When coroners fill out death certificates, there are many causes for a person’s demise that all of us are far too aware of. Heart disease, cancer, and gunshot wounds leave little doubt as to what is responsible for death. Now, many climate activists are seriously suggesting that climate change brought on by mankind’s emissions of fossil fuels start being mentioned as a cause of death, or at least be listed as a contributing factor.
A recent article by Steve Goreham, which appeared in the Washington Examiner, makes the point that the “climate deaths” trope may be the next propaganda tool in the climate hysteria movement’s arsenal.
According to Goreham, climate alarmists “appear to believe that if people see a daily announcement of climate deaths, they will be more inclined to accept climate change policies.”
Those of us of a certain age can remember CBS’s Walter Cronkite giving a nightly count of Vietnam War deaths on the news. The nightly death count is sited by many as a main reason Americans became disenchanted with the war in Vietnam. Are climate alarmists seriously contending that such a nightly announcement could be made with climate change standing in for war?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled the type of propaganda climate alarmists hope for in her address to COP28 in December.
“We are seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate,” Clinton said. “And by far the biggest killer is extreme heat.”
Back around the turn of the century, reasonable climate scientists used to be fairly reserved when attributing individual weather events to climate change, claiming it was a future problem that couldn’t in any true sense be connected with current weather conditions.
But predictions of possible climate chaos decades and centuries in the future don’t move policy, climate alarmists found out. That’s when the field of “attribution science” first reared its ugly head.
Attribution science first began to gain serious traction in the last decade when a 2018 article in the scientific journal Nature suggested that current weather events could be reasonably attributed to climate change.
“We have more confidence scientifically than in the past,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate researcher at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. “I feel more brave personally to say to people, ‘How was it in the past and how has it changed now?’ There are cases — especially with extreme heat and drought and fires — where the logic in everyone’s mind is correct: It’s connected to climate change.”
Le Quéré’s self-described bravery aside, is it realistic to directly attribute deaths to climate change?
The UN has already started counting so-called climate related deaths, with the World Meteorological Organization (WNO) estimating that since the year 2000, weather “turbo-charged by man-made global warming” has taken more than two million lives and cost the global community more than $4.3 trillion.
What constitutes a “climate related death” varies depending upon whom you ask. While malaria and malnutrition have plagued mankind for millennia, some claim that these deaths are “preventable” and should be used in order to further the narrative that climate change is here and now and is deadly.
“After millions of preventable deaths, climate change must be treated like a health emergency,” said Dr. Colin J. Carlson of Georgetown University. Carlson attributes most of these “climate related deaths” on malnutrition and malaria but also claims that even deaths from cardiovascular disease should be attributed to climate change.
As Goreham points out, “If death from cardiovascular disease can be counted as a climate death, almost any death can be counted.”
Alarmist propaganda aside, deaths from extreme weather events are actually way down from earlier in the 20th century, from a high of about 500,000 globally in the 1920s. From the 1990s onward, those deaths average less than 50,000 annually. Given that fact, isn’t it reasonable to say that global warming actually saves hundreds of thousands of lives every year?
It doesn’t matter what facts you put in front of the climate-alarmist community; the narrative always comes first. Climate change kills, they tell us, and any facts to the contrary are simply “denialist” propaganda.
