Man-made climate change was responsible for an additional 41 days of dangerous heat around the world, according to scientists with World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, groups seeking to quantify the effect of “climate change” on “extreme weather events.” The announcement comes on the heels of the Copernicus Climate Change Service reporting with “virtual certainty” that 2024 was going to be the “hottest year on record.”
Goal: Phasing Out Fossil Fuels
The claim was retailed by The Associated Press. That outlet appears to be giving the Danish extremist group KR Foundation its money’s worth by furthering the climate-emergency agenda. (The KR Foundation’s raison d’être is “pushing for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.”)
The source of the recent claim is World Weather Attribution. Founded in 2014, the group’s sole purpose is to attribute current weather to man-made climate change. In the “research,” international volunteer scientists reportedly studied temperature readings from all over the world to temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change.
“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising: Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people,” said Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution.
“As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” she explained.
And it’s primarily the world’s poorest and most vulnerable who are seeing the worst effects of the supposedly record heat. Said Climate Central’s Kristina Dahl:
The poorest, least developed countries on the planet are the places that are experiencing even higher numbers.
Further, some scientists fretted, heat-related deaths were severely underreported, especially in those poor and less-developed nations.
“People don’t have to die in heat waves,” said Otto.
But if we can’t communicate convincingly, “but actually a lot of people are dying,” it’s much harder to raise this awareness. Heat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.
More Fearmongering
“Extreme weather reached dangerous new heights in 2024,” the report noted:
This year’s record-breaking temperatures fueled unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes. This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become with 1.3°C of human-induced warming, and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
The authors also commented on the number of deaths worldwide brought on by the so-called climate crisis:
Climate change contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people and the displacement of millions in 26 weather events we studied in 2024,. These were just a small fraction of the 219 events that met our trigger criteria, used to identify the most impactful weather events. It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands.
Reality Check
Of course it all sounds horrific; as propaganda it’s meant to. But let’s put on the brakes for a moment. “Attribution science” is a 21st-century invention, after all. It started when climate alarmists’ claims of an unlivable environment were being dismissed as a problem for the next century. Disbelief was stifling movement on climate change policy politically.
Therefore, the claim that 3,700 peopled have died and millions have been displaced needs to be taken with a grain of salt, to say the least. While the authors of the report claim they used peer-reviewable methods, the results have yet to be peer-reviewed. Any scientist undertaking such a review would have to face the wrath of the climate-change industry, which controls most scientific funding.
So, the claims in World Weather Attribution’s report are specious at best, and downright fraudulent at worst.
