.
More importantly, perhaps, Lomborg points out that seasonal rises in temperature kill far fewer people than cold weather.
“In Europe, cold kills nearly four times as many people as heat — a danger that a warming climate helps ameliorate,” he notes.
While 155,000 people die each year from extremely high temperatures, 4.5 million people die from the cold, he adds.
Along with the U.N.’s alarmist-in-chief, Lomborg also calls out the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for publishing a wildly inaccurate report on deaths from extreme heat.
In early August, the W.H.O. declared that in Europe alone, more than 175,000 people die each year because of extreme heat, a figure that overstated the real figure by some 400 percent.
Another U.N. group — UNICEF — its dedicated child-welfare organization — “also rang a false alarm in late July,” Lomborg writes, lamenting in a policy brief the deaths of 377 young people in 2021 from high temperatures across Europe and Central Asia.
The brief fails to mention that the very report it references shows that annual heat deaths of young people have declined by more than 50 percent over three decades and that “cold causes about three times as many child deaths in these regions each year.”
Deaths of young people from heat pale in comparison next to malnutrition, which claims 26,000 young lives across Europe and Central Asia every year, Lomborg writes.
Ironically, falsely attributing heat deaths to “global warming” is likely to lead to more heat deaths, Lomborg suggests, since the recent decline in mortality from heat is largely due to greater access to electricity and therefore to air conditioning, something that alarmists detest.
Economic growth and cheap, reliable energy are the greatest antidote to heat-related deaths, he observes, but these are only possible by prioritizing energy availability over climate ideology.
Guterres’ remedy to the so-called “climate crisis,” which involves abandoning fossil fuels, “would cost quadrillions of dollars, spike electricity costs, and spread poverty,” Lomborg writes.