Hot Facts about Heat – Watts Up With That?

Follow-up Essay by Kip Hansen — 28 June 2024 — 900 words

My recent essay titled “Why Do They Lie About Extreme Temperature Deaths?” highlighted the outright falsehoods being repeated in the mainstream media about the dangers of extreme temperatures, heat and cold, prompted and encouraged by the major Climate Crisis Propaganda cabals:  Covering Climate Now and Inside Climate News.  Of course, it is worse than that, in the United States, even federal governmental agencies, under the guise of informing the public, do the same. 

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, offers  series of Climate Change Indicators.   Why the EPA has a huge section on climate change is a mystery to me, other than rank agenda-pushing, but there you have it: the massive governmental Enviro-Climatism Agenda writ large. On the page “Climate Change Indicators: Heat-Related Deaths”, the EPA informs us, in the Background section of the page: 

“Heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States”

This is simply a “talking point” and is not true, not even according to EPA’s own Climate Change Indicators.

We at WUWT (and the dozens of other kindred spirits in the blogosphere) are not alone in this fight against propaganda surrounding the Climate Change issue.  Allies are not restricted to those who normally cover climate, weather and related science news beats.

Here I call your attention to a helpful and very well-written editorial at Issues & Insights, “Heat Wave Sets Off New Round Of ‘Climate Crisis’ Lies” by the I & I Editorial Board on June 19, 2024.  These folks are the professionals: “Issues & Insights is run by seasoned journalists who were behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning IBD Editorials [Investor’s Business Daily] page (before it was summarily shut down).”  It was brought to my attention via the “WUWT Tips and Notes” page by John Merline  at I&I (a sample of his past writing here).  This editorial is well worth reading and has some very clear and useful graphics.  There is a companion piece written a few days later “Google Doesn’t Want You To Know The Truth About Heat Waves And ‘Climate Change’”, which you should read as well.

Their lede:  “There’s a summer heat wave going on, which gives journalists the opportunity to fill up their stories with climate change boilerplate. It no longer matters whether any of it is true. Just the opposite, in fact. If you point out the truth, you’re accused of being a denier.”

The web page has a little note at the top:  “Follow up: As we predicted, Google is blocking its ads from appearing on this page because, according to Google, it contains “unreliable and harmful claims.””

I&I offer this graphic:

This shows annual Deaths per Million with data from the EPA’s to Climate Change Indicator pages, Heat-Related Deaths and Cold-Related Deaths.

[Aside:  There is a funny and on-going story about those two pages, which I will mention in the Author’s Comment section following the essay.)

The EPA’s data, derived from the CDC database of death certificates, clearly shows that, in the United States, when counting data as entered into Death Certificates (see my essay on that here), in the most recent years shown, that cold kills people at a rate of 5 to 6 per million every year, which heat kills at the rate of between 2 and 3 per million.  (In the “funny story” bit, EPA has updated heat deaths to “almost 5” in 2022 but has neglected to update cold deaths since 2016.)  And, as is the case all over the intellectual map, EPA still insists that “Heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States” contrary to its own published data. 

It is oddly comforting to find that the Climate Realist viewpoint has allies in the business world, who are not cowed by the yammering propagandists and their enforcers.

What do you think this “Heat Kills More” talking point is based on?

I suspect that it is an agenda-serving comparison between Heat Related Deaths and deaths from tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, lightening, cold, winter, wind and  ‘rip currents’ only according to the false NOAA NWS graphic I have discussed so many times.

The real data on relative Heat and Cold Related Deaths worldwide are covered in “Why Do They Lie About Extreme Temperature Deaths?” which includes links to the definitive studies at the end.

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Author’s Comment:

The funny bit:  As I was working on this, I was making my own, more complete version of the Heat/Cold Death rates graphic from I&I (which I’ll use in a second follow-up next week).  As I labored on, through the morning, checking back to the EPA Climate Indicator pages repeatedly to pick up details, EPA updated the Heat-Related Deaths page adding several more years of (up-trending, of course) data:

I have been communicating with the Climate Indicators team at EPA about this:  they up-dated the Heat-Related, but not the Cold-Related, Deaths page.  And yes, golly, it does suspiciously look like they have managed to change down-trending data into up-trending data. Not jumping to conclusions yet.  I’ll let readers know when I have sorted it out with EPA.

I appreciate John Merline at I&I for looping us in on their “climate lies” work.

Thanks for reading.

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