From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent post at Yale Climate Connections (YCC) titled “Climate change is boosting health care costs” discusses a new online forecasting tool that tells employers extreme weather is getting worse due to climate change and will impact health more and thus raise insurance costs in the future. This is false. Extreme weather is not worsening, and weather and temperature related fatalities are in long term decline. So, it is reasonable to assume injuries are also not rising.

YCC begins by making the false observation that “[c]limate disasters like hurricanes and heat waves can send people to the hospital with problems ranging from injuries to heat stroke,” which “can lead to unexpected medical bills for families – and rising costs for employers who help pay for their employees’ health insurance.”

Since hurricanes, tornados, floods, and heatwaves are natural weather events, not a sign of climate change, there is no such thing as a “climate disaster.” YCC is confusing weather events with climate, which is a statistical observation of a region’s weather pattern over time. Only a long-term trend in worsening extreme weather events could suggest climate change is playing a role in such events, but no such trend is discernable in the data. Otherwise, this statement is not controversial, since any extreme weather event can cause injuries, which can lead to medical bills and higher insurance costs. If that was all this post was about it would hardly be worth critiquing, but YCC continues with some misinformation.

The post is basically an advertisement for an online tool that purports to calculate and predict climate change-caused increases in health care costs, developed by an HR firm called Mercer and the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health. YCC reports that the tool “shows companies how extreme heat, poor air quality, floods, and hurricanes could increase the cost of their employees’ health care over the next decade,” claiming that climate change is worsening those weather conditions and making them more hazardous for people.

This is false. The weather conditions discussed are not getting worse, which means they are not causing more harm to people by that metric.

It is true that health insurance is becoming more expensive, but that is an economic issue, not a climate issue.

We have good data for hurricanes, for example, which show they are not more frequent, nor more extreme, as discussed in dozens of Climate Realism posts. Over the decades, however, more people have moved to locations where hurricanes are relatively common, which leads to building more homes and infrastructure in these hurricane-prone areas. As such, when a hurricane strikes, more people are at risk of injury unless they take precautions, and more buildings are there to be destroyed. After a weather disaster, hospitalizations and lingering health effects do increase, especially for people left to the elements by the disaster. But again, hurricanes are not worsening. So, demographic shifts, not climate, are to blame for higher costs.

Extreme heat is not getting worse, the worst heatwaves on record occurred in the 1930s, (See figure below) and the average temperature anomaly data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network doesn’t show any trend towards worse extremes.

Also, data clearly show that deaths from non-optimum temperatures have declined significantly over the past century amid, and partly due to, modest warming. In fact, cold temperatures kill far more people than hot temperatures each year.

Flooding is likewise not getting worse or more common, despite media claims. Annual costs of flooding have declined over time despite the fact that more infrastructure now exists in flood zones.

Air quality in the United States is the best it has been in more than a hundred years. The EPA reports that “air quality based on concentrations of the common pollutants has improved nationally since 1980.” Air quality is not a climate change issue, unless you link it to wildfires. But wildfires are not getting worse, which means smoke from them isn’t hurting more people either.

On top of all of this, the elephant in the room is the fact that deaths from extreme weather are significantly down, by more than 99 percent, over the past century of climate change. (See figure below) While a dead person does not need health insurance, this fact should also indicate the amount of general injuries and sickness from extreme weather are also declining.

If, however, governments were to ban the use of fossil fuels and their byproducts, one would see a sharp sustained rise in the number of deaths due to weather and malnutrition. This is because fossil fuel-powered infrastructure, and all the products made with them, including medical technologies, are responsible for the improvement in quality of life for people around the world.

YCC should be embarrassed for shilling for this questionable, expensive, program. Just because it has the word “climate” in the title doesn’t mean it is useful to anyone. I suspect that the tool will not be especially accurate when compared to products that take more than the weather into account. Only Mercer and the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health who sell the tool, and the insurance companies who will charge higher premiums blaming climate change rather than their own desire for larger profits and fewer justified payouts, will benefit from this tool. Those trying to purchase health, home, or business insurance will be harmed by higher rates or by being unable to obtain/afford coverage.