CNN Falsely Claims That Climate is The Cause For Excess Deaths in Europe

According to a recent video news report on CNN, they falsely claimed that 1.4 million people per year in Europe die as a result of climate change. That is untrue. Climate change occurs over longer periods of time rather than a single year, so it is impossible to attribute any portion of a given year’s death to climate change unless a long-term trend directly demonstrating a causal connection between changes and deaths made obvious. Data also demonstrates a significant global decline in deaths from temperature-related and severe weather-related causes over the past few decades, as well as a downward trend in pollution.

The 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.

According to Kluge, 1.4 million deaths occur in Europe each year that are directly related to environmental factors like climate change. He provides no supporting information because the available information contradicts his claim. The interview and The WHO conference, where the organization is urging swift action on climate change to stop deaths from climate-related causes, coincide not by accident.

The long time horizons on which climate change operates must be understood. The World Meteorological Organization specifies 30 years as the minimum time period for any climate-related data, as stated on Climate at a Glance: Weather vs. Climate. One would need to observe a consistent trend in deaths that corresponded to changes in climate before one could attribute deaths to climate change. Such a trend doesn’t exist. Deaths can result from severe weather events and occasionally extreme temperatures (more frequently cold than hot), which are regularly experienced around the world, but those trends have sharply decreased during the recent period of modest warming. When weather-related deaths are on the decline, climate change cannot be adding to the number of fatalities.

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:

There is no proof that any particular weather event is being caused or made worse by so-called man-made climate change caused by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. No such attribution is made anywhere, not even in the IPCC’s summary of the state of global climate science.

In fact, over the past 100 years, the amount of human mortality directly related to weather-related catastrophes, such as floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures, has decreased by more than 99 percent. About 485,000 people per year on average died in weather-related disasters in the 1920s. By 2020 the average number of deaths attributable to extreme weather events had fallen 7,790. See Figure 2, below.

Extremes of temperature can also be linked to mortality in addition to severe weather events. The rise in temperatures and subsequent rise in heat-related deaths are frequently attributed to climate change. But the reality is quite the opposite. A study published in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet in 2021 supported this. According to the study, over the course of the 20-year study period, the number of deaths attributed to cold temperatures decreased by a factor more than twice as large as the increase in deaths attributed to hotter temperatures. However, as shown in figure 3 below, there are three times as many deaths in Europe from cold-related causes as there are from heat-related causes.

Over the course of the study, temperature-related mortality significantly decreased, with a total of 166,000 fewer deaths attributed to suboptimal temperatures, in part due to the decrease in cold 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 the 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.

Similarly to climate change, there cannot be more deaths in Europe today than there were in the past due to air pollution because there is less pollution. Bottom line: No matter how you look at it, the assertion that climate change is killing millions of Europeans annually, as CNN and the WHO claim, is not supported by actual data.

In this blatant instance, environmental activism has trumped accurate reporting, and CNN should be ashamed for running this interview.

Instead of urging the world to address climate change, the WHO should urge people to heed their own far more sensible and doable recommendations in their report, which reads, “Improving access to water, sanitation, and hygiene can save 1.4 million lives per year.”