False, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Causing More European Heat Deaths – Watts Up With That?

In his The New York NYT (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 modeling 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 a unsubstantiated opinion. Instead, Mistry’s analysis relies on modeled “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 sensationalizing seasonal heatwaves. (See the Figure 1, below)

Equally important is the fact that a single hot year is a weather anomaly, not an indication of long-term climate change which could only be reflected in a trend of increasing heat waves; a trend which does not exist. The NYT presents a single season’s heat as though it was proof of a runaway climate crisis, yet meteorological records show that past heatwaves have been far more severe. Europe experienced devastating heat in 1540, when temperatures remained scorching for months. Temperatures were significantly above normal, reaching over 40°C (104°F) in many areas, causing widespread crop failures and famine across the continent. Even within the instrument record, the 2003 European heatwave, which killed more than 70,000 people, remains unmatched in severity despite lower atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. As Climate at a Glance points out, U.S. heatwaves were actually worse in the 1930s Dust Bowl era than they are today. Historical variability, not modern emissions alone, is the defining factor in extreme heat events.

Nor does the NYT acknowledge that 1.5°C of warming added to a heatwave peak makes little meaningful difference. If a city reaches 100°F during a heatwave, adding another 2.7°F is not what tips human health outcomes. What matters are pre-existing health conditions, housing quality, and access to cooling and hydration. A marginal increase in temperatures during an already hot event is does not make it less survivable.

This leads to the most glaring omission of all: Europe’s persistent lack of air conditioning.

A previous Climate Realism article points out that fewer than 20 percent of European households have air conditioning, compared with over 90 percent in the United States. In countries like Germany, France, and the UK, air conditioning is not only rare but often discouraged or even restricted by regulations. In Switzerland, homeowners in some cantons face prohibitive rules against installing units. In Spain, energy efficiency mandates restrict cooling use. These policies mean millions of Europeans are far more exposed to heat than their American counterparts. Blaming climate change while ignoring the absence of air conditioning is misleading at best and irresponsible at worst. Figure 2 below, from an article by Fixr titled “The Use of AC Across the World: Putting America’s Dependence Into Perspective,” clearly illustrates the difference between Europe and the rest of the developed world when it comes to air conditioning adoption.

Even Sweden, cited in the NYT as a country where “climate change is now starting to lift summer temperatures into the range where they can harm human health,” could mitigate the risk easily by adopting modern cooling infrastructure. Yet the political climate in much of Europe frames air conditioning as environmentally suspect, leaving populations vulnerable. To claim, as the NYT does, that global warming is to blame while failing to mention the preventable factor of inadequate cooling is to substitute ideology for analysis.

Recent research published by both the International Journal of Biometeorology and the International Energy Agency both confirm that adaptation to heat, such as the wider adoption of air conditioning, saves thousands of lives each year, and could save more lives, for instance in Europe, if governments there didn’t’ discourage or forbid the technology’s adoption. I guess the NYT decided that this good news was not among the “News that’s fit to print,” as its masthead proclaims.

There is also a statistical trick at play. The study estimated that European summers would have been “2.2°C cooler” absent human emissions. But as Climate at a Glance explains, the observed global warming over the past century amounts to about 1.1°C, not 2.2°C. The study doubled the attribution to make its estimates more dramatic, highlighting just how malleable modeling assumptions can be.

Ultimately, the NYT has presented a speculative, model-based estimate as though it were hard evidence of climate catastrophe. The paper neglects the overwhelming toll of cold weather deaths, ignores historical heat extremes worse than today, exaggerates the impact of a degree or two of warming, and sidesteps the obvious reality that inadequate adoption of air conditioning—not carbon dioxide—is what is responsible for European heat related deaths in recent decades, including this year.

The New York Times has misled its readers, offering them a scary but ultimately false narrative of crisis rather than a sober assessment of facts. That may make for click-driving headlines, but it fails as serious journalism. The NYT’s readers deserve better than a warmed-over tale of doom built on simulations, omissions, and half-truths.

Originally posted at Climate Realism

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