National Public Radio (NPR) recently posted an article, “Climate change is deadly. Exactly how deadly?” where they attempt to link deaths due to weather disasters to long-term human-caused climate change. This is false. It is impossible to tie any particular extreme weather event to climate change, and long-term weather patterns have not significantly worsened during the modest warming of the past hundred-plus years. In addition, the fossil fuel restrictions that NPR advocates would be disastrous for resilience to natural weather disasters.
NPR hardly even attempts to justify their connecting disparate weather events to climate change. Rather, they simply assert that any given extreme weather is a “climate-driven disaster” and go no deeper.
“The definitive federal accounting of climate change’s impacts in the United States, the National Climate Assessment (NCA), estimates that upward of 1,300 people die in the U.S. each year due to heat alone and that extreme floods, hurricanes, and wildfires routinely kill hundreds more,” NPR reports. NPR should have have examined the NCA’s accounting skeptically. It’s bizarre and completely untenable to claim that every death from extreme weather is due to climate change, as though people did not die from extreme weather before modern warming trends got rolling. This is obviously absurd, but NPR is utterly unskeptical.
The very first example NPR cites as evidence of the growing threat climate change supposedly poses to human life is the flooding from the summer of 2022 in Eastern Kentucky, where 14 inches of rain fell over 5 days, resulting in between 36 and 45 deaths during flash floods. They assert that the flooding was due to climate change. Data debunks this connection.
As discussed in the Climate Realism post, “Were Kentucky’s Floods Caused By Climate Change?” the record highest single-day precipitation event occurred in 1997. Although average total precipitation has slightly increased since the early 20th century, there is no significant upward trend in extreme precipitation. The latter half of the record from the National Centers for Environmental Information state climate summaries seems to be higher than the former when data is averaged over 5-year periods, but the raw annual values show that among the most extreme instances of rainfall occurred in the 1970s, and 1910s. (See figure below)
Flooding and flash flooding is not unusual for Kentucky, not now and not historically, so it is strange that NPR would imply that it is.
With regards to the claim that excessive heat from climate change is killing people in the United States, this is another poorly evidenced claim. Not only are deaths from heat outnumbered eight times to one by deaths due to cold in the United States, according to a 2021 study published in The Lancet, but heatwaves are not getting worse in the United States, either. The average high surface temperature anomalies have not been increasing, according to U.S. Climate Reference Network data. (See figure below)
Worse, NPR insists deaths due from extreme weather should “spur policies that address the reliance on fossil fuels at the root of global warming.” This shows the story to be purely political, and bad politics at that. NPR may not be aware, though they should be, that fossil fuel use is among the root causes responsible for the massive decline in weather-related deaths worldwide over the past century and a half. As such, the anti-fossil fuel policies NPA is advocating would hinder vulnerable communities’ resilience to natural disasters.
For instance, fossil fuels allow for reliable electricity that can provide air conditioning at an affordable cost, helping to protect vulnerable people like the elderly from heatwaves when they do occur. The medical industry, construction, agriculture, everything that we depend on for survival, rest on the use of fossil fuels, and the materials made from petroleum byproducts.
NPR reveals itself as foolish, uncurious, and ideologically driven when they blatantly ignore obvious questions and publicly available data, relying instead the primarily on the say-so of government officials and anecdotal testimony of people who have been harmed by weather disasters. Worse, the very policies they promote would do far more harm than global warming to the people whose interests they claim to be promoting; NPR’s preferred policies would cause more weather related deaths, deaths that the use of fossil fuels currently make it possible to avoid.
