The Temperature’s Rising
Old -v- cold
Posted on 22 Aug 24
by Mark Hodgson
I’m returning to an old subject because the Guardian won’t leave it alone. In Losing the Plot I criticised a potentially misleading Guardian headline (“Extreme temperatures kill 5 million people a year with heat-related deaths rising, study finds”) by pointing out that the study referenced by the Guardian in that story actually demonstrated that a human inhabitant of planet earth is almost 10 times more likely to die of cold than of heat. Another study on the same topic has just been published, and unfortunately for the Guardian’s climate doomsayers it also undermines the narrative that rising temperatures (this time specifically in Europe) will lead to more deaths.
What, then, is to be done? Why, the answer is obvious. It’s to do what the Guardian always does in these cases, namely to choose a headline that spins the study’s findings in the desired direction, and then to cherry-pick the findings so that the required impression is created in the mind of the reader. Thus we find an article with the heading “Heat deaths in Europe may triple by end of the century, study finds” and the sub-heading “Countries in south most at risk, with rise likely to outstrip fall in cold-related deaths if global heating hits 3C or 4C”.
Having got off to this good start, the article proceeds to build upon these foundations. As always, it’s cleverly done, and the data cited do appear in the study. The problem is the way in which they are presented, which creates a different impression from the one justified by an objective reading of the study. Thus the Guardian concentrates on soundbites such as these:
https://cliscep.com/2024/08/22/the-temperatures-rising/
