From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

Several mainstream media outlets, including The Daily Mail, Economic Times, and The Washington Post released articles referencing a study that claims global warming will result in a decline in exercise and physical activity, leading to a large increase in premature deaths. This is nonsense. This study relies entirely on assumptions that can’t be proven and notably unrealistic computer model scenarios. The media should have shown a little justified skepticism and debunked this research, or ignored it entirely.

The Daily Mail titled their article “Terrifying study predicts exactly how many people will DIE by 2050 if we don’t take urgent action to curb climate change.” The title is obviously hyperbolic, meant to frighten readers instead of informing them, demonstrating right away some problems with how the study was conducted. The Washington Post’s headline was only slightly less alarming, “Inactivity in a warming world could spur hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

According to The Daily Mail, the researchers “set out to understand how rising temperatures will affect physical activity – and as a result, premature deaths,” which calls into question whether this study is a case of finding data to fit a particular conclusion, especially since it depends on computer models the researchers had to program the conditions for.

The study concluded that “by 2050, each additional month with an average temperature above 27.8°C will increase physical inactivity by 1.5 per cent globally,” which “translates to a predicted 470,000 to 700,000 additional premature deaths every year – and up to $3.68 billion in productivity losses.”

The study admits that “global evidence on how sustained warming translates into physical inactivity remains scarce, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.” Yet those low- to middle-income countries are also the ones, generally, that the study says are the most at risk of the impact of heat-induced sedentary lifestyles. So, it seems where data are absent or lacking, the idea is that it is legitimate to use computer model projections to make it up. No need to go about the hard scientific work of actually doing research and collecting real world data. Contrary to the impression given by various media outlets’ headlines, there is no real-world data indicating that people exercise less if temperature rises by one or two degrees.

The countries this study says are most at risk are places where hot temperatures are the norm, especially around the equator, like equatorial nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, and the Pacific. In those countries, often lacking modern energy infrastructure, people have always gone about their business daily working and playing in the hot sun.

One of the many problems here is that climate change theory, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and data agree that the greatest amount of temperature change in a warming world is occurring and will occur at the poles. Countries around the equator experience little if any rise in temperatures and attendant climate impacts. Another problem is that most warming occurs at night—it’s not that daytime highs are becoming much higher, but nighttime lows are less low. That is not something one would expect to have an impact on physical exercise. People don’t typically exercise in the middle of the night, they are sleeping.

Another problem is that this study relies on the infamous and widely discredited SSP5-8.5, which is a very extreme, in fact, likely impossible, scenario compared to real world emission trends. The future warming and associated impacts predicted by SSP5-8.5 are simply not going to come to pass. Using bad science to promote policy is irresponsible. Climate Realism has addressed the failings acknowledged by climate scientists of the 8.5 climate change emissions scenario on a number of occasions.

The study presents layers and layers of computer simulations with assumptions built in every step of the way. As Climate Realism has often shown (here, here, and here, for example) computer models that produce outputs that don’t match real-world observations and data prove nothing other than the fact that the models are inadequate. What real-world data show is that cold kills far more people than heat each year, by a factor of 10 to one, and as the Earth has modestly warmed, deaths tied to non-optimum temperatures have fallen dramatically.

This study is not “terrifying” unless you assume that human beings are one-track, unadaptable automatons doomed to simply sit around and suffer from slightly warmer average temperatures. In reality, when the temperature outside bothers people, they simply move indoors to exercise or shift the times when they exercise, taking their walk or run in the evening or early morning rather than midday.

The study suggests that air conditioning (AC)  contributes to a sedentary “feedback loop,” where more AC makes people lazier. Yet the AC the authors and media outlets complain about is widely acknowledged to save tens of thousands of lives each year, as discussed at Climate Realism, and in studies published by the American Medical Association and the International Energy Agency. Indeed, air conditioning is common in gyms, recreation centers, and other places where people exercise.

The mainstream media, including The Daily Mail and others, are using this study to fearmonger but the connections are so tenuous it’s barely science at all. There are many factors that contribute to sedentary lifestyles, including culture, and there is no reason to think that increasing wealth and access to technology that can provide some respite from the heat won’t help mitigate any dangers from high temperatures.