Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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?
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Experts warn that rising global temperatures are bringing hotter summers, more frequent flooding, stronger storms and increasingly devastating wildfires and droughts.
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Overall, mortality from extreme weather disasters has fallen over recent decades.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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There is “no clear trend” when it comes to deaths from natural disasters, Grimm said.
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.
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.
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.
In an article in Politico, titled “EU has no plan for rising climate-related deaths, scientists warn,” writer Rory O’Neill warns that “Europe is increasingly grappling with illness and deaths from extreme weather and the arrival of tropical diseases, but it has no plan to prevent and cope with rising climate-related health problems.” This is false. In fact, evidence from multiple sources suggests that climate and temperature related deaths globally — and in Europe — are in long-term decline, rather than increasing.
In an article in Politico, titled “EU has no plan for rising climate-related deaths, scientists warn,” writer Rory O’Neill warns that “Europe is increasingly grappling with illness and deaths from extreme weather and the arrival of tropical diseases, but it has no plan to prevent and cope with rising climate-related health problems.” This is false. In fact, evidence from multiple sources suggests that climate and temperature related deaths globally — and in Europe — are in long-term decline, rather than increasing.
O’Neill continues:
Scientists fear mosquito-borne diseases dengue and chikungunya that were once confined to tropical regions could become endemic in Europe due to the northward spread of tiger mosquitos, which have made it as far as Brussels and 20 other towns in Belgium.
Meanwhile, heat-related deaths are projected to increase threefold by the end of the century, while deaths caused by extreme events including floods and wildfires are rising.
Perhaps the most glaring lie Politico tells is that deaths from extreme weather events are rising. The truth is just the opposite: climate-related deaths worldwide have declined by more than 98% since the 1920s and are approaching zero. (see Figure 1, below)
Figure 1. The graph demonstrates a vast improvement in human mortality related to all extreme weather events over a 100-year span from 1920 to 2021. Source: Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, data from International Disaster Database published in ScienceDirect.
As shown by Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, and presented at Climate Realism, using long-term data from EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database), the annual number of people dying from weather-related disasters (which are often wrongly co-opted to be climate disasters) such as storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures has plummeted, despite moderate warming over the past century. Lomborg’s analysis exposes the inconvenient truth for climate alarmists: modern societies have become vastly more resilient thanks to technology, infrastructure, emergency response systems, and adaptive capacity.
As Lomborg rightly observes, “[t]he reason we don’t hear about this phenomenal achievement is because it doesn’t fit the narrative of climate alarmism.”
It would, in fact, be surprising if deaths from extreme weather events are rising in Europe, since neither wildfires nor floods are increasing in number or severity – two other assertions made by O’Neill that are simply flat out wrong. Data discussed in Climate at a Glance: Global Wildfires from three independent sources, including from NASA and the European Space Agency, show that globally wildfires have declined over the past few decades. (see Figure 2, below)
Figure 2: Global observations of burned areas and trends show a decline in wildfires from 1998-2015. Source: “NASA detects drop in global fires,” NASA website, June 29, 2017.
The figure above shows no wildfire increase in Europe, a fact confirmed at Climate Realism, here.
Concerning floods, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found no increase in flooding, and, recent European floods have not be historically unusual, as discussed at Climate Realism, here, here, and here.
Politico’s temperature death assertions are misdirection. O’Neill’s claims totally ignore the significant decline in deaths from cold temperatures, a figure that is far larger than the slight increase in deaths from heat. O’Neill cites projections that heat-related deaths in Europe could triple by 2100, based on worst-case model scenarios. But what the Politico article conveniently omits is the fact that cold-related deaths vastly outnumber heat-related deaths, and deaths from cold are on the decline.
A landmark study published in The Lancet analyzed mortality data from 13 countries, concluding that cold kills roughly 20 times more people than heat, as shown in Figure 3 below:
Figure 3. Global heat and cold related deaths graphed by region, from 2000-2019. Graph created by Willis Eschenbach from Monash study data published in The Lancet.
As a result, during the period of modest warming deaths tied to non-optimum temperatures have fallen dramatically, due to the significant decline in deaths due to cold temperatures. Warmer winters are saving far more lives than warmer summers are endangering. Yet this life-saving benefit of a modestly warmer climate is completely ignored in Politico’s climate polemic and are not accounted for in the models O’Neill cites.
As pointed out in another Climate Realism article, even within Europe, the bulk of excess mortality during winter comes from cold, not heat. In fact, energy poverty — driven largely by EU climate policies raising energy prices — leaves many elderly Europeans unable to adequately heat their homes, contributing to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths annually.
Politico attempts to whip up hysteria by claiming that dengue and chikungunya will soon become endemic in Europe due to climate change. The facts tell a very different story.
While the tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) has spread into parts of southern Europe, the number of actual dengue cases remains minuscule. As Politico itself admits (buried mid-article), there were only 304 dengue cases in the EU in 2024 — barely higher than the 275 total cases from the previous 15 years combined.
This is not an epidemic; it is a statistical blip. As Watts Up With That covered here, the principal factors behind the spread of these diseases are not temperature but international travel, global shipping, urbanization, and human settlement patterns — factors which have nothing to do with CO₂ emissions.
Perhaps the most egregious assertion in the article is that “nearly 60 million people suffered from serious food insecurity in Europe in 2021, with 11.9 million of these cases attributable to climate change.” This claim was offered without any causal evidence, because no such evidence or data exists. Rather the claim is based on claims made in climate attribution studies — computer-based guesswork dressed up as empirical science.
Europe remains one of the most food-secure regions on Earth. As Climate Realism has documented dozens of times, crop yields have risen consistently across Europe and the globe, aided by technological advances and CO₂ fertilization — the scientifically validated phenomenon where increased atmospheric CO₂ boosts plant growth and water efficiency.
If anything, climate change has so far been a net benefit to European agriculture. Far from facing existential threats, farmers in Europe are producing record harvests.
The reason why the EU has no “master plan” to combat rising climate deaths is simple: there is no crisis that warranting such a plan. Real-world data shows modern Europe is safer than ever from weather-related threats.
The greatest current public health risk stemming from climate policy isn’t disease — it’s energy poverty. As covered in multiple WUWT posts, Europe’s premature abandonment of fossil fuels has created skyrocketing energy prices, forcing vulnerable populations to choose between heating and eating.
This — not dengue fever — is where actual lives are being lost due to climate zealotry.
As always, Politico’s piece leans heavily on speculative models forecasting dire outcomes by 2100. These models fail empirical validation tests. As Roy Spencer, Ph.D, has thoroughly demonstrated, climate models continue to “run hot,” consistently overshooting actual observed warming. Even The Lancet Planetary Health scenarios that Politico cites rely on extreme worst-case climate models, RCP 8.5, which climate scientists admit is unrealistic and shouldn’t be used to forecast future climate conditions or impacts.
In summary, Politico’s piece is not journalism — it’s an extended press release for climate activists and unelected NGO bureaucrats, which regurgitates flawed model projections, cherry-picks isolated data points, and conveniently ignores real world data to the contrary that shows climate-related mortality has drastically declined during the recent period of modest warming and that adaptive capacity has never been higher.
If it wants to tout itself as a journalistic endeavor, Politico should spend less time amplifying NGO talking points and more time seeking out the truth which is easily discovered through an examination of existing, actual, data.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has signaled a change that could mean the difference between life and death for millions in Africa. Speaking at the “Powering Africa Summit” in Washington, D.C., Wright told leaders of a continent of 1.5 billion people that the Trump administration “has no desire to tell you what to do with your energy system.” This is a departure from the Biden regime, which was aligned with much of the Western climate juggernaut imposing Green New Dealism on developing countries that couldn’t afford it and stood to suffer by it.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has signaled a change that could mean the difference between life and death for millions in Africa. Speaking at the “Powering Africa Summit” in Washington, D.C., Wright told leaders of a continent of 1.5 billion people that the Trump administration “has no desire to tell you what to do with your energy system.” This is a departure from the Biden regime, which was aligned with much of the Western climate juggernaut imposing Green New Dealism on developing countries that couldn’t afford it and stood to suffer by it.
“It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand,” Wright said of the climate evangelism that sought to force others to abandon fossil fuels and adopt largely useless technologies like solar and wind energy.
Africa has languished under paradoxical political and economic pressures: Nations that had built their prosperity on coal, oil and natural gas have spent decades discouraging Africans from tapping their own wealth of fossil fuels. The continent was shackled by a sanctimonious agenda of Western elites who used their financial and geopolitical leverage to press Africans into a campaign against a fabricated climate crisis.
But where is the evidence for this “existential threat”? Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900, hunger rates have plummeted, and climate-related deaths have dropped 98% over the past century. Predictions of global overheating are fearmongering resting on pseudoscience, and purported solutions to prevent catastrophe have no hope of working in any case.
So, these climate policies forced upon Africa aren’t environmentalism; it’s eco-imperialism that perpetuates the poverty and deprivation that only sensible energy policy can reverse. Poor education, ill-health and shortened lives would remain the lot of Africans being promised an ecological nirvana.
“If you trace the evolution of energy on the world or on a country, it is the evolution of human possibility, human opportunity, and the quality of life,” said Wright. Exactly.
Repeating his message at the Houston CERAWeek energy conference, Wright noted that millions of people use solid fuels such as wood, straw and animal dung for cooking and heating.
“The indoor air pollution from this activity alone is estimated to kill over two million people annually,” he said. Where he asked, is the global conference to address this crisis?
Deafening is the silence from the climate establishment, which seeks to block development of natural gas deposits that would eliminate these deaths.
Roughly a billion people worldwide enjoy the comforts of modern life, consuming annually the energy equivalent of 13 barrels of oil per person, Wright said. In Africa, that figure plummets to less than one barrel per capita.
“We wear fancy clothes, mostly made out of hydrocarbons. We travel in motorized transport. The extra lucky of us fly across the world to attend conferences,” he said. Meanwhile, African women walk miles to carry fresh water, wash clothes by hand and forgo education because a lack of electric lighting precludes doing homework at night.
“Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems,” Wright said, “there is simply no physical way that wind, solar, and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.” The same goes for replacing coal and oil.
Africa sits atop a treasure of energy riches. Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and Libya are oil giants; Mozambique and Tanzania boast world-class gas fields; South Africa and Zimbabwe hold coal reserves that could power entire regions. Yet, much of this wealth is locked up by the arrogance of foreign pressure and the timidity of domestic hesitation.
Wright’s endorsement of fossil fuels is a game-changer. He has thrown open a door that was once bolted shut. His rejection of past impositions and embrace of African energy autonomy is an overdue recognition of realism and opportunity.
Abundant energy is the lifeblood of progress. Without it, Africa remains trapped in a pre-industrial limbo, its people condemned to toil in darkness while the West preaches about an imaginary crisis.
The continent’s leaders must seize this moment with unapologetic resolve. Wright’s words are a challenge for Africans to act decisively.
The African Energy Week conference at Cape Town in September, as Wright noted, will be a critical platform to connect with global investors and accelerate development. From oil rigs in the Gulf of Guinea to coal reserves in the Kalahari basin, the time to build is now. Godspeed, Africa.
This commentary was first published at Daily Caller on March 18, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
Numerical weather prediction has improved dramatically over the past decades, providing potent warnings for extreme weather, such as hurricanes.
There are few better examples than the prediction of Hurricane Lee, which will make landfall near the Maine/New Brunswick border late Saturday.
Numerical weather prediction has improved dramatically over the past decades, providing potent warnings for extreme weather, such as hurricanes.
There are few better examples than the prediction of Hurricane Lee, which will make landfall near the Maine/New Brunswick border late Saturday.
The U.S. global model, the GFS, has been spectacularly skillful in predicting this storm, well more than a week ahead.
The latest forecast run shows the storm making landfall near the international border around 5 PM PDT on Sunday. That is a 54-h hour prediction This is so close enough in time…and so consistent with other model forecasts… that you can be assured that this is close to what will happen.
But how did extended forecasts do?
The 72-h prediction is pretty much the same.
The 126 h prediction is nearly identical in position:
The 198 hr (8.25 day) forecast has a strong hurricane in pretty much the same location.
Folks, this is a stunningly good forecast for over a week ahead.
Professor Brian Tang of the University of Albany has a wonderful website that verifies the hurricane track (position) forecasts of major modeling/forecasting systems. The results for Hurricane Lee are shown below for forecasts of 120 hours (5 days) or less.
In general, the track accuracy gets better for shorter forecasts…which makes sense. But let’s compare the American model (blue color, AVNO), the European Center model (red color), and the UKMET office model (green color). The human (official) forecast is shown in black.
Wow. The American model is STUNNINGLY accurate at all projections in time.
It is FAR better than the nominally top two global modeling systems in the world: the European Center and UKMET. The forecast error is under 100 km (60 miles) for all projections shown.
Extraordinary.
The model forecasts are better than the official Hurricane Center forecasts….I suspect that humans are probably hedging their bets with the European Center model solution.😅
This was a truly excellent forecast and not the only success for the American model this season. Hopefully, this extraordinary performance will be persistent for future storms, perhaps reflecting recent improvements in the U.S. global modeling system.
Finally, I should note there are real policy implications of the rapidly advancing weather prediction skill now available to decision-makers. Excellent forecasts can help protect people and economic assets from extreme weather.
Better forecasts are the first line of defense against severe weather.
Better forecasts have great potential for reducing the negative impacts of global warming.
One of the reasons I have spent some time trying to calm down some who are panicking over global warming and extreme weather.
Climate-related deaths are down…and I mean WAY down. Better adaptation and a richer world have contributed, but so have better forecasts.
Importantly, we have only begun taking advantage of improved forecast skill.
The winds on Maui were nearly perfectly predicted on August 7-8 of this year, yet 115 people died and nearly 10 billion dollars in damage was done. We could have easily stopped the carnage, by shutting off the power and effectively evacuating the population.
Most major wildfires are related to strong winds and such winds are often forecast with great skill. Few should be a surprise.
In summary, coastal New England has had nearly a week to prepare for strong winds and heavy precipitation (over northern Maine)– and we can be proud of the technological advances and investments in NOAA and in other government agencies that made such forecasting prowess possible.
The only reason I have brought up this debunking video now is because it indirectly relates to the recent evaluation of IPCC’s AR6 published by the Clintel group.
What do you know about Bjorn Lomborg? More than me I’m guessing. I know he wrote a book that is very popular with climate sceptics and is universally derided by those who are not. I know that debunking Lomborg is now big business, with a turnover likely in excess of the GDP of most South American countries. And I know he is famous for pushing the following graph depicting the fall in climate-related deaths since 1920:
The graph has been referenced more than once here on Cliscep, so it should be of considerable interest and concern to learn that there is also a ‘fact-checking’ video doing the rounds that, according to those who have no time for Lomborg, does a pretty good job of debunking him. As I say, I am no student of Lomborg and so I am in no position to offer a sweeping judgment regarding his position within the climate change debate; I’ll leave that sort of grandstanding to the likes of Wikipedia and DeSmog. But, given the importance and notoriety of his analysis on climate-related deaths, I thought I would at least take the time to view the debunking video and report on just how good a job it does in adding to the legend of the debunked ‘denier’. In so doing I think I learned a thing or two about just how easy it seems for self-satisfaction to overcome the average fact-checker and, more to the point, just how breathtakingly hypocritical they can be.
If you take a stand then you have to stick to it
The first theme of the debunking is based upon the old chestnut of cherry-picking. The problem is that Lomborg conveniently chooses to start his graph at 1920, which happens to be the high point of the EM-DAT dataset upon which the graph is based. Had he commenced from the start of that dataset the graph would have shown a lower climate-related death rate leading up to the 1920 maximum. Indeed, the earliest version of the Lomborg graph did just that. Whilst it still conveyed the message of a significant drop in climate-related deaths up to the present day, it also invited people to ask the rather awkward question, ‘but what is that at the start?’ It seems a bit sly of Lomborg to subsequently drop this inconvenient section of the data, but does pointing this out debunk Lomborg? Certainly not in my book. With or without the pre-1920 data, there is nothing in the graph to suggest an increase in climate-related deaths in recent years. The opposite is still clearly the case, and that has to remain the point. At worst this is an awkward detail for Lomborg and at best it is an irrelevance.
But he’s cherry-picking, the video screams, and that’s exactly the sort of dirty trick that deniers are supposed to pull. Besides which, the video continues, had you not noticed that the fall in deaths only shows up when one looks at global data? If one focusses in on the USA the data definitely shows an increase. So take that Lomborg! In fact, all you have to do is ignore the data from China and the Indian subcontinent and you get a completely different graph showing a marked recent increase.
It turns out that the real sleight of hand pulled by Lomborg wasn’t to cherry-pick from post 1920 data but to then fail to cherry-pick his countries. Sneakily, he insisted on using global statistics to analyse a global phenomenon. He somehow felt that including the most populace and traditionally most vulnerable countries of the world was perfectly okay. The swine!
I just wonder whether the maker of this debunking video has the slightest understanding that you can’t accuse someone of cherry-picking only then to make cherry-picking a central pillar of one’s own debunking argument. It just beggars belief. Can the hypocrisy get any worse? Well let’s look at the second theme of the debunking to see if it can.
And if you take another stand then you have to stick to it also
As if using global statistics to analyse a global issue wasn’t bad enough, Lomborg also chose to define deaths caused by floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures as climate-related. But, according to the debunking video, this was highly misleading since the events that were driving the data were not purely climate events. The video goes through them all and, in every case, is able to point to other factors (usually caused by human conflict or failed policy) that contributed to the death toll. Maybe it would have been more appropriate for Lomborg to point out that deaths resulting from conflict had dropped dramatically since 1920.
As with the accusation of cherry-picking, this is actually a valid point, but it is again overplayed and is groaning with hypocrisy. The reality is that very few supposedly natural disasters can be placed purely in such a category since there are nearly always human-related causations that have to be taken into account. Even the non-climate related disasters that Lomborg references will have been affected in that way. For example, just how many deaths have been caused by an earthquake will be a function of both its strength and just how earthquake-resistant the buildings will have been. And yet we still refer to the deaths as earthquake-related rather than construction-related. And we don’t whine when someone does so but fails to point out the human negligence involved. So saying that Lomborg is misleading his audience is a bit rich, particularly when you take into account that no matter how many human-related causations were behind the death tolls of recent climate events, all the deaths were counted as climate-related. The rule seems to be that when the statistics are dropping it is due to trends in the human-related causations, but when they are rising, it is entirely due to the trends in climate.
So it is fine to pick up Lomborg on this point, but if you do so then you are going to have to stop objecting to those who point out the major role of deforestation in Pakistani flooding, or the role that an epidemic of arson has had on Australian wildfires. Either you take a sophisticated view regarding causation or you don’t. You can’t just switch sophistication on and off just to suit your ‘debunking’ arguments.
And try not to get desperate
The only other supposedly debunking argument I can discern in the video is one taking issue with Lomborg’s claim that the drop in climate-related deaths is entirely positive. Yes, asserts the video, but at what cost? All these protections that have come with greater economic wealth have also resulted in greater financial loss when disaster strikes – just ask the insurance companies. And we all know that money is fungible – every pound spent on sea defences or to rebuild houses is a pound less for cancer research.
‘Specious’ is the word that comes to mind here. ‘Naïve’ is another. You just can’t do that. You can’t play the cancer card unless you can directly relate the two revenue streams and provide statistics that unequivocally show that death rates due to cancer are a lot higher because of the redirection of funding. Sure, cancer deaths are on the increase, but this trend is easily explained in terms of a growing and aging population that is not dying as much from other things that would have traditionally got you before cancer had the chance. The attempt to allude in this way to a hidden climate-related death toll is just downright desperate. The less said about this one, the better.
A call to arms
The only reason I have brought up this debunking video now is because it indirectly relates to the recent evaluation of IPCC’s AR6 published by the Clintel group. In fact, I had not even heard of this video until Dr Ken Rice referenced it in the latest post on his ATTP blog. The article dismisses the Clintel report as a litany of the same old heavily debunked arguments offered by climate ‘deniers’ and, in passing, Dr Rice adds a comment citing the Lomborg graph as another example of the sort of stuff that has already been thoroughly debunked (he actually says of the debunking video, ‘I thought this was a pretty good debunking of Lomborg’s graph’). I know that there are differences of opinion here on Cliscep regarding whether there is still much to be gained by arguing against the science used to justify Net Zero. I say that there is, and I will continue to say this whilst there are still people such as Dr Ken Rice who feel that the video I have just reviewed does a pretty good job of anything.
We are sorry to conclude that the IPCC has done a poor job of assessing the scientific literature. All countries rely on the IPCC reports to support their climate policies and most of the media blindly trust its claims.
* IPCC hides good news about disaster losses and climate-related deaths * IPCC wrongly claimed the estimate of climate sensitivity is above 2.5°C; it is more likely below 2°C * IPCC misleads policy makers by focusing on an implausible worst-case emissions scenario * Errors in the AR6 report are worse than those that led to the IAC Review in 2010 The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920. The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change. These are two important conclusions of the report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, published by the Clintel Foundation. The 180-page report is – as far as we know – the first serious international ‘assessment’ of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, has a huge bias in favour of ‘bad news’ and against ‘good news’, and keeps the good news out of the Summary for Policy Makers. The errors and biases that Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Council (IAC Review) in 2010. Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform or be dismantled.
With the recently published Synthesis Report, the IPCC finished its sixth assessment cycle, consisting of seven reports in total. An international team of scientists from the Clintel network has analysed several claims from the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reports. This has now led to the report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC.
In every chapter the Clintel report documents biases and errors in the IPCC assessment. The errors are worse in the WG2 report than in the WG1 report. Given the political relevance of what is known as “Loss and Damage” (at the yearly COP meetings, countries currently negotiate donations to a Loss and Damage fund) one would expect a thorough review of the relevant literature. However, Clintel shows that the IPCC has totally failed in this respect. For example, a review article on the subject, published in 2020, showed that 52 out of 53 peer reviewed papers dealing with “normalised disaster losses” saw no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. The IPCC highlighted the single paper that claimed an increase in losses. That paper is – unsurprisingly – flawed, but its cherry picking by the IPCC suggests they found its conclusions irresistible.
Climate-related deaths “We are on a highway to climate hell”, said UN-boss Guterres recently. But an in-depth look at the mortality data shows that climate-related deaths are at an all-time low. Well-known economist Bjorn Lomborg published that important information in a 2020 peer-reviewed paper, but the IPCC, again, chose to ignore it. The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change and hype anything bad.
Erasing climate history The Working Group 1 report is not free from bias and misleading conclusions either. The report documents problems in every chapter the Clintel team reviewed. The IPCC has tried to rewrite climate history by erasing the existence of the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (or Holocene Climate Optimum), a warm period between 10,000 and 6000 years ago. It has introduced a new hockey stick graph, which is the result of combining cherry-picked proxies. And it has ignored temperature reconstructions that show more variability in the past, such as the well-documented Little Ice Age.
The IPCC claims there is an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in recent decades. Clintel has shown this claim is flawed, because the IPCC ignores decadal variability in sea level. We also show that its sea-level tool – made available for the first time – shows a mysterious and improbable jump upward in 2020.
Climate sensitivity Canadian economist Ross McKitrick has pointed out that all global climate models used by the IPCC show too much warming in the troposphere, both globally and in the tropics (where models predict a ‘hotspot’). This probably indicates some fundamental problems in the way that these models simulate the climate system.
A ’spectacular’ result of the IPCC AR6 report was the rise of the lower bound for the climate sensitivity likely range from 1.5°C to 2.5°C, therefore claiming that low values for climate sensitivity are now unlikely. The Clintel report shows this rise is not justified. The Clintel report suggests that observed warming and other evidence indicates that the true figure is more likely to be below 2°C than above 2.5°C. This also means that the best estimate for climate sensitivity, which the IPCC says is 3°C, is not justified.
On top of that, the IPCC is ‘addicted’ to its highest emissions scenario, so-called RCP8.5 (or now SSP5-8.5). In recent years, several papers have demonstrated that this scenario is implausible and should not be used for policy purposes. Deep inside the WG1 report, the IPCC acknowledges that this scenario has a ‘low likelihood’ but this very important remark was not highlighted in the Summary for Policymakers, so these important audiences are unaware of the issue. RCP8.5 is the scenario most often referred to in the IPCC report.
IAC Review Back in 2010, errors in the WG2 report of the Fourth Assessment led to the investigation of the IPCC by the U.N. Interacademy Council (IAC). This review recommended, amongst other things, that “[h]aving author teams with diverse viewpoints is the first step toward ensuring that a full range of thoughtful views are considered.” This important recommendation is still being ignored by the IPCC. Worse, we document that Roger Pielke Jr, a scientist with considerable expertise in these areas, is regarded as a kind of ‘Voldemort’ by the IPCC, and they deliberately avoid mentioning his work or even his name. This leads to biased conclusions.
Reform We are sorry to conclude that the IPCC has done a poor job of assessing the scientific literature. All countries rely on the IPCC reports to support their climate policies and most of the media blindly trust its claims. The Clintel report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC shows that this trust is not justified. In our view the IPCC should be reformed, and should include a broader range of views. Inviting scientists with different views, such as Roger Pielke Jr and Ross McKitrick, to participate more actively in the process is a necessary first step. If, for some reason, such inclusion of different views is unacceptable, the IPCC should be dismantled.
Our own conclusions about climate – based on the same underlying literature – are far less bleak. Due to increasing wealth and advancing technology, humanity is largely immune to climate change and can easily cope with it. Global warming is far less dangerous to humanity than the IPCC tells us.
The press release (in English) can be downloaded here in pdf. Dutch press release here. Hungarian press release here.
ABOUT CLINTEL The Climate Intelligence foundation (Clintel) was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. Clintel’s main objective is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change, as well as the effects of climate policy. Clintel published the World Climate Declaration, which has now been signed by more than 1500 scientists and experts. Its central message is “there is no climate emergency”.
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