Tag: Deaths

Lowest Six-Month Human Death Toll From Bad Weather Since Records Began

Something rather odd is happening to the weather. Millions, nay billions, are on the move fleeing droughts, floods, wildfires, runaway temperatures, rising sea levels (see any mainstream media page climate page to fill in rest of sentence). Armageddon will only be put on pause when hard-Left elites take control of the climate and corral us all into their fantasy world of Net Zero. But hold on a minute – news just in. The first half of 2025 has seen the smallest number of deaths related to extreme weather since records began.

A desolate landscape depicting ruined buildings and debris under dark, rain-filled clouds, creating a somber and atmospheric scene.

From The Daily Sceptic

by Chris Morrison

Aerial view of a devastated urban area with demolished buildings and debris, illustrating the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Something rather odd is happening to the weather. Millions, nay billions, are on the move fleeing droughts, floods, wildfires, runaway temperatures, rising sea levels (see any mainstream media page climate page to fill in rest of sentence). Armageddon will only be put on pause when hard-Left elites take control of the climate and corral us all into their fantasy world of Net Zero. But hold on a minute – news just in. The first half of 2025 has seen the smallest number of deaths related to extreme weather since records began. And more weird weather news – despite boiling seas, all four northern hemisphere ocean basins in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific are running below average on accumulated cyclone energy. The North Atlantic has seen very little activity with the ACE energy measurement from January 1st to July 21st running at only 41% of the 1991-2020 average.

The cyclone news is natural variation of course, but don’t let on to climate fanatics. The news on deaths from extreme weather is not. It is a long-term trend that has seen weather fatalities plunge by over 99% during the last 100 years. As hydrocarbon use pulls billions out of grinding poverty, so fortunate humans can use the extra wealth to protect themselves against all that Nature throws at life on Earth.

Bar graph showing deaths from weather and climate-related disasters from 2000 to 2025, with the lowest recorded deaths in 2025.

Roger Pielke Jnr has compiled the weather and climate related deaths over the last 25 years and his graph above shows that just 2,200 deaths from a world population of over 8 billion can be attributed to the weather in the first six months of the year. Past number spikes are invariably caused by one-off disasters such as the 138,00 fatalities attributed to Cyclone Nargis in the Indian Ocean during 2008. Pielke concludes that it is likely that the first half of 2025 has seen the fewest deaths related to extreme weather of any half year “in recorded history”.

The slump in the extreme weather death in the hydrocarbon age is truly astonishing as the graph below illustrates.

Bar graph depicting estimated deaths related to weather and climate extremes from the 1870s to the 2020s, with a significant decline in deaths over the decades.

“In contrast to apocalyptic sermons, at no point in human history have humans had less risk of death related to extreme weather and climate”, concludes Pielke. 

In fact, the risks of extreme weather are the number one weapon used by activists to scare populations into accepting Net Zero. Just look at the twaddle below recently published by the part Green Blob-funded Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), or perhaps that should be the Union of Scientists you should be Concerned About.

Graphic displaying extreme weather alerts affecting 169,899,454 people in the United States, with the title 'DANGER SEASON 2025'.

Certainly this does not appear to be a Union that cares much for unbiased science and the rigours of the scientific process. Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order telling all federal scientists to stop pissing about with propaganda piffle and reconnect with Popperian scientific principles. It was a tricky order to complain about since it laid down perfectly reasonable rules and procedures for employees paid by the taxpayer. “It all sounds very non-objectional, but it’s extremely dangerous in its details and subtext”, observed Gretchen Goldman, President of the UCS. Danger is a word much favoured by these Armageddonites – it seems that 169 million Americans are in extreme danger this summer, particularly if they don’t use sunscreen lotion.

In fact, desperation stalks the halls of activism, politics, media and science. Forty years of hysterical climate alarms, predicated on the unproven opinion that humans control the climate by adding the trace gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is coming to an end. Opinion polls asking unloaded questions are starting to show that interest in climate cry-baby catastrophising is waning. The Swedish Doom Goblin has moved onto more fashionable causes. Promised tipping points don’t tip, the corals don’t disappear – ditto the polar bears – and the ocean currents don’t stop. Eventually, the vox populi shrugs – nice try, but no cigar. The climate, in fact, is in a relatively benign phase. A little (largely natural) extra warmth and a CO₂ top-up from previously denuded levels has greened the planet, and crop yields have soared, leading to reduced levels of global famine. Despite all the Net Zero blather and unworkable mandates, hydrocarbon use across the world still provides over 80% of total energy – a prospect that holds out hope for further action against grinding poverty in the developing world.

For decades, elites have managed to shut down scientific debate by dishonestly claiming the science is somehow ‘settled’. As a result, most climate activists have lost the ability to debate the underlying science backing Net Zero. When public scientific discussion is encouraged on broadcast forums such as Britain’s Talk and GB News, the fact that almost the only person willing to debate against known critics is the climate comedy turn Jim Dale says it all.

The inability to stand up arguments in the face of increasing public scepticism will count heavily against the activists when the settled science barrier crumbles away. Needless to say, it started to fall some time ago on social media. On genuine free speech platforms such as X, the activists have long fled to the safer spaces offered by echo chambers such as Bluesky. Hiding behind the settled science comfort zone and backed by the pseudoscience offered by weather attribution guesses and computer model predictions, the activists are woefully unprepared to engage in genuine scientific discussion about the little understood complexities of the atmosphere and climate. The notorious letter published by the Guardian in 2018, when a group of activists including BBC regular Professor Mark Maslin said they would no longer “lend their credibility” in debating human-caused climate change, was a notable low point in the decades-long campaign to quash dissent.

Put simply, the activists are terrified to enter into genuine dialogue. The more intelligent ones are probably aware that if they reveal an obvious inability to counter all the alternative views around natural climate variation, this will greatly reduce public support for the Net Zero project. They are aware that CO2 levels have been much higher in the past without a provable link to runaway temperatures. Propping up this hard-Left controlling political fantasy with an unproven claim that humans somehow control the climate by releasing a trace gas into the complex atmosphere will likely be seen by future historians as the centrepiece of one of the greatest science swindles of all time.

And of course the dosh is starting to dry up. Some of the most fanatical Net Zero cash incontinent countries are running out of money, or rather other people’s money that they are borrowing to destroy the financial prospects of future generations. In the United States, the entire Net Zero scam is dead in the water with President Trump taking all the toys away. Delegates to the upcoming COP 30 Belem meeting in Brazil, travelling through the Amazon on the special road carved out of the rain forest to speed their virtuous journeys, will find the magic money tree has also been chopped down. There will be no more financial freebies from the US, which accounts for almost 60% of the GDP of the G7 group of guilt-tripped industrialised countries. China is not interested in handing out no-strings attached cash and India only plays lip service to the aims of Net Zero. Grifting nations likely to be disappointed include all those Pacific Islands growing in size but apparently destined to soon disappear beneath the waves. Bad news also for all those political chancers inventing nonsense tales for gullible woke westerners of climate justice and colonial climate oppression.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

30C At Rothamsted

More on that “killer heatwave”:
I now have the temperature data from the Met Office for Rothamsted for last weekend. They say it peaked at 30.0C.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

More on that “killer heatwave”:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/21/heatwave-expected-deaths-england-and-wales-analysis?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-5

I now have the temperature data from the Met Office for Rothamsted for last weekend. They say it peaked at 30.0C.

Rothamsted is one of the few high quality Class 1 sites, situated just north of London in the Hertfordshire countryside. It therefore offers reliable temperature measurements, which are pretty representative of that part of England. Obviously London is likely to have higher temperatures because of UHI, and no doubt higher temperatures may appear in counties further south, such as Kent and Sussex.

But equally, most of England and Wales will normally be cooler than Rothamsted.

With these provisos over (!), the record for Rothamsted shows clearly that 30C is not an unusually high temperature there.

Claims of 600 dead are no more than dishonest scaremongering.

Heatwaves and Excess Deaths–The Facts

Further to the Guardian’s absurd claim that “last week’s heatwave killed 600 people”, it is worth going back to the ONS analysis carried out after the 2022 heatwaves

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Further to the Guardian’s absurd claim that “last week’s heatwave killed 600 people”, it is worth going back to the ONS analysis carried out after the 2022 heatwaves:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/excessmortalityduringheatperiods/englandandwales1juneto31august2022

In short, deaths spiked during the hot days, but quickly fell back below average. Over the period as a whole, the number of deaths was no higher than  normal.

People may have died a few days earlier than they would otherwise. But the heat did not kill them at all – they were dying anyway, and the heat was no more than a trigger, just as a bit of cold or wet weather could have been.

Because the ONS study was carried out before all summer deaths had been registered, they included this table:

Although the number of deaths in 2022 appears to be slightly higher than usual, what is noticeable is that the hot summer of 2018 recorded one of the lowest totals of the decade. In contrast, 2016, a much cooler summer, recorded the highest number of deaths until 2021.

Clearly then, there is no correlation between heat and increased deaths.

We need, of course, to be wary of comparing post pandemic death rates with those before – we do know that there were large numbers of excess deaths throughout 2022, for reasons never explained.

“Current heatwave ‘likely to kill almost 600 people in England and Wales”- Latest Guardian Fake News

This shameful article surely marks a new low for the wretched Guardian, and its author, Damian Carrington:

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

This shameful article surely marks a new low for the wretched Guardian, and its author, Damian Carrington:

Almost 600 people are expected to die early in the heatwave roasting England and Wales, a rapid analysis has found.

The surge in deaths would not be occurring without human-caused global heating, the scientists said, with temperatures boosted by 2C-4C by the pollution from fossil fuels.

More than 10,000 people died before their time in summer heatwaves between 2020 and 2024, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). The government’s preparations to protect people from the escalating impacts of the climate crisis were condemned as “inadequate, piecemeal and disjointed” by official advisers in April.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/21/heatwave-expected-deaths-england-and-wales-analysis?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-5

You don’t even have to read it to realise what a load of drivel it is. And they cannot even wait a week or two to get the actual mortality data.

It is hard to know where to start with the pack of lies.

For a start, temperatures in the last few days have not been unusually high. CET maxed out at 28.5C, a level reached in most of the years on record.

The allegation that temperatures [were] boosted by 2C-4C by the pollution from fossil fuels is clearly fake.

As for the claim that 600 will die as a result, if true the same must apply to every summer in Britain. Yet every single year, the death rate in summer is the lowest of every season.

The Guardian links to a report by Swiss Re:

In turn, Swiss Re link to the well-known Lancet study to justify their propaganda:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext

However, neither Swiss Re nor the Guardian mention the fact that, according to the Lancet, excess deaths from cold far exceed those from heat:

In particular, deaths from cold in Western Europe run at four times the rate of heat ones.

And as I always like to point out, if people are dropping like flies in summer, what is killing far greater numbers in spring and autumn? Extreme mildness?

Swiss Re also provide a link to the EPA’s Heat Wave index, in an attempt to prove their argument that extreme heat is killing people. Unfortunately, they obviously did not bother to fully read the EPA analysis, which shows that heatwaves in the US were much more severe at times in the past. Nor are recent heatwaves in any way exceptional

Quite insultingly the Guardian quotes Dr Lorna Powell, an NHS urgent care doctor in east London, as saying “We must stop burning coal, oil and gas if we are to stabilise our climate and prevent scores of preventable health issues, hospital visits and deaths”

Maybe this silly woman might like to justify the deaths of tens of thousands in winter, when people will no longer be able to heat their homes with cheap gas.

Why the Spike in Pacific Gray Whales Deaths is All Natural

The Eschrichtius robustus, or gray whale, is a baleen whale named for the gray and white patches on its dark skin. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, whalers drove the gray whale to near extinction for its oil. Gray whales stand out from their heart-shaped blow in calm surface conditions. Scientists can identify each one based on their scars, patches, and dorsal surfaces. These markings come from the parasites that attach to them and leave in cold feeding grounds.

From Jim Steele

Gray whales are remarkably resilient animals. Eastern Pacific whales make a round-trip of 10,000 miles between their warm winter waters around Baja California to give birth, then to feed in the cold Bering and Chukchi Seas from May thru September, gaining enough energy that must sustain them for the rest of the year. Unlike other whales, gray whales have specialized on suctioning the sea floor for food, preferring sand dwelling amphipods.

While experts suggest the optimal whale population has historically been between 18,000 and 22,000 individuals, their coastal migrations made them easy targets for whalers in the late 1800s, reducing their population to somewhere between just 250 and 5000 individuals. After receiving protection by the International Whaling Commission in 1947, they quickly rebounded and by 1995 were removed from US Endangered Species List. Despite climate change, by 2018 gray whale numbers increased to 27,000+ and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature considered them a species of Least Concern.

Why such increases in whale abundances? The lack of Bering Sea ice between 2012 and 2018 had allowed more photosynthesis. Stanford researchers reported a 57% increase in phytoplankton in the past 2 decades. That increased the food that sank to feed organisms on the sea floor (the benthos). In addition, less sea ice and a longer open-water season, enabled gray whales to spend more time feeding in the Chukchi and Bering Sea, gaining the energy needed for their 7-8 month fast, while enduring migration and reproduction.

Nonetheless, whenever gray whales approached peak abundances that may have exceeded their carrying capacity, they experienced sudden population crashes in 1987–1989, 1999–2000 and 2019–202 that NOAA has called an “Unusual Mortality Event” (illustration C). All the evidence suggests gray whales experience the classic ecological “boom and bust” dynamics (exemplified by the relationship between the lynx and snowshoe hare that’s taught in every 8th grade science class- middle illustration). The whales’ main prey (ampeliscid amphipods) can only feed a limited number of whales. As the whale populations increased beyond that level, they “eat themselves out of house and home”, the prey species crashes followed by whale numbers quickly crashing.

To counter the acknowledged positive effects of global warming, a recent paper (Stewart 2023) was compelled to push an unsupported narrative that global warming, not abundant whales, had reduced the ampeliscid amphipod prey. This led to numerous click-bait media headlines spreading misinformation about the gray whale deaths.

The bottom graphic highlights (red circles) the 2 main feeding hotspots that almost all gray whales now depend on. It is interesting to note that during the low sea levels of the last ice age, those hotspots were high and dry and relegated to Arctic tundra just 8-10,000 years ago. As sea levels rose, these hotspots became shallow seas with depths mostly less that 50 meters. It is that shallowness that allows more food to sink from the surface to the benthos before bacteria can decompose it, thus nurturing an abundance of sea floor organisms. In addition, the nourishment carried by the 3 major northbound currents further maintains these hotspots.

Stewart (2023) acknowledged that the loss of Bering Sea ice has perhaps enabled gray whales populations to grow beyond their pre-whaling maximums. However, apparently to grift the government climate crisis funding, he also offered a very contradictory narrative blaming global warming and less ice for reducing the whales’ prey. Despite research showing that less ice increased phytoplankton by 57% in 2 decades, Stewart reiterated to numerous media outlets that “With less ice, you get less algae, which is worse for the gray whale prey”.

Stewart (2023) was alluding to an unproven hypothesis, previously pushed by his co-author, that global warming reduces sea-ice-algae, algae that only grows on the bottom of sea ice. Climate alarmists have pushed the unsupported narrative for a decade that sea-ice-algae provides the critical food for the benthos food web. Click-bait media like ScienceNews headlined “Sea ice algae drive the Arctic food web”. What those grifters fail to share with the public is sea-ice-algae only contributes on average a meager 3% of all Arctic production, compared to the 97% provided by increasing phytoplankton where sea ice melts.

Furthermore, sea-ice-algae requires sunlight, so thick multi-year sea ice reduces photosynthesis. Due to the loss of multi-year ice, more transparent first year ice has nearly doubled since 1980, which increases sea-ice-algae production.

Finally, in their desperate attempt to link whale deaths to a climate crisis, Stewart (2023) cherry-picked the fact that less ice can change the speed of ocean currents and erode the sediments that large amphipods prefer. However, Stewart does not share that abundant amphipods prevent such erosion. Ampeliscid amphipods build mucus-lined tubes in the sand. As their density increases, individual tubes coalesce to form a mat that prevent currents from eroding away the sediments and thus preserving a stable environment for more abundant amphipods.

Yet again, it is the growing population of hungry gray whales that bulldoze those mats, reducing amphipod abundance, enhancing a classic natural boom and bust dynamic!

No, CNN, Climate Isn’t the Cause of Excess Deaths in Europe

CNN interview is titled “W.H.O.: 1.4 million European deaths can be blamed on climate change, environment” features a conversation with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Hans Kluge.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A recent video news story on CNN claims that climate related deaths in Europe are 1.4 million per year. This is false. Climate change occurs on timescales longer than one year and unless a long-term trend is evident directly showing a causal connection between changes and deaths, one can’t attribute any percentage of the deaths in any one year to climate change. Further, data shows that deaths related to severe weather events and temperature related deaths both have declined significantly over recent decades globally, pollution is also trending down.

CNN interview is titled “W.H.O.: 1.4 million European deaths can be blamed on climate change, environment” features a conversation with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Hans Kluge.

Kluge blames 1.4 million deaths per year in Europe directly on climate change and other environmental factors. He cites no data or evidence to back up his claim, because the data that exists refutes it. The interview not coincidentally coincides with The WHO conference during which the agency is calling for immediate action on climate change to prevent climate related deaths.

It is important to realize that climate change acts on long time scales. As described on Climate at a Glance: Weather vs. Climate, the World Meteorological Organization defines 30 years as the minimum for any climate related data. For deaths to be blamed on climate change one would have to see a consistent trend in deaths corresponding to changes in climate. There is no such trend. Severe weather events and sometimes extreme temperatures (more often cold than hot), experienced around the world on a day-to-day basis, can result in deaths, but those trends have declined steeply during the recent period of modest warming. Climate change can’t be causing more deaths when deaths related to weather are declining.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11, Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate, provides conclusions, summarized in Figure 1, illustrating the fact that severe weather events cannot be detected as increasing nor attributed to human caused climate change:

No evidence exists that any specific weather event is directly driven or worsening by so-called man-made climate change from increased carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Even the IPCC’s summary of the state of global climate science makes no such attribution.

Indeed, human mortality attributable to weather related disasters, including floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures has declined by more than 99 percent over the last 100 years. In the 1920s, death related to weather-related disasters averaged approximately 485,000 each year. By 2020 the average number of deaths attributable to extreme weather events had fallen 7,790. See Figure 2, below.

Figure 2. 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. Bjorn Lomborg, data from International Disaster Database published in ScienceDirect.

In addition to severe weather events, mortality can also be attributed to extremes of temperature. Climate change is often cited as being the reason for increasing temperatures and therefore increased heat related deaths. But the opposite is actually true. This was confirmed by a study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in 2021. The study reports that the number of deaths associated with cold temperatures decreased by more than double the amount that deaths tied to hotter temperatures increased over the 20-year period of the study. But, as seen in figure 3 below the number of deaths in Europe due to cold outnumber the number of deaths due to heat by a factor of three to one.

Figure 3. Total global cold related deaths vs. heat related deaths by region from 2000 to 2019. Data source: Monash University press release.

In part as a result the decline in cold temperatures, over the period of the study, temperature-related mortality has declined significantly, with a total of 166,000 fewer deaths tied to non-optimal temperatures.

This study confirms what research previously published in The Lancet, the Southern Medical Journal, and the Centers for Disease Control, and National Health Statistics Reports has consistently shown that cold is the biggest temperature related killer, not heat.

This contrary data flies in the face of the claims made on CNN by the WHO official Kluge.

But there’s more. In addition to blaming climate, WHO blames air pollution in Europe as a cause of death in the interview. But the data doesn’t even support that claim. Examining real world air pollution data from the European Environmental Agency, seen in Figure 4 below, show a sharp downtrend since 1990 on all types of air pollution in the 27 country European Union.

Figure 4. data from 27 nation EU emission inventory report 1990-2021 under the UNECE Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, published July 3, 2023.

As with climate change, air pollution can’t be causing an increase in the number of deaths in Europe now than in the past because there is less pollution.

The bottom line is the claim that climate change is causing millions of Europeans to die each year as CNN and the WHO maintain is not supported in real world data no matter how you look at it. This is a clear-cut case of climate activism trumping truthful reporting and CNN should be ashamed to publish this interview.

If the WHO really wanted to cut 1.4 million excess deaths, instead of calling for action on climate change, they could call on the world to follow their own far more rational and practical advice in their report: “Improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene can save 1.4 million lives per year, says new WHO report.”

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.

He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.

He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.