From The Daily Sceptic

By Will Jones

According to Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 170 Londoners died due to climate change in last week’s heatwave. But it’s just more modelling make believe, says Ross Clark in the Spectator. Here’s an excerpt.

So, 260 Londoners died as a result of last week’s heatwave, of which 170 can be attributed to climate change. So claims Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

There’s just the one problem with this: the researchers haven’t actually counted any deaths at all. The study rushed out this week is nothing more than a piece of modelling, which estimates the number of deaths which might be expected to have been caused by the hot weather, as well as trying to guess how much hotter last week’s weather was than it would have been without man-made climate change. We won’t know whether there really were any excess deaths during the hot weather until the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes its figures in a few weeks’ time.

Why rush out a piece of modelling when we will shortly have some real-world data? The researchers will have to explain their reasoning, but it is as well to note that both the participants in this study have a bit of previous when it comes to modelling alarming numbers of deaths. 

Both were heavily involved in modelling during the Covid pandemic. Many of their predictions were not able to be tested against real data: we will never know, for example, whether 500,000 people really would have died of Covid were it not for social distancing measures – as Imperial College claimed in its paper of March 16th 2020 – because, of course, the government did impose a lockdown.

But towards the end of the crisis, one prediction was able to be tested against reality. On December 11th 2021, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine put out a paper claiming that 24,000 people would die as a result of the Omicron variant of Covid, with daily hospitalisations peaking above those in January 2021, unless the government introduced a return to lockdown -style measures. Perhaps it was counting on ministers taking its advice, but in the event the cabinet resisted – and the prediction was exposed for what it was: a gross exaggeration.

Worth reading in full.