From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

The desperate Lancet search for climate related deaths.

Climate change fuels disasters, but deaths don’t add up

January 21, 2026

Climate change is turbocharging heatwaves, wildfires, floods and tropical storms, but how deadly have extreme weather events become for people in their path?

…

Experts warn that rising global temperatures are bringing hotter summers, more frequent flooding, stronger storms and increasingly devastating wildfires and droughts.

…

Overall, mortality from extreme weather disasters has fallen over recent decades.

…

“It’s not because the events haven’t become more dangerous. It’s because we have become a lot better at coping with them,” Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a climate-health monitoring programme, told AFP.

…

According to the Lancet Countdown, global heat-related mortality reached an estimated 546,000 deaths on average per year between 2012-2021, up 63 percent from 1990-1999.

…

In an annual report last week, Munich Re said deaths from floods, storms, wildfires and earthquakes rose to 17,200 last year, distinctly higher than the 11,000 fatalities recorded in 2024.

…

There is “no clear trend” when it comes to deaths from natural disasters, Grimm said.

…Read more: https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/climate-change-fuels-disasters-but-deaths-dont-add-up/news-story/faf1c7fae883f9017446dacfe88c3c18

This desperate attempt to make heat seem more dangerous is ridiculous. Every nation, even hot countries like India, experience a surge of deaths in Winter.

BBC Ignore Cold-Related Deaths in India

If global warming were to abolish winter, the chances are people would live significantly longer. There is substantial paleo evidence to support my claim. During the PETM, a brief spike of extreme global warming which occurred 57 million years ago, the species which did notably well was monkeys.

CO2 levels during the PETM may have been as high as 2520ppm – 6x higher than today. There is no evidence life suffered during the PETM, quite the opposite. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our mostly fruit eating monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned.

We’re never going to experience that much global warming. For the last 34 million years, powerful geological forcings have kept our world locked in the Late Cenzoic Ice Age.

But millions of people each year choose to abolish winter in their personal lives by relocating somewhere warm.

The reason is simple – as you get older, cold weather causes more health problems. Our monkey ancestors evolved in the extreme tropics, our bodies are built for hot weather, not cold weather. My asthma gets worse in cold weather. Cold weather stresses your body. Cold weather is more likely to kill you. By relocating somewhere warm, you improve your odds of experiencing fewer health problems.

The feeble global warming the world has experienced to date provides nowhere near the health benefit that relocating to warm places like Florida provides. But the evidence is clear that cold weather is bad for our health. Even a few degrees of warming might make a substantial difference. And with polar amplification, the tendency of global warming to manifest more strongly in polar regions, even a few degrees of warming could bring enormous health benefits to high latitude regions.