From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Burn more oil and coal, save lives and never ever apologize

It’s been a hot ten days in Europe and the Blob-Propaganda Machine is running full tilt. A rapid “analysis” invented a number of excess deaths faster than junk science has ever been done before. So, teeth can be gnashed appropriately, never mind about peer-review, who needs that? Thus, extreme heat was said to have killed 2,305 people across 12 cities — 2,305! And with Coupled Voodoo Models we can “show” two thirds of those deaths were because of fossil fuels and “Climate Change^TM“! This study, note, has not even been published, it can’t be using real data from the event “seven days prior” (June 23 to July 2, 2025) because that won’t be published for weeks or months. It’s all guesstimated from past deaths in other years.

One *handy* thing about rapid analysis like this is that it’s also “too fast” to see if the excess deaths were followed by a lower death rebound, which often happens after heat-waves.  A few hot days in a row generally take those who are about to die in the next six weeks anyway, so after the peak, comes the drop. It’s rather darkly known as harvesting future deaths. Good studies use at least a 21 day lag, but crass publicity-science-stunts don’t even wait 21 days to hit the news stands. Maybe they “guessed” that too in the assumptions? Who can tell? Maybe they’ll add it in and adjust the numbers later — after the media hype?

The Grantham Institute at least has a PDF paper out for a UK heat wave they forecast would kill 570 people last month. (And at least that was called a “forecast” so everyone knew they were just guessing).

Of course, if the sole purpose of junk-science-academia is to promote government tax and spending plans, then we wouldn’t want to do a careful analysis and find that 1,500 people weren’t really excess deaths we could blame on fossil fuel induced warming, or that by the same reasoning probably 15,000 Europeans were saved last winter. Shh!

The complete sell out of university and legacy-media is there for all to see. All it takes is for one professor, or one journalist to do five minutes of research (or a read a blogger for free) and show what we all know — that if global warming kills anyone in summer, by the same reasoning it would save ten every winter. Around the world Global warming saves 166,000 lives a year. (Zhao et al).  Where are the headlines for the people the Greens don’t care if they kill in winter each year?

Climate Change saves ten times as many lives every winter

It’s rare in medical science to have unequivocal research. But this is one of those moments. Studies of 74 million people show the same pattern everywhere; in terms of the climate nothing is more deadly to humans than winter. (See Gasparrini et al).  For every summer heat wave death, at least 6, 10 or even 20 people die due to cold weather in winter. The largest study across 13 countries found cold deaths were twenty times more common than heat deaths. Look at the scary blue bars below, it’s moderate cold coming to get you!

In richer European cities, with gas stoves and coal fired power stations *only* ten times as many people will die of the cold. (Mazzelot et al)  Even in warm sunny Brisbane, Australia, six times as many people die in mild cold weather as in the heat of summer.  (Cheng et al).

The Lancet was so desperate to whip up alarm, they stooped to stretching half the axis to make the pitiful few heat deaths look worse.

Remember this graph? The one on the left made it through peer-review and expanded deaths on the “warm” side. The graph on the right is the real proportion of cold deaths to warm ones.  And the Lancet published the big 74 million deaths study in 2015. They knew. They knew!

In reality, man-made climate change probably killed no one, but fossil fuels made life possible for 500 million people in Europe all year round. The icing on the cake of civilization is that airconditioners save 20,000 lives in USA each year (as long as you can afford to run them). As it got hotter in Spain last century, less people died. Thank air conditioning and electricity.

Related posts

• Forget extreme temperatures: Nothing kills as many people as moderate cold
• Save lives, give us global warming: Even in cities, cold kills ten times as many people —
• As it got hotter in Spain, less people died. Thank air conditioning and electricity.
• 7,000 excess winter deaths in Australia and 1,500 in New Zealand each year
• Despite record heat, six times as many people die of cold in Australia not heat
• Airconditioners save 20,000 lives in USA each year
• The Lancet stretches half the axis and then heat deaths look worse…

The benefits we can derive,
From warming, helps keep us alive,
While our true foe is cold,
Killing both young and old,
Who with warming would otherwise thrive.

–  Ruairi

REFERENCES

The World Weather Attribution study (unpublished) … ?

Grantham Institute: Konstantinoudis, G., Mistry, M., and Gasparrini. (2025). Real-time forecast of heat-related excess mortality during June 2025 heatwave.

Cheng et al (2019) Impacts of heat, cold, and temperature variability on mortality in Australia, 2000–2009, Science of The Total Environment,Volume 651, Part 2, 15 February 2019, Pages 2558-2565, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.10.186

Masselot et al (2023) Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study in 854 cities in Europe, The Lancet, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00023-2

Gasparrini et al.  (2015) Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study. The Lancet, May 2015 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)62114-0.  Full PDF.

Zhao, Qi et al. (2021)  Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study, The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 5, Issue 7, e415 – e425, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00081-4