At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is an article titled, “Climate Change Is Killing Americans. Health Departments Aren’t Equipped to Respond.” The article, published by Columbia Journalism Investigations and the far-left British tabloid The Guardian, claims “a rise in dangerous heat in the United States” is causing a dramatic rise in climate-related deaths. However, just the opposite is the case, as objective evidence proves warmer temperatures are reducing deaths in America and around the world.
The Columbia article claims, “In contrast to a viral pandemic, like the one caused by the novel coronavirus, this [the asserted rise in heatwaves] is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.” The article provides, as an illustrative example, the story of an Arizona man who lived alone, in isolation, in his rural desert home. When people hadn’t heard from him for three weeks, police checked on his home and found his dead body. His air conditioner had broken down and it was 99 degrees. An autopsy ruled “heat exposure” as his cause of death.
The premise of the Columbia article is that global warming caused the high summer temperatures in the Arizona desert that caused the man to die. As if Arizona was a cool, temperate, refreshing summer oasis prior to global warming causing the Arizona desert to begin getting hot in the summer just 50 years ago. People with common sense know better.
If you don’t trust your common sense, we can look at objective evidence. As shown in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Temperatures, there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, which is when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented its most precise-ever temperature network throughout the United States. It seems rather odd that Columbia would publish an article claiming “Climate Change Is Killing Americans” by virtue of higher temperatures when there has been no increase in American temperatures for at least the past 15 years.
Also, scientists report cold temperatures cause more deaths than warm temperatures. In a peer-reviewed study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, researchers found that colder-than-ideal temperatures kill 20 times more people globally than warmer-than-ideal temperatures. That includes the United States, where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report far more Americans die each day during the cold winter months than during the warm summer months. Therefore, even if temperatures were warming in the United States, any such climate change would save the lives of far more people than would die because of the warmer temperatures.
It is a shame that Google doesn’t “fact check” itself to avoid promoting clearly deceitful alarmist articles as top results for climate change “news.”
The post No, Google, Climate Change Is Not Killing Americans, It Is Saving Themappeared first on Climate Realism.
