Global Warming or Just Getting Old?

 A hot day in Rome. 

 

The World Health Organization is at it again. A top commission—stacked with a former European Union climate commissioner, a former prime minister of Iceland, other former ministers and environmental campaigners—has recommended that the health body declare climate change a global health emergency. The commission’s headline evidence is a Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990.

But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor: Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths.

Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates, which are comparable over time because they control for demographic change. The Global Burden of Disease, the world’s leading mortality database, finds that Europe’s standardized heat-death risk has changed only marginally since 1990. At current population, the increase amounts to fewer than 850 additional heat deaths. The WHO commission’s unstandardized figures exaggerate the problem more than 50-fold.

This isn’t a technical quibble. It is the difference between a genuine health crisis and a demographic inevitability being rebranded as a climate emergency.

The deeper dishonesty lies in another omission. As temperatures rise, heat deaths increase but cold deaths fall. Cold deaths far outnumber heat deaths on every continent. Age-standardized data shows that cold death rates in Europe have declined by nearly 50% since 1990. At today’s population levels, that translates to roughly 210,000 fewer cold deaths each year.

The WHO report not only exaggerates heat deaths; it conceals the fact that cold deaths have declined by approximately 250 times as much as heat deaths have risen. This is the suppression of inconvenient data to manufacture a crisis.

Mr. Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”