Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
Editor’s Note: Climate Realism has responded to dozens of false stories published by the mainstream media claiming more people are dying of extreme weather and sub-optimum temperatures than ever in history, or that climate change is causing more illness. The truth is just the opposite. Copious amounts of research and numerous studies produced using hard data demonstrate clearly that deaths resulting from extreme weather events have declined more than 99 percent over the past century, amid modest warming. In addition, deaths due to non-optimum temperatures are declining as well, in large part due to technologies that run on fossil fuels or that are constructed from or using oil, gas, and coal. Larry Hamlin responds to a new media addition to these false claims, below.
The Orange County Register published a full-page chart (shown below) allegedly portraying the impact of increasing weather temperatures on fatalities across the U.S. over various time intervals.
The lower portion of the chart is provided below for improved viewing showing the hyped 2023 and other time period weather fatalities supposedly compared to other weather events as contrived by NOAA as well as the July 2024 highest average temperature ranking of the 48 U.S. states.
The contrived weather fatalities chart information deceptions regarding “heat” have been addressed in detail by Kip Hansen in his excellent and comprehensive WUWT article here and shown below.
As noted in Kip’s article:
“In a recent News Brief, I pointed out that the major climate alarm propaganda cabals [CCNow, Inside Climate News] would be flooding the mainstream media outlets all around the world with the news that in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the humanity lives, it is Summer, and summers tend to be hot.”
“Further, encouraged by the Climate Propaganda Cabals, news outlets rely on a report from world newspaper-of-record like The Guardian [a co-founder of the climate propaganda outlet Covering Climate Now – CCNow]:
Extreme temperatures kill 5 million people a year with heat-related deaths rising, study finds [The Guardian]
Selectively quoting from that piece is common practice, despite the fact that there is a sub-headline that reads: “More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years, but climate change is shifting the balance.” One has to read the piece very carefully to find that it reports on Zhao et al. 2021 (a comprehensive peer reviewed global wide study) which did, in fact, find that heat related deaths were rising (as population also rises) and to discover that the gentle warming of the climate is preventing more cold deaths than the increase in heat deaths — resulting in a net reduction in extreme temperature deaths.
More exactly: 9.43% of all deaths were related to non-optimum temperatures. Of the same 5 million, 8.52% were cold-related and 0.91% were heat-related. Again, over 8.5 percent of deaths are cold-related and only 0.9 were heat related — that is almost 10 times as many cold-related deaths than heat related deaths.”
The extensive Zhao 2021 study (noted above) involved data analysis for 750 global locations contained within 43 countries and covered the period from 2000 to 2019.
Kip’s WUWT article further notes:
“This lying about heat and cold deaths is subject to a pretty good debunking by Joshua Cohen at Forbes, in his July 2023 piece Excessive Heat Can Kill, But Extreme Cold Still Causes Many More Fatalities.
[quoting below from that Forbes piece – note the author is writing about Zhao et al. 2021]
“Between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased globally. The 20-year period coincided with the earth warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat-related fatalities disproportionately impacted Asia, Africa and Southern parts of Europe and North America.”
“Interestingly, during the 2000-2019 period examined in the study, while heat-related deaths rose, deaths from cold exposure fell. And they decreased by a larger amount than the increase in heat-related fatalities. Overall, researchers estimated that approximately 650,000 fewer people worldwide died from temperature exposure during the 2000-2019 period than in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“Bluntly, in the recent twenty years studied, about 650,000 lives were saved by the slow and steady warming of the climate 2000-2019.”
There is yet more in Kip’s article which provides links to 3 peer reviewed articles – 2 of which are published in The Lancet (the premier Journal of Medicine publication founded in 1823) that address the overwhelming result that cold produces many times more deaths than heat.
In addition to the Zhao 2021 and 2024 studies (the 2024 Zhao study increased the time interval study period to 30 years from 1990 to 2019) Kip’s article also addressed a Lancet European region study which involved assessment of 870 European urban areas over 30 countries.
Our World in Data provides the following chart from the Zhao et al. 2021 study showing the dominance of cold related deaths versus heat outcome occurs (note 9 times greater cold deaths in North America versus heat related deaths) worldwide as noted below.
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The Register’s Chart completely misrepresents, conceals and falsely characterizes extensive and overwhelmingly persuasive data from worldwide peer reviewed scientific studies that clearly establish that deaths from extreme cold hugely outnumber deaths from extreme heat and that modestly increasing temperatures lower overall deaths from extreme temperatures. How could the Register (and SCNG) manage to get this clearly established global outcome so incredibly wrong.
The Register’s chart regarding the U.S. states July 2024 temperatures (provided above in the chart with the weather fatalities erroneous “heat” information) is typical of climate alarmist cherry picking. If the highest average monthly June or August 2024 temperatures had been used instead for California in this graph these months would have shown as California’s 3rd and 17th highest temperatures respectively.
The upper portion of the Register’s falsely hyped and misleading chart is shown below.
This chart also misleads readers in a number of very significant ways.
First, note that the Registers article graph temperature starting dates are all in the late 1950s and into the 1960’s which conceals and hides the well-established climate science data that clearly demonstrates the highest (by far) heat waves indexes across the entire U.S. occurred in the decade of the 1930s as shown in EPAs Heat Wave Index data shown below.
The period of the late 1950s and into the 1960s are representative of the lower levels of the Heat Wave index across the U.S.
Additionally, the Registers chart completely ignores the climate science data establishing that the huge population growth and increasing population density across the U.S. in the 1880 – 2023 period has resulted in Urban Island Heat effects contributing to increased summer temperatures that have exaggerated cities warming growth by at least 100% as noted in the study shown below.
The study determined that:
“It is interesting that the spatial (inter-station temperature difference) UHI effect is always stronger in the homogenized GHCN data than in the raw version of those data in Fig. 1. The very fact that there is a strong urban warming signal in the homogenized data necessitates that there must be a UHI impact on trends in those data. This is because the urban stations have grown substantially in the last 130 years. A recent paper by Katata et al. demonstrates that the homogenization technique used by NOAA does not actually correct urban station trends to look like rural station trends. It does breakpoint analysis which ends up adjusting some stations to look like their neighbors, whether urban or rural. To the extent that spurious warming from UHI is gradual through time, it “looks like” global warming and will not be removed through NOAA’s homogenization procedure. And since all classes of station (rural to urban) have undergone average population growth in the last 130 years, one cannot even assume that rural temperature trends are unaffected by UHI (see Fig. 2).”
The study concludes:
“But for the average “suburban” (100-1,000 persons per sq. km) station, UHI is 52% of the calculated temperature trend, and 67% of the urban station trend (>1,000 persons per sq. km). This means warming has been exaggerated by at least a factor of 2 (100%).
This also means that media reports of record high temperatures in cities must be considered suspect, since essentially all those cities have grown substantially over the last 100+ years, and so has their urban heat island.”
The significant issue of increasing population density contributing to increasing temperature measurement outcomes unrelated to claims of “climate change” is worldwide and unaddressed in global measurement system claims of climbing temperature outcomes as revealed in this further study shown below.
The study highlights the following regarding global temperature measurements systems:
“To review, the dataset is based upon over 13 million station-pairs of monthly average air temperature measurements at closely spaced GHCN stations between 1880 and 2023. It quantifies the average *spatial* relationship between 2-station differences in temperature and population density (basically, quantifying the common observation that urban locations are warmer than suburban, which are in turn warmer than rural). The quantitative relationships are then applied to a global population density dataset extending back through time.
The quantitative relationships between temperature and population are almost the same whether I use GHCN raw or adjusted (homogenized) data, with the homogenized data producing a somewhat stronger UHI signal. They are also roughly the same whether I used data from 1880-1920, or 1960-1980; for this global dataset, all years (1880 through 2023) are used together to derive the quantitative relationships.”
Provided below are some of the study’s results regarding UHI impacts on increasing measured temperatures as illustrated by specific color coding temperature increasing impacts over defined time intervals worldwide, across the U.S. (note California and Los Angeles impact color codes), Europe, India, China and other Asia regions.
The study concludes:
“Over 50% of the population now lives in urban areas, and that fraction is supposed to approach 70% by 2045. This summer we have seen how the media reports on temperature records being broken for various cities and they usually conflate urban warmth with global warming even through such record-breaking warmth would increasingly occur even with no global warming.”
Unfortunately, there are yet more significant troubling problems regarding the lack of quality and credibility of the temperature measurements taken across the U.S. (that allegedly are supposed to provide reliable and accurate climate temperatures measurements that are used to create government climate policy) as documented in great detail in the year 2022 report by Anthony Watts from The Heartland Institute as shown below.
In summary (the document is some 60 pages in length), the report includes the original results of an extensive study and evaluation in 2009 of more than 850 USHCN temperature measurement stations located across the nation and addressed these stations compliance with NOAA/NWS siting and other requitements needed to achieve reliable and accurate measurement data.
Some of the key results are reflected in the page shown below including “Approximately 90 percent of the USHCN stations failed to meet NWS’s own requirements which stipulate that stations must be 30 meters (100 feet) or more away from artificial or radiating /reflecting heat sources.” This critical issue represents a particularly significant measurement problem that is clearly apparent in the evaluations of the USHCN system presented in the Heartland report.
Based on these troublesome findings as well as other investigation findings the GAO conducted its own review in 2011 and found that (among many other findings):
“NOAA does not centrally track whether USHCN stations adhere to siting standards and the requirement to update station records, and it does not have an agency-wide policy regarding stations that do not meet its siting standards…
“Without centrally available information, NOAA cannot easily measure the performance of the USHCN in meeting siting standards and management requirements. Furthermore, federal internal control standards call for agencies to document their policies and procedures to help managers achieve desired results. NOAA has not developed an agencywide policy, however, that clarifies for agency staff whether stations that do not adhere to siting standards should remain open because the continuity of the data is important or should be moved or closed. As a result, weather forecast offices do not have a basis for making consistent decisions to address stations that do not meet the siting standards”.
Additional reviews and evaluations continued based on the 2009 report including a key 2015 peer reviewed study (Watts Et Al., 2015) which showed that well sited stations have significantly lower temperature trend outcomes as noted below from Heartland year 2022 report.
Additionally, a 2019 experiment conducted by Oak Ridge Laboratory proved conclusively that temperature measurement siting failures (particularly related to close proximity to artificial heat sinks) can result in important impacts on daily temperature maximum and minimum outcomes as noted below from the Heartland year 2022 report discussed below.
A typical example (one of many dozens of such contained in the report) of the failure of NOAA to site USHCN temperature measurement stations at a significant distance away from heat sinks is shown below where the heat coming from a nearby power transformer (infrared scan image) is clearly affecting the station measurement location.
“The abstract of the ATDD’s 2019 report explains the experimental design:
A field experiment was performed in Oak National Ridge Laboratory, TN, with four instrumented towers placed over grass at increasing distances (4, 30, 50, 124, and 300 m) from a built-up area. Stations were aligned in such a way to simulate the impact of small-scale encroachment on temperature observations. As expected, temperature observations were warmest for the site closest to the built-up environment with an average temperature difference of 0.31 and 0.24 °C for aspirated and unaspirated sensors respectively. Mean aspirated temperature differences were greater during the evening (0.47 °C) than day (0.16 °C) …
These results suggest that small-scale urban encroachment within 50 meters of a station can have important impacts on daily temperature extrema (maximum and minimum) with the magnitude of these differences dependent upon prevailing environmental conditions and sensing technology.
The 2019 NOAA Oak Ridge Laboratory publication vindicated the findings of the original 2009 Surface Stations publication as well as Watts et al.’s 2015 follow-up.”
The actions taken by NOAA to address the obvious and significant artificial heat source measurement station siting problems were half measures at best with the year 2022 Heartland report noting critical measurement problems that continued to plague the temperature measurement system validity and accuracy:
“NOAA and its subordinate agencies clearly went to great lengths to defend the quality of the USHCN network.
However, NOAA abruptly stopped using the USHCN dataset in 2014, switching to a new dataset called “nClimDiv.”
“USHCN’s 1,218 stations were dwarfed by the nascent nClimDiv initiative, which incorporates more than 10,000
installations in a network called “nClimGrid.” This new network combines the USHCN stations, in addition to thousands of stations from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN).
The switch was likely a strategic maneuver by NOAA to draw attention away from the fact that its long-maintained
USHCN had been riddled with poorly sited locations, compromising the temperature records it produced.
Perhaps NOAA believed changing the name and the method would shield the system from further criticism.
NOAA / NCDC concurrently rolled out the new U.S. “Climate Reference Network” (USCRN), which it described as thusly:
NCDC developed the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) to address the most basic of climate change questions that Americans will ask in the mid-21st century, “How has the climate of the Nation changed in the last 50 years?” The USCRN measures temperature with superior accuracy
and continuity in places that land-use change will not likely impact during the next five decades. Built specifically for this purpose, it is unlike any other climate observation network in the United States. NCDC began the USCRN build-out in the lower 48 states in 2000 and completed the last of 114 station installations in 2008. Since 2005, the USCRN has operated a sufficient number of stations to generate accurate annual national temperature averages.”
However, a huge problem remains with measurement station reliability and accuracy that is hidden from view as described in the Heartland report as follows:
“Surprisingly, NOAA, NCDC, and NCEI do not use or cite the high-quality temperature data produced by the USCRN in any public reports. Instead, they use nClimDivdata, which contains all of the poorly sited USHCN stations, in addition to thousands of other stations that likely have the same set of station siting problems. NOAA / NCDC claims they then “adjust” the nClimDivdata to closely match the data from the USCRN. This “Band-Aid” approach does little to address problems that have been identified, and instead creates a dataset rife with multitudes of adjustments that may or may not fairly represent long-term temperature trends. Moreover, this approach does not address problems with individual station records, such as heat sink effects and biased temperature readings.
Furthermore, adjusting the nClimDivdata to closely match the data from the USCRN only affects 17 years of
data, failing to address any data produced before USCRN became operational in 2005. This means all of the
temperature data showing climate warming in the 20th century was not adjusted in the same manner as data
gathered after 2005, creating a disjointed U.S. climate dataset.”
The latest USHCN contiguous U.S. maximum temperature anomaly measurements (measured temperatures with superior accuracy and continuity in places that land-use change will not likely impact during the next 5 decades that remain away from artificial heat sinks) for the 19-year period from January 2005 to August 2024 (shown below) clearly show significant oscillating changes with little to indicate any established warming trend from 2005 to 2024 despite the ridiculous claims of climate alarmist propagandists that are reflected in the Registers completely misleading chart.
It is extremely unfortunate that the U.S. media is so incapable and incompetent at addressing the huge climate science shortcomings underlying climate alarmist propaganda as illustrated in this Register and SCNG chart.
