The New York Times publishes a scary but false narrative of a climate crisis in Europe

 In his The New York Times (“NYT”) article, ‘Climate Change’s Toll in Europe This Summer: Thousands of Extra Deaths’, reporter Raymond Zhong claims that severe heat in Europe this summer killed three times as many people as would have died in a world without human-caused warming. This is false. These are not real additional deaths, but estimates based on a modelling analysis of mortality trends across 854 European cities. Hard data on heat and cold mortality refutes the NYT’s claim.

The NYT reports that 24,400 deaths were attributable to the season’s heat, compared to just 8,000 in a counterfactual world generated by computer model algorithms absent greenhouse gas emissions. To support its claims, the NYT quotes and cites the work of Dr. Malcolm Mistry of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who concludes that Europe’s inability to keep pace with global warming shows a dangerous vulnerability, saying “nearly all heat-related deaths are preventable.” The NYT story further cites earlier research that estimated 61,000 people died during the 2022 summer heat across the continent, half of which it attributed directly to climate change.

The NYT framing is deeply misleading. The first problem is that Mistry’s analysis, by the article’s admission, has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. This means it’s nothing more than an unsubstantiated opinion. Instead, Mistry’s analysis relies on modelled “early estimates” extrapolated from past mortality rates and climate model counterfactuals. That means the 24,400 figure is not based on actual death records, but on computer simulations. As anyone who has followed climate science closely knows, computer models are seriously flawed and can be tuned to yield virtually any desired outcome. Models’ projections are not equivalent to hard observational evidence.

In an attempt to frighten its readers, the NYT also omits crucial context, specifically that while heatwaves can indeed cause tragic deaths, data shows they aren’t becoming more common or severe and far more people die from cold than heat. A comprehensive study in The Lancet covering data from 43 countries found that cold weather kills about ten times more people than hot weather. Europe, with its long, harsh winters, is especially vulnerable to cold-related mortality. This reality undermines the constant focus on summer heat as though it were the primary temperature-related health threat. If policymakers are genuinely concerned with saving lives, reducing cold-weather deaths should be a far higher priority than sensationalising seasonal heatwaves...<<<Read More>>>...