People around the planet suffered “an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat this year because of human-caused climate change,” CBS News lamented Friday.
The report cited a joint analysis by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, which claimed that 2024 was “likely” the hottest year ever measured.
“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising,” said Friederike Otto, the leader of World Weather Attribution. “Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people.”
“As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” Otto warned.
The new report does not tell the whole story, however, leaving out what is arguably the most important point.
Conspicuous by its absence in the report were statistics concerning the reduction in days of extreme cold, which is far more dangerous for human beings than extreme heat. It stands to reason that a slightly warming planet will mitigate the effects of extreme cold.
Of those who die from weather-related causes each year, many more people die from cold weather than from heat, and many more die during the winter than during the summer. As average temperatures have increased around the world in recent years, fewer weather-related deaths have been registered, in part because the decrease in deaths from the cold more than offsets any increase in deaths from heat.
According to data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over the past twenty years annual heat-related deaths in the United States have ranged between 0.9 and 3.6 per million people, whereas cold-related deaths have ranged between 3.6 and 5.9 per million people.
The two graphs below, furnished by the EPA using data from the CDC, depict this disparity visually.
Heat- and cold-related deaths in the United States per annum (EPA).
The imbalance between heat-based deaths and cold-based deaths becomes even more apparent when looking at the global scenario, where cold-related deaths dwarf heat-related deaths by nearly ten to one.
The UK-based Lancet medical journal, which regularly laments the dire consequences of climate change, published a study in 2021, which found that 5,083,173 deaths worldwide were associated with “non-optimal temperatures per year,” and then went on to explain that the vast majority of these were “cold-related” rather than “heat-related.”
According to the Lancet, people around the world are 9.4 times more likely to die from the cold than from the heat. While 155,000 people die each year from extremely high temperatures, 4.5 million people die from the cold, the Lancet reported.
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 by more than twice as much (-0.51 percent) during the same period.
Climate alarmists’ fixation with warm weather while ignoring the effects of cold weather suggest an agenda that goes beyond scientific curiosity. An unbiased study would not only make a case for the ill effects of global warming, but also its possible or real benefits.